\n\tMore than half a century after the film\u2019s release, the scene is back in all its outrageous glory.<\/p>\n
\n\tOpening in U.S. theaters Oct. 16 for a one-week engagement through Clockwork<\/a>, Warner Bros.\u2019 new specialty film label led by former Neon marketing chief Christian Parkes, the restoration follows a cut reconstructed in 2004 under Russell\u2019s supervision, now receiving its first official theatrical release. The label has survived Warner Bros.\u2019 move into Skydance.<\/p>\n \n\tReleased in 1971, The Devils draws on Aldous Huxley\u2019s The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting\u2019s play The Devils. Its origins lie in the real persecution of Urbain Grandier, a priest in 17th-century France accused of bewitching a convent of nuns.<\/p>\n \n\tOliver Reed plays Grandier; Vanessa Redgrave is Sister Jeanne, the head nun whose fixation on him helps fuel the catastrophe. Redgrave declined to comment on the film.<\/p>\n \n\tRussell turned the story into an extravagant examination of religious hysteria and political power, with stark white sets by Derek Jarman and an avant-garde score by Peter Maxwell Davies.<\/p>\n \n\tBritish film critic Mark Kermode learned how much the censored sequence mattered to Russell when he interviewed the director for Sight and Sound in 1995. Kermode had loved The Devils since seeing it on a late-night double bill with The Exorcist in 1979. Hearing Russell describe the missing footage, he promised to find it.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cYou won\u2019t find it,\u201d Russell told him. \u201cBecause it\u2019s gone. It\u2019s lost. It\u2019s probably been destroyed.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tKermode began contacting vaults and Warner Bros., examining shipping logs and asking what survived. Eventually, a cryptic entry caught his attention: \u201cC Cut 89.\u201d He persuaded a skeptical studio employee to retrieve the can. When it was opened, it smelled. The film inside was beginning to decompose.<\/p>\n \n\tIt also contained the missing sequence.<\/p>\n \n\tIts recovery, reconstruction and eventual restoration would span decades. Russell lived to approve the reconstructed cut, but not to see the completed restoration.<\/p>\n \n\tKermode spoke today with The Hollywood Reporter about the film\u2019s long journey back to the screen.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tOliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave in \u2018The Devils\u2019<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tWarner Bros.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat did Ken Russell tell you about the censorship of The Devils?<\/p>\n \n\tKen described what happened: He\u2019d made the film, and it had been seen by John Trevelyan, who was the head of the British Board of Film Censors, before it was officially submitted. He said to Ken, \u201cYou\u2019re going to have problems with this. It\u2019s an important film, but there\u2019s stuff that\u2019s going to have to come out.\u201d There was a central sequence that was going to come out in its entirety. Ken said, \u201cYou can\u2019t take that out.\u201d And he said, \u201cYeah, we can, and that\u2019s what we\u2019re going to do.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWhat happens in that sequence?<\/p>\n \n\tThe French king comes in and says that he has a vial containing the blood of Jesus Christ, and the demons appear to leave the nuns. Then he opens the box and there is nothing inside, exposing their performance as a fraud, at which point all hell breaks loose.<\/p>\n \n\tIn the released version, things begin to break loose, then it stops. In the film as we have it now, it goes on to depict this ridiculous pantomime of blasphemy in which the nuns attack the huge crucifix and pull it down.<\/p>\n \n\tThe film shows how religion was used by the authorities as a weaponized tool to distract the people and maintain power. The story is about the unholy marriage of church and state. For Ken, the juxtaposition of these two things was crucial.<\/p>\n \n\tWhere did you begin looking for this lost scene?<\/p>\n \n\tI\u2019m not an archivist. I\u2019m a journalist. I just started getting in touch with vaults and Warner\u2019s and asking, \u201cWhat have you got? What are the logs? Where are things?\u201d Warner in the UK were very, very accommodating. I would go in all the time and they\u2019d go, \u201cHere comes Mark again asking about The Devils.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWhen we started making the 2004 <\/a>Devils<\/a> documentary <\/a>Hell on Earth<\/a>, it was like, \u201cOK, now I\u2019ve really got a purpose for doing this because I\u2019d love to use those sequences in the documentary.\u201d I had made a documentary about The Exorcist in which we had included for the first time the spider walk and the conversation on the stairs between the priests.