I’m kind of conflicted about “director’s cut” versions of movies. On the one hand, directorial fiddling such as we’ve had with Blade Runner gets on my nerves; on the other, restoring cut scenes to make the story flow better is generally a good thing.

I’m no great expert on how movies are made, but listening to commentary tracks it seems fairly clear that directors often have a big fight to get what they want. They are subject to the whims of marketing people, focus groups, and most importantly studio executives. None of these people know much about story telling. What they all seem to have in common is a desire to make the film as short as possible; preferably under two hours. Age of Ultron is a classic example of the sort of damage that can cause. I had to watch the film twice just to get a handle on what was going on. Apparently, when it comes out on disc, a much longer version will be available.

Before that, however, there has been a new release of X-Men: Days of Future Past. For the benefit of those of you who don’t obsessively follow superhero movies (don’t all shout at once), it is called The Rogue Cut, because it restores Rogue to the story. Some of the changes are simply adding missing scenes. The resulting movie is 16 minutes longer. But The Rogue Cut is much more than that. In some ways it is a very different film.

I’m going to have to get a little spoilery here because otherwise I can’t really explain how it is different, but I expect those most of you who have read this far will have already seen the film. The major change is that Kitty is so damaged by her struggle to keep control of Logan’s time traveling following the events in Paris that she is in danger of dying on the job. Charles and Eric go in search of Rogue, who has been captured by the Sentintels, because she can take Kitty’s powers and take over the job of keeping Logan in the past.

That change, however, has multiple consequences. Several character arcs change significantly as a result; most notably those of Raven, Hank and Bobby. It is pretty clear listening to Bryan Singer’s commentary that this is not only his preferred version of the film, it is a necessary one. That is, things that will happen in the next film are foreshadowed in this version of Days of Future Past, but not in the theatrical release.

From my point of view, what I’m seeing here is a structural edit. It is like seeing two versions of a novel: a first draft, and one in which the author has added some new chapters, and totally re-written others. I’m an editor. I love seeing this sort of thing because of the insight it gives into the story-making process, and the way that the creators see the characters.

I should probably be annoyed at the studio executives who forced Singer to make such radical changes to the theatrical release in order to shave 16 minutes off the run time. Actually, however, I’m grateful to have been able to get this little piece of insight into the film-making process. It makes the whole thing much more interesting for me.