Just what the world needed, another re-edit of Caligula…
As quixotic quests go, it’s a doozy: take 96 hours of raw footage filmed during one of the craziest and most tumultuous shoots in movie history and attempt to create a new version of the film described by Variety on release in 1979 as “a moral Holocaust”.
Step forward Thomas Negovan: the man who rescued Caligula. “There were definitely a lot of points in the last three years where I thought I was crazy,” he says. “I thought: ‘Is anyone going to care about this?’” But, in fact one of the most important entities in the industry, the Cannes film festival, cared very much, booking the new-and-possibly-improved version a premiere in its prestigious Cannes Classics strand, a section of the festival generally dedicated to celebrating the art of cinema at its finest.
“And so all of a sudden, I thought: ‘OK, all the therapy bills are worth it,’” says Negovan.
Screened for the first time on Wednesday, the 2023 version is billed as Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, and Negovan is keen to point out that, “The thing that’s bizarrely unique about it is it’s almost like the version that was released in 1979 is the deviant version. Ours is closer to what was originally intended. Even the word restoration … I don’t know what word works, but it isn’t a restoration. I don’t know what to call it.”