Interview with the Director concerning the release of his original cut

“It was a movie ahead of its time,” Christopher mused, his back to a giant screen on which a shirtless Phillippe stands bathed in blue light. He spoke to Variety at Chase Sound by Deluxe in Los Angeles, less than three weeks before the world premiere of his director’s cut at the Berlin film festival, while scrambling to finish the sound mix in time. “First of all, the gay subject matter, that’s a huge thing,” he continued. “But we have a flawed lead character, which was really tough at the time for people to deal with. Now, you expect flawed characters, you expect lots of edge and a certain darkness.”

That’s how Christopher conceived “54”: It’s the story of Shane, a gorgeous New Jersey mouth-breather played by Phillippe, who discovers almost by accident that his body is his entry ticket to New York’s decadent and highly exclusive disco party scene. Plucked from the behind the velvet ropes outside Studio 54 by the club’s lecherous gay owner, Steve Rubell (Mike Myers in his first and best dramatic role), he leverages his sex appeal by flirting with any and everyone — and sleeping with most — to land a job at the club, work his way up to bartender and leverage that for a short-lived place among Gotham’s upper-class elite.

Except that by the time Miramax released the film, the menage-a-trois plot between Phillippe, Meyer and Hayek had been snipped, along with nearly all traces of Shane’s bisexuality. Instead, the movie played like a watered-down “Wizard of Oz” — or perhaps more to the point, a cross between “Cabaret” and “Saturday Night Fever,” with afterschool-special-caliber morality grafted on.

The love triangle is back in the movie, including a scene in which Phillippe comes on to Meyer in the club’s basement, shortly after having sex with his wife. Where “55” had featured Shane sleeping with a montage of sexual partners, all of them female, he now alternates between men and women. Here, it’s Shane who steals the money that gets Rubell’s longtime accountant fired, and it’s that accountant who ultimately turns him in to the authorities, who swoop in and arrest Rubell — all of it capped, a bit inexplicably, by Ultra Nate and Amber’s hit disco-style cover of “If You Could Read My Mind.”