When the ticketing system opened for booking at 8am, four days before its world premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Ken Russell’s The Devils sold out all 452 seats at the Salle Buñuel in under 60 seconds — 55 years after it was first released. Except, the truth is, Russell’s film, an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s 1952 novel The Devils of Loudon, was never actually released in a cut that its director wanted people people to see it in. Based on the true story of a Roman Catholic priest accused of witchcraft in rural France in 1634, The Devils featured violence and nudity that still seems strong today. Joined by Russell’s widow Lisi, British film historian Mark Kermode introduced the Director’s Cut to a veritable who’s who of movie critics, plus special guest Peter Jackson.

Speaking to Deadline after the screening, Kermode revealed that the process began in January of this year, at a meeting in Berlin with Christian Parkes and Spencer Collantes.

“Christian and Spencer walk in,” Kermode recalled, “and I go, ‘Right. It’s Warner Bros., so it’s either The Exorcist or The Devils” — famously two of Kermode’s specialist subjects — “but I know for a fact that it’s not The Exorcist. So, what do you want to do with The Devils?’ They said, ‘We really want to do the Director’s Cut, and we think it’s happening.’ I was completely speechless.”

To explain Kermode’s astonishment, you have to understand the censorship battles that Ken Russell’s film faced, both at home with the BBFC and in the US, with the much stricter MPAA. “The short version of this story,” said Kermode, “is that Ken ended up with the British X-rated version, which was, for as long as anyone can remember, the definitive version of The Devils, but was missing stuff that Ken had always regretted. The US R-rated version was just a really severely truncated version of that cut, and, actually, one of the biggest problems was that after The Devils had finished its run in the X-rated cut [in the UK], the 35mm prints were taken and cut to conform with the R-rated version in America. So, for a long time, even getting the British X-rated cut was very difficult.”

The scene that came to typify the elusive Director’s Cut is a scene best described as a religious freakout, in which a posse of supposedly possessed nuns cavort naked with an effigy of Christ. Recalled Kermode, “I said to Ken, ‘Well, what happened to it?’ He said, ‘Literally, the last time I remember seeing it was in a roll of film, and it was sitting next to the editing machine — and then it was gone. As far as I’m concerned, it’s lost.’ There was one still, an overhead shot of them all lying around the statue of Christ. That was pretty much the only thing that existed of that scene. I, being me, said, ‘Ken, we’ll find it.’ He said, ‘You won’t.’”

How and where that missing footage was subsequently found — and in near-mint condition too —will be covered in a future piece closer to the film’s release date in October. But it speaks to Clockwork’s intent that the company began with such a notorious title and took it to Cannes in the space of just four months.

Said Parkes, “As far as the process goes, it all goes back to the very first meetings that I had with Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy at Warner Bros., when we were talking about creating Clockwork. We talked about everything we could do, both the opportunities and the potential. One of the things we said was, ‘If our remit — if our motivation — is to support great films and great filmmakers, could we go back into the archives, and into the library, and pull out some of those films out that perhaps weren’t judged correctly at the time? There’s an opportunity now to introduce them to new audiences in new and fresh ways — can we do that?’ They said, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ I was like, ‘Great, we’ve got some titles that we’d love to work with,’ and they were like, ‘Go do it.”

“Next thing, we’re in a meeting with the team that oversees the archives, the library, all of home entertainment, and, miraculously, they were like, “Yeah. OK. Let’s get into it.” Obviously, we were pleasantly surprised and mildly shocked. Even at the point where we sat down with Mark, we were still waiting for something to happen, for someone would say, ‘No, we can’t do that.’”

Sadly, Russell died in 2011, aged 84, and never got to see this superb restoration, although he did get to see a version of his Director’s Cut, albeit in DigiBeta form, in 2004 at the NFT in London. Introducing the screening with Kermode, Russell’s wife Lisi recalled that, even in such a rudimentary format, Russell was delighted to see his vision back on screening, telling her, “I’ve got my rhythm back.”

Said Kermode, “The great thing for me about the screening in Cannes was Lisi being there, because, honestly, I thought this was never going to happen. And Lisi mentioned something that everyone forgets: Ken always wanted to be a dancer, and when he said to her, ‘I’ve got my rhythm back,’ he meant it. I thought that was such a beautiful thing to say. I mean, it’s all about the rhythm of the work as a whole. That main sequence, when you lose it, the film loses its rhythm. It’s like it missteps somehow because the rhythm of that sequence is really important. I thought Lisi really set the tone for the screening.”

Ken Russell’s The Devils will screen at Il Cinema Ritrovato (June 20-28)