To say that this weekend's release of THE CURRENT WAR: DIRECTOR'S CUT is a long time coming is to understate things. The project, about the competition between geniuses Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse to power the world with electricity – has been in the works since 2011, when the screenplay hit the Hollywood Black List. It didn't go before cameras until 2016, with Alfonso Gomez-Rejon behind the camera and Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Shannon (in a role once intended for Jake Gyllenhaal), Katherine Waterston and Tuppence Middleton in front of it. Plenty of films have long development histories, but this one's took an additional, unfortunate turn when it screened – before it was really ready – at the Toronto Internatinal Film Festival in fall 2017. The film was not well-received, and its fate seemed sealed, but when distributor The Weinstein Company had to sell off its rights, THE CURRENT WAR got a second chance, with Gomez-Rejon being able to cut the film the way he always intended, snipping ten minutes of it while adding new scenes.
So here we are. I got a chance to talk to the film's stars – Cumberbatch, Shannon and Middleton – years after they shot the film about the long wait, Cumberbatch's long involvement in the project, shooting one of the movie's critical scenes, and why this story is still so fascinating to us today.
It's also only fair that Gomez-Rejon gets his day in the sun after spending three years trying to get THE CURRENT WAR in front of audiences. We spoke about how important it was for him to get this cut to see the light of day, how he changed it from the version that premiered two years ago, how his mentor and executive producer Martin Scorsese helped him out, and designing the look of the picture.
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