“Gonzo Girl,” Patricia Arquette’s directorial debut, world premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, to weak reviews. The film still has no U.S. distributor, which has led to Arquette re-editing the entire thing in hopes of finding distribution.
That’s the winding journey of Arquette’s film. But while many filmmakers might see such a situation as disheartening—a blow to their creative vision—Arquette sees it as something else entirely: “what a neat opportunity.”
“I feel so grateful to the producers and for this opportunity to go back in and continue to learn about the filmmaking process and be able to re-edit this movie,” Arquette tells IndieWire.
Arquette likens the process to creating two distinct versions of the same story. To her, she got to make both the “American cut” and the “European cut” of her debut. “Who else can say that?”
“Gonzo Girl,” based on Cheryl Della Pietra’s semi-autobiographical novel, was inspired by Pietra’s time working as Hunter S. Thompson’s assistant, the film reimagines the famous author as “Walker Reade,” played by Willem Dafoe. The story unfolds mostly in Reade’s Colorado retreat, as a young stand-in for Della Pietra is swept into a whirlwind lifestyle defined by excess and volatility.
After the film’s festival debut, Arquette felt the emotional arc might have been a bit too scattered in the first cut. The solution? A tighter, more focused version of the film—about 11 minutes shorter—that now premieres at the Tribeca Festival, aiming to connect with a new audience and, hopefully, find a distributor.
Still, she’s not dismissing the original cut. “I actually really liked that cut of the movie,” she said. “I look at it more like the European cut. There’s some more space in things, just to kind of absorb things. There’s less handholding of the audience.”
In other words, she went to the editing room to make a more accessible cut in the hopes to find a buyer. #ReleaseTheEuropeanCut
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