The Angelina Jolie thriller “Salt” needed extensive reshoots after the director and producer disagreed over crucial scenes, according to a Hollywood source.
After filming supposedly ended last summer, Jolie spent the holidays on the East Coast with Brad Pitt while shooting additional scenes in New York.
The reshoots were just the most recent hiccup in the project. In August 2008, before shooting even started, Jolie replaced the movie’s original star, Tom Cruise. The script was rewritten to make the main character, Edwin A. Salt, into Evelyn Salt, a CIA operative accused of being a Russian sleeper agent. Filming began last March in Washington, DC, and New York and didn’t finally wrap until this week.
According to an insider on the set: “The reshoots had to be done because the completed version just didn’t look good. There were at least two scenes which were bad, including the climax, so some changes had to be made pretty quickly.” In one scene filmed last week, a bloodied-looking Jolie was photographed dangling from a helicopter.
The Hollywood source said producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura insisted on changes to director Phillip Noyce‘s rough cut. The picture was re-edited with the new scenes with Noyce’s approval.
But Sony Pictures said rumors of rancor were untrue. “Production was completed last fall. We did return to shoot some additional action sequences in New York during the last several days,” said spokesman Steven Elzer. “The filmmakers and the studio couldn’t be more happy with the results and look forward to the release this summer.”
A rep for di Bonaventura said, “In all of Lorenzo’s career as an executive or a producer, he has never done a cut on a movie.” Di Bonaventura has produced “Transformers” and “Transformers 2.”