Philip Seymour Hoffman famously once said, “The film is made in the editing room” and nowhere has that been more apparent to me than the recent restoration of Tinto Brass’ troubled transgressive Roman epic Caligula, which is now screening theatrically thanks to Drafthouse Films. Notoriously the film’s original director Tinto Brass was locked out of the edit after production and plot was discarded altogether, for new hardcore footage that was shot to insert into the film to appease its producer Bob Guccione owner of Penthouse. It’s a project I’ve been a very vocal champion of, especially checking out the new cut, dubbed Caligula the Ultimate Cut, at its US Premiere in Austin, Texas at Fantastic Fest.
At that screening, I very briefly met the editor of the project Aaron Shaps and thought after chatting with its architect Thomas Negovan, that might be a fun discussion. Aaron didn’t appear to have a lot of credits before stepping into this project; which sounds like it wasn’t simply editing the film, but a rather eclectic mix of archival, restoration, and narrative reconstruction. Obviously Tom and Aaron succeeded in not only restoring the film elements, but the lost performances and the narrative as well delivering the film I believe audiences were promised when the epic first premiered.
Aaron was very generous in this interview, discussing not only the approach of the project to resurrect the film, but the work that went into its 3 year execution. As a fan of the film this was a fascinating discussion I am excited to share with those of you still waiting for news of the film’s release.
So the first question has to be were you aware of Caligula growing up or was it something that you found out about because of the project?
I saw the original theatrical cut for the first time on DVD in college, and it was one of those things where, if you’re a big kind of film nerd like I am, you hang out with other film nerds, obviously. So a buddy of mine came home from Best Buy or whatever, and he was like, “Hey, you guys heard of this movie Caligula?”
I hadn’t heard of it, but I looked at the box and I’m like, Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren and Peter O’Toole, it’s the only movie that Penthouse ever produced. Like, what is this thing? And we watched it that night and it was just like a bunch of guys sitting around drinking beers and just laughing. We just laughed at the movie, basically because how ridiculous it was, it was so over the top. Then I honestly didn’t watch it again or think about it for years until I got a phone call from Tom, who I had been friends with for almost 20 years and he said “Hey man, I think I need your help with something.”
So that was how Caligula then reentered my life.
What state was the footage in when you were brought in to edit? How much was done before you sat down and what did you have to do to sort of get it up and running?
Nothing was done. I was actually a part of the project from the very beginning of the archival process. Tom, myself and other members of the team we actually physically went and retrieved the materials from the storage units that Penthouse controlled and I was one of two people who physically cleaned the 35mm negative and supervised the actual scanning of all the negatives during the digitization process. So I was there for all the archival stuff as well.
The scanner was capable of scanning at like six times normal speed. But we were worried that if we tried to run this 40 year old negative that hadn’t really been properly stored through that scanner at a higher speed, that it would damage it. So, I literally sat there as it scanned, just sort of discovering this incredible treasure trove at 24 frames a second, just watching these performances that, you know, we had no idea even existed.
Just the emotions and the closeups on Malcolm’s face, Helen’s face and how creepy Peter was when turned up as Tiberius, who was almost a comedic figure in the original version.
How did you craft your approach to the edit? Did you watch any of Tinto Brass’ other films or that 60 minute workprint that Brass had before he was kicked out of the edit?
I did not. I had seen Salon Kitty, which I think is probably the only other Tinto Brass film I had seen years ago. I did not watch the work print. Tom and I had a lot of conversations about this and I said, I don’t wanna try to get in Tinto’s head and try to cut this the way that he would want me to cut it, because at best, then it would be a poor impersonation of a Tinto Brass film.What we wanted to do overall tonally with it is, to pretend that Tinto had just been fired, as he was back in the seventies, and I was brought in, during that time to try to do something with this movie.
I didn’t want it to feel modern at all. I wanted it to feel like this could have been maybe the movie that the seventies might have gotten in an alternate timeline. So I did look at a lot of pre-1977, 1978 movies. I looked at a lot of spaghetti westerns and I looked at a lot of other historical epics. I tried to look at things that I thought would have been an influence if I were working back then.Tom and I really wanted it to feel more like a 1970s European graphic novel version of a Roman epic, and really just lean into the visuals, and lean into the melodrama, and lean into the emotion and make it something that was very operatic.
