Wesley (all the rumours)

[Dave]

The studio and director recently denied that they cut that much out. Now they are saying that it's length came in pretty much as expected, and they only needed to trim Wesley out to make it 1 hour 30 mins long. The Director thinks any film longer than that is too long. I guess we'll have to see what the DVD ends up like, and see who was right then.

 

[Tabitha]

I would say that the main difference between LOTR and a film like Nemesis is the source material.
I mean, when the script for Nemesis was being pitched, the writers would have know that the ideal length was 90mins or so - isn't there some convention about number of pages in a script?
On the other hand, something that comes from a book, like LOTR, has to be based on source material that can be far too long or short. The opposite to LOTR could be Minority Report - a two hour movie that was based on a thirty page short story.

So basically, my incredulity is that there was 48 minutes of extra footage off the back of a dedicated film script - quite impressive!

 

[Dave]

I can't find that interview I referred to, just one from Rick Berman. He also denies the rumours of massive cutting, but says the film is 2 hours long.

Star Trek Monthly #98
I heard that [rumour] from somebody else the other day. The original assembly of the film was long. We always knew it was going to be long and we've been trimming it down. But over the last month the cutting process has been a cutting down process of minutes.

All these stories about major cutting have never been true. The rumours are always that we're re-shooting or cutting immense amounts. the movie is going to be, with the main titles and the end titles, within five or six minutes under two hours. That's the length of the most of the Star Trek films. We had to trim it down to get it to that length, like all paramount films are trimmed down to get to that length.

There was a very, very brief scene [with Wesley] and it was cut. It was two lines that Wil had in the movie and they were cut for a whole series of reasons. It really had to do with the scene that led into it and a scene that went out of it.......

.... It had nothing to do with Wil.

 

[Tabitha]

no cutting eh?

/incredulity cancelled