Placeabove: After a subway ride home, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Nora (Greta Lee) separate, but are in different headspaces. He wants to continue dating her, but she simply says that he will see him the next day and gets on another train. It was mostly a silent scene, with a lot of tense emotions, but it ended up being cut.
Lost moment: “We shot it exactly as we dreamed,” says writer-director Celine Song. “It was very difficult to remove it, because the actors were very proud of that scene; The team worked very hard to get that scene; It's a scene that we all loved. But when you watch the whole movie, you think there's a problem. The ending has to work. The entire film is a knife, and everything has to lead to that gesture of pushing the knife. Everything in the subway scene happens 30 minutes before the movie ends, and it's that scene all over again. We blow away the tension and uncertainty. [for the ending] earlier. The breath holding, the silence, the intense staring… all those things in the middle of the movie were killing the way it was supposed to happen.”
A driving scene was cut from “The Holdovers,” which ran too long in its first cut.
(Seacia Pavao / Focus Features)
