HBO's "Tales from the Crypt" had made the concept cool again, and what they had in mind was take top young filmmakers familiar with the Miramax/Dimension brand and have them each direct a 30-minute segment. Gary Fleder, who had made "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead," would direct "Imposter," based on an appropriately loopy Philip K. Dick story; the "Trainspotting" team of director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald and writer John Hodge, would contribute sci-fi comedy "Bizarre Love Triangle" (Miramax had distributed "Trainspotting" stateside and turned it into a counterculture hit); and Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican filmmaker who had recently turned in the micro-budget art-house hit "Cronos," was tapped for "Mimic," a tale of evolutionary insects in New York.
Except it didn't work out that way.
The executives tapped two of the projects for expansion into feature length films. Meanwhile, Boyle's contribution would only have a single public screening in all the years since its inception. "Imposter" would be padded to a feature length runtime, while del Toro's buggy "Mimic" project would ultimately go through a number of changes before arriving in theaters in a compromised version that neither the filmmaker or the studio were happy with.
That isn't the only famous collaborator who is buried somewhere beneath the towering pile of bug bodies on "Mimic;" none other than Robert Rodriguez (a favorite of the Weinsteins) was hired to direct one of the film's additional photography units. There were several additional units on the crew and -- of that footage -- del Toro liked Rodriguez's the best. Still, he credits that experience with being the reason why he has no second (or third) units on his films, even the big ones like "Pacific Rim." Good or bad, it's all him.
After the movie opened in 1997 and was a disappointment both critically and commercially, it looked like that was the end of it. "Mimic" turned into an obscure midnight movie; the home video releases were badly formatted and transferred (the poor treatment of the movie continued even after its theatrical life). Finally, in 2009, the filmmaker said that he had begun work on an expanded, director's cut version of the film, which would be released whenever he finished it. In 2011, that version was finally released along with the warts-and-all commentary track heavily referenced here.
This new version of "Mimic" runs a whopping six minutes longer, with most of the additional photography units' contributions removed. In this new version, a lot of what are now, in hindsight, obvious studio contributions (jump scares, fake-outs, etc.) have been removed. The pace is more luxurious and the chunky exposition taken away (for the most part).
Del Toro seems happier with this version of the movie and relieved that he can finally share the experience of making the movie, fully aware of how it shaped him as a filmmaker. "Mimic," at least, has reached its final evolutionary stage.
