A Worthwhile Audio Commentary
The Venus DVD provides an informative feature-length audio commentary by director Roger Michell with important contributions by producer Kevin Loader. They cover nearly every aspect of production, including that O'Toole fell and fractured his hip during the Christmas hiatus, had hip replacement surgery and returned to finish his scenes.
Both commentators characterize the story they are telling as "a fairy tale." Later, Michell says it's a film about "love and death and mortality and longing and yearning and youth and sex, but in that order."
Michell and Loader supply a wealth of interesting detail. The director once saw a fox in Regent's Park, so he put one in the scene where Maurice goes to the open-air theater there. When Valerie watches one of Maurice's old movies on television, we hear dialogue from O'Toole's The Ruling Class. And when the filmmakers needed a photo of the young Maurice, they used one that was originally part of the press pack for O'Toole's Lawrence of Arabia.
DVD Details
Below I've listed the details for the DVD containing Venus.
Release Date: May 22, 2007
Widescreen (1.85:1), Color
Feature Film Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes
MPAA Rating: R for Language, Some Sexual Content and Brief Nudity
English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound
English Captions for the Hard of Hearing
Feature Audio Commentary by Director and Producer
Venus, a Real Work of Art (14 minutes)
Deleted Scenes (4 scenes with total run time = 4 minutes)
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