With the film set to start its roadshow roll out early next month, director Kevin Smith is apparently set to make a few late minute cuts to his hotly talked-about horror/thriller, RED STATE (read our Sundance review).

The director recently called in to the Kevin And Josh Movie Show out of Washington, DC (via Bleeding Cool), and not only talked about his upcoming roadshow, which starts early in March at Radio City Music Hall, but also revealed that after seeing RED STATE with a crowd who had “no involvement with the movie,” a few cuts will be made. Read what he had to say after the break.

Here’s what he had to say:

The movie that I showed the cast and crew screening at wrap, two days after we wrapped, I showed them the whole movie, that’s the movie I pretty much showed at Sundance with end credits attached to it… I loved the movie, we knew what we were doing in terms of editing it, it was a beautiful running time and stuff… and then we go to Sundance and I sit in the back and for the first time I get to watch it with 1200 people who have no involvement with the movie, no involvement with me…

So I’m sitting there going “Okay, there’s something I thought would work, didn’t play with the audience”, “Something I thought would get a nice reaction just kinda laid there”, “Boy, that played way bigger than I ever thought it would, maybe we should shape something around there” and just found some time to take out… if I had to guess I’m saying five to ten minutes somewhere in there.

And John [Gordon, producer] fought me on it. John was just like ”Why bother dude, we’re our own bosses, nobody’s telling you to take it out”, like back in the old days Harvey would be “I love it! Take ten minutes out,” no direction at all, just take the time out, so John’s like “We don’t have to do that now, we don’t have to really cut the movie at all” and I said “Yeah, but I’m a filmmaker first and foremost, dude, and I want the movie to play as gangbusters as possible” and if the length of Parks’ speech is making anybody remotely go “Maybe that speech is a little long”… I want them to love Parks as much as I do, so for me, right, I’m an editor, you kill your babies every step of the way as an editor.

So, there you have it. It’s not rare for a film to have cuts after debuting at a festival, and it’s nice to see that Smith appears to be playing into what works best for the film as a whole.  Those directly involved with the film are likely to be a bit jaded as to what they think does or doesn’t work, so it's really interesting to see that he’ll be cutting with regards to what works for audiences.

What do you think?