But I purposely ignored the original cut of Caligula at that point. I tried to wipe it from my brain so that I wasn’t influenced. That’s not to say that it’s bad. I just didn’t want to be influenced in any direction by it. Like, I didn’t want to find myself trying to mimic things that I liked, but I also didn’t want to find myself sort of intentionally going in the other direction for the sake of going in the other direction. I would say my biggest influence would be spaghetti westerns. I watched the Leone stuff, some of the Enzo Castellari and Sergio Corbuccii films and some of the other spaghetti western filmmakers as well. Just because I thought, you know, those are sort of big operatic set piece based movies, from the same era produced by a lot of the same crews.
Now, was the project always gonna be rescored or when did that come into the decision process?
I don’t know if it was always going to be rescored, but definitely I remember those conversations fairly early on. There was another composer that Tom had brought in that was involved early on, and he didn’t work out for whatever reason. Tom had known Troy (Sterling) for a while and Troy had scored a short film that Tom and I made back in 2018. Once he came in, it really started to come to life. He totally got the operatic and kind of, I don’t wanna say psychedelic necessarily, because it isn’t really that, but this was definitely one of those things where we wanted it to be, again. We were all kind of trying to role play if we were doing this in the seventies.
So the idea is that people would go see this movie the same way they saw A Clockwork Orange or 2001. Where they were going for more of an experience and not just a film, something that was going to kind of bombard them with visuals, bombard them with sound, bombard them with tone and mood and atmosphere, and just kind of draw you in that way.
I think the score definitely helps differentiate it and I personally felt the score definitely works better this time around.
I think so too. I’m biased, but I appreciate that. I feel the same way.
Now you used a couple different versions of the script to sort of cut this thing together. But how did you designate your source of truth for what your decision making process was?
We tried whenever possible, and I know Malcolm talked about Gore’s script not being great. And it wasn’t great. But what I think, and Malcolm may disagree with me on this, what I think wasn’t great about it was a lot of the dialogue. I think what was great about it was the arc that Gore Vidal envisioned for Caligula and some of the symbolism he tried to work into it. So, as far as that’s concerned, Tom and I and everyone else involved on that level, we all tried to stay as close to that as possible. Just in terms of the story beats and the arc of Caligula himself.
A lot of it we weren’t really able to approximate because, the script had gone through so many iterations by the time they were in production, and there were things even in the shooting script, which was sort of closer to Gore’s vision than what they ultimately actually shot, because Tinto just kind of cut scenes at will that he didn’t feel like shooting or didn’t think he needed to shoot. Some of it might have also been scheduling issues, one thing a lot of people don’t know is that there were a lot of sets built for this movie that they didn’t actually shoot on, that were ultimately used by other productions later.
There’s things in the script that are supposed to be in different people’s bedrooms and things like that, that didn’t ever even make it in front of the camera, that are visible in other productions.
The final draft that Gore did was our north star whenever possible. And then of course, also the shooting script, which Guccione kind of rearranged scenes at will in ways that didn’t make sense and stuff like that. So, Gore’s script number one, whenever possible for the broad strokes and then the shooting script, for kind of understanding how what they did was supposed to fit together.
So speaking of the story beats, one thing that I was really surprised with is how this feels like this intended version of the film in that it’s not only with the performances, but thematically, like there’s a lot of thematic threads that basically that hold this thing together. It makes this not just a different film, but a new more coherent one.How hard was it to not only narratively put this thing back together, but also thematically and subtextually as well, because I was surprised to set it all there?
I don’t know if I’d say it was hard. It was definitely a journey of discovery. But once we saw everything that we had, and when Tom and I sat down and talked about the different iterations of the script that we were hoping to draw from.
I think there’s probably two reasons that Tom wanted to involve me so early on – number one, like I said, we’d been friends for almost 20 years, so he knew that this was gonna be a big kind of stressful, monumental, multi-year undertaking. He needed people on the team that, you know, we weren’t gonna kill each other. I do think he’s said this before, that when it comes to storytelling, I know he trusts my instincts. So, after we had watched all the footage and tried to sort of digest and absorb the scripts as best we could. We both did a ton of research and read all kinds of other materials to sort of supplement our knowledge and try to get our heads around what they were trying to do, interviews with Gore Vidal, interviews with Guccione, interviews with Tinto.
