Changing the Ending of SIL

From a radio interview earlier this year with the editor of Sight and Sound:

...One of the intriguing things about making films is that filmmakers often change them and they change them quite often as a result of test screenings. Now last week you [deputy editor of Sight and Sound] were telling us about what goes on at test screenings and one of the people you were talking to, was John Madden. And you hinted at something which is really intriguing, which was that the ending of SIL as we saw it on screen was not the ending as originally put on celluloid.

"Yes, as you remember the end of SIL, Gwyneth Paltrow's character, marries Colin Firth and goes off for America, is shipwrecked and the very last shots of the film are of her emerging from the surf unto a sandy beach and suggests certain elements in Shakespeare's own play 'Twelfth Night'."So John Madden explains what happened when his first cut went in front of a preview testing audience. "They didn't understand the ending, the ending was slightly different in its initial form, I'm talking about the very ending now, the part of the film in which Viola is cast ashore in a new world.

It's probably true to say that it was more literally the beginning of Twelfth Night, that's to say she was shipwrecked although that was never seen in anything more than the kind of highly impressionistic form because obviously the ending of the film was really suspended between two different realities.

And in the original ending she more literally landed in a new world and she met a sailor, as Viola does in Twelfth Night she actually askes the question of him: 'What country friends is this?' It was a sailor and a native American actually and he replied immortally: 'This is America, lady' and she looked around and then said: 'America, well good!' and walked away up the beach. It was beautiful and ironic and funny and it kind of pulled the movie right up into the present day.

The test audience found that kind of hard to cope with, they were, I guess, up in some sort of romantic stratosphere at that point. I think in the end, I was led to feeling or allowed myself to be led to feeling by the audience that, the more metaphorical, the more ambiguous the ending was, probably the stronger for the film.

I probably will include that ending in the DVD version of the film so that people can see it 'cos it's not anything I feel apologetic about. It's just interesting. Editing is not a process of going from A to Z in one move, it's an evolving thing, you actually cut a film the way you feel is right at that moment. You then live with it for a while and learn it and breathe it and then you recut it, it evolves in other words. So it is quite useful to have an audience's input fairly early on. It also tells you very quickly whether you've got it right or got it wrong."