I attended the American Gangster screening and Q&A with Director Ridley Scott at the Westside Pavilion on February 19 with my good friend Marcy.

They showed the film with the additional footage as featured on the extended DVD. It was a treat to see all three hours on the big screen and a great crowd to watch with – every seat filled – terrific reaction and applause at the end – and this for a film coming out on DVD! When the moderator mentioned the Academy nominations for art direction and supporting actress during the Q&A, I felt a sharp regret that neither the director nor the film received such (deserved) acknowledgment.

This may be entirely coincidental but I did not notice before and it amused me - there are references to both Monopoly and Robin Hood in American Gangster.

Ridley was looking good – he is so charming and always interesting. To a question about improvisation, he said that he was happy to step back, allow these master actors to go to work and see what they would bring, but he also noted that the script was so strong that there was not much need or room for improvisation.

A question about the script being essentially two stories – one about Richie and one about Frank – prompted Ridley to praise writer Steve Zaillian. At first Ridley said that Zaillian was "the best" writer he had worked with, but then he paused and asked if there were writers in the audience. When a few hands went up, he amended his description to "one of the best". He also saw an opportunity to lambaste Entertainment Weekly's review of the DVD by Chris Willman (the one that made much of the factual disputes and now-dismissed legal claims). I will not repeat his exact comments – suffice to say he shares an affinity for certain descriptive terms with Russell.

A woman who said that she was a fan of Ridley's historical films like Kingdom of Heaven and Gladiator asked if he was planning to make more like these and he replied, "Yes. The next thing I'm doing is Robin Hood." (I was hoping for elaboration - but no.)

Someone asked if he thought that Frank's sentence was just and he quickly responded, "No. But I'm not the judge," adding that even though Frank turned evidence against the corrupt cops, he did not personally think Frank paid a high enough price for all the damage done.

He spoke about the perils of test audiences and about the temptation to take the test screening scores as the final word on finishing a film. "When in fact that's not what it's about at all, or it's not for me," he said, elaborating on the balance of artistic vision against desire for commercial success. Despite his misgivings about test audiences, he was very pleased that when they screened the uncut version of AG that the film received an overall score of 86. Ridley said that for an R rated film it was a "phenomenal score – That's like what you'd get for Shrek," -  something the whole family would love – "But being the commercial bastard I am, I wanted to know if we could get it higher."

As a result, they edited about twenty minutes and tightened the ending. Ridley said he felt that the theatrical ending was more powerful because it left open-ended questions – would Frank go back to crime? How would he survive? I thought it was very interesting that Ridley personally prefers the ending we see on the extended DVD – where Richie comes to pick Frank up and reassures him that he is going to watch out for him. Ridley said that when they made these changes, the film's test score went to 90. He also noted that the DVD is the appropriate place for the extra footage because he thinks we have longer attention spans at home – "you can pause it, go and crack a beer, come back, put it back on and watch."