Production
All the Pretty Horses was filmed in New Mexico and Texas. The production was a partnership between Columbia Pictures and Miramax Films, with Columbia initially handling the film's domestic release and Miramax Films overseeing international distribution. The studios switched distribution roles reportedly, due to Billy Bob Thornton's refusal to cut the film, which was said to have a total runtime of three hours and 40 minutes. With Miramax Films now at the helm of the film's marketing efforts in the United States, studio co-chairman Harvey Weinstein demanded that the film be cut down to under two hours and also put aside the original musical score by Daniel Lanois, having Marty Stuart replace it. The theatrical cut was brought down to one hour and 55 minutes.
In his 2004 book Down and Dirty Pictures, Peter Biskind detailed the troubled post-production process of the film. Matt Damon publicly criticized Weinstein's decision to edit the film, and is quoted by Biskind as saying: "It was like you bake a soufflé and somebody wants you to make it half the size, and you just chop the thing in half and try to mold it and make it look like that was how you made it to begin with. It can't work." Damon added Weinstein "tried to make it look like a love story, so that teenagers would go see it. He made a trailer with me and Penélope Cruz swimming around in the water, skinny-dipping, with Bono singing ... And on the poster, they put, 'Some passions can never be tamed,' which is exactly what the movie's not about. There is no love story, it's about unrequited love, it's about life being bigger than these people and just crushing the passion out of them."
In a 2012 interview with Playboy, Damon reiterated his displeasure with the changes, saying: "Everybody who worked on All the Pretty Horses took so much time and cared so much. As you know, the Cormac McCarthy book is set in 1949 and is about a guy trying to hold on to his old way of life. The electric guitar became popular in 1949, and the composer Daniel Lanois got an old 1949 guitar and wrote this spare, haunting score. We did the movie listening to his score. It informed everything we did. We made this very dark, spare movie, but the studio wanted an epic with big emotions and violins. They saw the cast, the director, Billy Bob Thornton, and the fact that we spent $50 million, and they never released our movie—though the cut still exists. Billy had a heart problem at that time, and it was because his heart fucking broke from fighting for that film. It really fucked him up. It still bothers me to this day."
In 2008, Thornton confirmed his possession of the director's cut on VHS and said it is "two hours and 42 minutes" in length, not over three hours as has been reported. He said he has no intentions of releasing it to the public, despite offers from Miramax Films to release his cut on DVD with Lanois's original score, out of respect for Lanois who owns the rights to the score. Said Thornton, "Dan [Lanois] felt like, 'If my music wasn't good enough for them to put in the movie, then I don't know if I wanna put it in there on the DVD,' so I stood by him. I'm not gonna ever go side against an artist." In 2017, film writer Matt Zoller Seitz shared Thornton had told him the original cut shown to Weinstein was in fact an assembly cut that he had no intention of showing to anyone; however, Weinstein insisted on viewing it and based his editing decisions on what he saw of the cut.
