Rebel Moon: Zack Snyder Teases “Cleaner” R-Rated Cut

Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire is the latest film from Zack Snyder, who is best known for helming DC movies. One of Snyder’s most famous films is his cut of Justice League, which was a four-hour version of the superhero film. Rebel Moon is heading to Netflix later this month, and Snyder has already teased different cuts of the movie. During a recent interview with Collider, Snyder talked about the R-rated version of Rebel Moon, and he explained why that cut is actually “cleaner.” 

“Yes, it’s influenced sort of iconographically in some ways,” Snyder explained when asked about the film’s graphic violence. “We have space fascists, they have space fascists, but I was kind of into that relationship because I like the comment. I think that’s one thing that you’ll see in the director’s cut that is different from the PG-13 version is the irony of a super hard R-rated sci-fi movie at this scale is cleaner in the R-rated version. In the PG-13, we push. It’s a hard PG-13. We push them to the ragged edge.”

“[I] had really wanted to keep the movie close to two hours,” Snyder added. “That was like a thing I really wanted to do. I just felt like these two movies together, if they’re both about two hours each, and I think movie two is even shorter, it’s like an hour and 54 minutes – it’s like, I think, one of the first movies I’ve made that’s under two hours, which is incredible – that was the sort of thing I had in my mind was that I really wanted to keep it close to two hours. So Dody [Dorn] and I, he’s an amazing editor, it was really the exercise of like, ‘Okay, what’s the leanest line through the movie?’ And that was the game we played with ourselves – only good shots, the best, cleanest line. That was the way that we went about finding what stuck. What stayed in the juggernaut of the movie is what we were looking for, and that was really how we did it.”

Zack Snyder Talks Director’s Cuts:

“I can’t help myself,” Snyder previously joked when referencing the director’s cuts of his films such as Watchmen, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Justice League. “The hope is for it to come out down the road,” Snyder said of the Rebel Moon director’s cut.

“It was cool because I think the one thing with Netflix was coming off Justice League, and look, I’ve done since Dawn of the Dead, I did a Director’s Cut for Dawn... Watchmen. I have two, there’s two Director’s Cuts, which is crazy. Yeah, BvS, of course, is one of my favorites, of course. And Justice League, that goes without saying. And so, it was just cool in the initial conversation I was having with Netflix about just this concept of them saying like, ‘Oh, well, why don’t we make it part of the plan?’ That makes it a lot easier,” Snyder said. “There’s a great history of director’s cuts that are just cool. When I was in film school, I just always thought that was cool that there was this other movie that you could discover. And so, for me, there’s a lot of… When you make a movie, you have a lot of voices in your own creative mind telling you what would be narratively just the strongest solution. And then, you have this other tug on you. I do anyway, that is like, ‘Well, what if there’s rabbit holes that are really amazing to go down and just kind of learn about different aspects of the characters?’ For me, those have always been a thing that in the drawing when I draw the scenes or when I am writing the script, I always end up with a lot of that stuff that I feel like really tells the sort of deeper dive story.”

Snyder estimates watching his director’s cuts of the Rebel Moon films would be “a six-hour sitting.” The original intention for Rebel Moon was to make a PG-13 film so that it. could be watched by a wider audience. “I always said that what I’d do on the side will be just, I’m not going to consider rating, so it’ll just be what it is, and it’s a much different experience,” Snyder added. “I feel like the cool thing about the PG-13 version is you can watch it with the family, you considered it. Where the other version is much more like, you know…” 

Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire is set for release on Netflix on December 22nd.