Over the last 4 days I’ve participated in more interviews than I have ever done while working on Collider. I've covered 6 junkets and I’ve got 2 more tomorrow. So while I’d love to post full transcripts of everything I’ve got…you’ll have to give me some time to get it all sorted out. So what I decided to do was pull some of the juicy quotes from some of the interviews. First up, the director of “The Golden Compass,” Chris Weitz.  

The reason I wanted to get these quotes up right now is that he talks about the eventual DVD and what was cut from the theatrical release. The actual running time of the movie is 114 minutes and it seems that a lot was cut. For fans of the book, this is stuff I'm sure you're dying to know. And if you’d like to listen to the full interview, you can click here for the MP3. Look for a full transcript in a few days.

Question: Sam Elliot was talking about some of his scenes that got cut and also I could've sworn I saw footage in the trailer that wasn't in the film.

Chris Weitz: Yes, you did.

Question: What were we missing?

Weitz: In terms of Sam's stuff we're missing a flirtation between him and Eva Green which I took the liberty of writing into the story which I think that Pullman quite liked, but it didn't fit into the kind of hurling forward motion of the narrative. We're missing the footage which covers the last three chapters in the first book which I'm shifting to the beginning of the second movie. The reason for that is that it's got some very dark stuff in it. It's got some stuff that's quite ambiguous and that people who haven't read the books found quite confusing and to me it was more important to sort of build a firm foundation for making films two and three and knowing that I'd have a better chance of getting away with the rather disturbing elements in the end of the first novel at the beginning of a second film as opposed to trying to kind of pretty it up for the end of the first one.

Weitz: I really hope an extended version is put out because I'd really love to do a fuller cut of the film. I would imagine – it's interesting. I would like to make the director's version and not the super duper long version which is long for length's sake. So I think that it could probably end up at two and half hours, I would think. So it's not going to be the kitchen sink, but I do think there are areas that could be explored much more fully.

Question: Would you do something special for a Blue Ray or HD version?

Weitz: Well, I've already done this strange version of the director's commentary where there's actually a camera trained on me to do the commentary. I think that's probably scary [laughs]. So there will be a chance of seeing me picture in picture, as if anyone wants to, and at the same time there will be B-roll that you can play while you're watching the scene so that you're looking at the sort of behind the scenes of the scene as it's running.

Question: The running time came out at 114 minutes and you're talking about a two and half hour version of the DVD in an optimistic way. Was there a pressure from the studio to make the movie under two hours or was this the version that you wanted to come out with or was there a negotiation?

Weitz: There's eventually give and take. I don't think that they were especially intent that it come in under two hours, but I always saw it as being around two hours because I think there's sort of inflationary tendency in movies where they're just getting longer and longer and longer, and I'm not sure I always understand why. What the studio wanted, I think, is a movie that moved at a real narrative clip and so did I. There are always sort of debates back and forth between directors and studios as to how long a scene ought to play out and whether a given bit of information is vital to a scene or not. For instance, there's a love story between Eva Green's character and Tom Courtenay's character because Serafina Pekkala is hundred's of years old and the reason that she's helping Lyra which she said is that she was once in love with Farder Coram. It's this really tragic love story, but it wasn't central to the love story and so that's a perfect example that in an ideal world where everybody understood the books the way that I do and love them the way that I do, then that would've been in the theatrical release. But it was inevitable that the viewership of the film, in order for this work, has to be larger than the readership of the books.