would see the light of day. And then came along an unlikely savior: Martin Scorsese.
Even with the contract, the director never thought he'd need to call on Scorsese, whom he had worked for as a personal assistant early in his career. "It wasn’t a favor I wanted to call on him for, but he was generous enough to offer it himself, should things get ugly. And then it did get ugly," he says.
The filmmaker outlines two specific scenes that Scorsese helped to craft. One was to keep a series of Civil War flashbacks featuring Shannon's Westinghouse, which was initially left on the cutting room floor. "I had a series of impressionistic cuts of how [Cumberbatch] was perceived in the moment, and [Scorsese] asked me to try one more time without any of that and just holding on the two performances, and I did, and of course it was thousand times better because it was a a lot more tense and haunting with the stillness of it all," he says.