Most director’s cuts feature added scenes to the original movie. Valencia writer-director Allen Wolf actually cut scenes out of his 2010 film, “In My Sleep,” making it “leaner and meaner,” the filmmaker said, all while ratcheting up the suspense in his thriller about a guy who discovers he may have murdered a good friend while sleepwalking. Wolf, who believes art is never finished — only abandoned — really wanted to tighten up his story.
He also had a strong desire to take out or change things he wasn’t happy with, and to modernize all the old phones, old web browsers and other “period” elements in the film so an audience could see it today and think it was made recently. “I wasn’t ready to abandon it yet,” Wolf said in an interview. “I just felt like it was a story that still has resonance today.
The deeper story is about someone who feels like their life is out of control and they don’t know how to stop it. Things are happening while this guy is sleeping. I feel like so much of life now feels that way, where things just feel out of our control.
” About four years ago, Wolf took his original version of “In My Sleep” out of distribution and began reworking it. He wasn’t doing it as a “money grab,” as some say, but rather he was doing it purely from a filmmaking standpoint, he said, to better the overall film. He began cutting scenes out, recutting others, he shot new scenes, many of which were inserts of new cellphones, computer screen.