<\/p>\n \n\tBut we just couldn\u2019t find anything at all. I had got to the point of thinking, well, maybe Ken was right. I said to Ken, \u201cWhen did you last see it?\u201d He said, \u201cThere was a single roll of film, and I remember it sitting on the side by the Moviola.\u201d And then it was gone.<\/p>\n \n\tEventually, I was going through shipping logs. There was a list of cans of film, and one was listed \u201cC Cut 89.\u201d I have a very stupidly retentive mind, and I remembered that 89 seconds was what was officially cut from The Devils by the BBFC.<\/p>\n \n\tWe called it in and opened it. It was two complete assemblies of that central sequence that John Trevelyan had said had to come out in its entirety. And a selection of other bits that had also been taken out.<\/p>\n \n\tDid you see the recovered footage before Russell? What was your reaction?<\/p>\n \n\tYes. It was astonishing, but the most amazing thing was that it was exactly as he had described it. Ken could conjure pictures in the room. He wasn\u2019t making any of this stuff up.<\/p>\n \n\tIf I remember correctly, there was a little bit of high-fiving, but there was also just standing there in awe that this thing we\u2019d been talking about for all these years was actually there.<\/p>\n \n\tWe hoped that would serve as the basis for a restoration. And it didn\u2019t for 22 years.<\/p>\n \n\tWhy do you think it finally happened in 2026?<\/p>\n \n\tThe film did not have the reputation then that it has now. People didn\u2019t rave about The Devils 20 or 30 years ago.<\/p>\n \n\tIn the years since, the reputation grew, with people like Guillermo del Toro talking about how much they loved it. When Christian Parkes and [Clockwork marketing chief] Spencer Collantes arrived to set up Warner Clockwork, they said The Devils was the thing they needed to do.<\/p>\n \n\tThey\u2019re young and sharp, they\u2019ve done brilliant work elsewhere, and they clearly had their ear to the ground. Warner said, \u201cGreat, fine, go ahead and do it.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHow did the audience at the Cannes premiere respond?<\/p>\n \n\tAt the beginning, they asked how many people had seen The Devils already. At least half the audience didn\u2019t put their hands up. A lot of people were seeing it for the first time. There were a lot of young people, a whole new generation.<\/p>\n \n\tIt looked amazing. It looks like it was made yesterday. But the really important thing was that when you put those sequences back in, the film makes coherent sense. It tells the story it\u2019s meant to tell. There aren\u2019t any devils here other than the human devils. It is about the unholy marriage of church and state and the weaponization of religion for political purposes.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tGemma Jones, Oliver Reed in \u2018The Devils\u2019<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tWarner Bros.<\/p>\n \n\tDid the original controversy translate into box office?<\/p>\n \n\tIt didn\u2019t bomb, but it didn\u2019t do gangbuster business. It opened, people were talking about it on television and in newspapers, and there had been all these scandals.<\/p>\n \n\tBut as David Cronenberg\u2019s Crash demonstrated, just having a scandal isn\u2019t enough to bring audiences in. There were places in the UK that banned it, councils that refused to allow it to be played. It came, there was a scandal, it went away, and Ken moved on. It became a disappeared film, one that was quite hard to see for a long time.<\/p>\n \n\tDel Toro has invoked <\/a>The Devils<\/a> while defending <\/a>Digger<\/a>. Do you see a comparison?<\/p>\n \n\tI\u2019m not a huge fan of Digger. My wife is a huge fan. I reviewed it, then my wife went to see it and told me how wrong I am about it.<\/p>\n \n\tI think it\u2019s good to have any movie that divides opinions. I would advise everyone to go and see it because if you\u2019re interested in cinema, you need to see it and make up your own mind.<\/p>\n \n\tThe difference is that Digger costs something north of $150 million, right? The Devils was a big production, but Ken didn\u2019t have a limitless budget, and he didn\u2019t have Tom Cruise.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s great that there are divisive films, that there are films people argue about. I think the achievement of The Devils is the greater achievement because Ken was fighting an uphill battle to get his vision on screen, and the version he was able to release was not the version he wanted.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat does it mean to you to see audiences discovering the film now?<\/p>\n \n\tYou cannot believe how, after all this time, to hear people speaking of it as they do now, how gratifying it is.<\/p>\n \n\tMy only regret is that Ken isn\u2019t here to see it because he would\u2019ve loved this.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n