I know Tom’s been in touch with Peter O’Tooles daughter. I don’t know if we got this from her or if this was something that the university archives that maintained his papers had. But we actually got Peter O’Tooles journals, his handwritten journals from the set, so we knew what he was thinking as far as Tiberius. That was incredibly helpful and just super cool, to be able to read that stuff. But at that point, Tom and I just sat down and we sort of, we mapped it out as if we were the writer and director of the film in terms of this is the arc that we want to tell. And then after that, I went and hunted down what we might have that we could actually use to execute those ideas in, in the edit.
That was when the discussion of having Dave McKean do the animated opening. That’s one of the things Tom and I talked about, because of the payoffs in the original version.
Another thing that really impressed me, was how thematically Caligula feels very much like a product of our time, because Caligula gets tired of the bureaucracy, seeing how far he pushes it till it basically falls apart. I know Brass was sort of an anarchist, but did it surprise you at all that this movie from 40 years ago could still be so relevant today?
It didn’t, because I think a lot of that is Gore and I was more, much more familiar with Gore’s body of work than I was with Tinto’s when I came onto this project. I read a lot of his essays, saw a lot of interviews with him and read a lot of his political commentary and things like that and he was almost like the original talking head liberal TV pundit.There’s actually a great documentary about his rivalry with William F. Buckley Jr. Who’s like one of the fathers of modern conservatism, the documentary is called Best of Enemies. I highly recommend it. So it didn’t surprise me only because the cynic in me kind of already knew that we sort of trap ourselves in these same cycles of power and politics. Obviously the parallel has been drawn many times by a lot of people smarter than I am between the United States and the Roman Empire.
So was there anything you couldn’t incorporate that you wanted to that was left in the trim bin?
I’m not super regretful of this. I only would’ve wanted to put this in for the shock value and ultimately that’s why it didn’t make it in. There’s that scene in the original where Proculus is tortured and killed and his penis is cut off and fed to the dogs.That’s like one of those scenes, like the death machine scene, like the kitchen scene, that everybody talks about. ‘Cause it’s so crazy’. But the problem with that scene is it was an afterthought that was shot very late in the production. We know it was an afterthought because in the shooting script, which is obviously numbered by scene, it’s like scene 64A or something like that. It was literally inserted into the script and we also know that it was a late edition, because even in the shooting script originally Proculus survives all the way until the end and he’s part of the conspiracy to kill Caligula.
So I’d kind of be remiss if I didn’t ask this question. So there’s, there was a bit of controversy on the film Twitter, about Beyond Fest, because Beyond Fest said that it was the, it was the US premier and then they stated the cut they were screening was re-edited. Was it re-edited, are you still working on the film?
I’m a hundred percent aware of what you’re talking about, but no.
To clear this up, there is only two differences between the version that was shown at Beyond Fest, which is the sort of final, final version and the version that was screened at Cannes, and Fantastic Fest. Those differences were some tweaks that were done to the grading, that we weren’t happy with. You know, we were so rushed. We didn’t find out we got into Cannes until like two weeks before. They had watched a work in progress version back in like November of last year. We didn’t hear from them for months, and we were like, okay, well we didn’t get into Cannes, and then all of a sudden we got into Cannes. So we were scrambling to get it ready. The folks who were doing the grading just really didn’t have time to kind of push it as far as they wanted to, and as far as Tom wanted them to.
So there are some tweaks to the grading that happened for the Beyond Fest version, which like I said, is the final version. And then the only other thing is there was an intermission now, and that was something that our marketing people and some other folks had talked us out of originally, in a nod to the great old biblical epics.
So we put in a 10 minute intermission and we had Troy write some new music to play over that intermission. But in terms of actual changes to the edit, there isn’t anything. It’s just grading and then that intermission, those are the differences. So you, you saw the same version that everybody else saw. The only thing that’s different is, a few scenes are darker, a few scenes are lighter, that kind of a thing. Plus the intermission.
As somebody who watches the 10 Commandments every year, that intermission would’ve hit perfectly for me.
