The cast of 'Mortal Engines' share their favourite deleted scenes

Clocking in at a brisk 128 minutes, Mortal Engines is a relatively slight blockbuster when compared to the lengthy run times of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films.

The film (in cinemas now) is adapted from Philip Reeve’s 336-page novel, and while Jackson – the film’s co-writer and producer – says the book was “trimmed down a little bit, here and there”, there were a number of scenes and sequences from the book, or from the shoot that didn’t make into cinemas.

The film tells the story of Hester Shaw, a young girl who seeks to uncover the truth behind her mother’s murder, set to the backdrop of giant mobilised cities battling it out in a wasteland.

Here’s what we learned about the deleted scenes of Mortal Engines.

Minor Mortal Engines spoilers incoming…

Shrike and Hester’s backstory

After Hester flees London, the ancient warrior cyborg Shrike is dispatched to track down the would-be assassin. It later transpires that Hester and Shrike have a long history, and some of that was cut from the finished film.

“There was a little bit more of Shrike raising Hester,” Jackson tells Yahoo Movies UK. The extended scene could turn up on the film’s DVD extras.

Anna Fang and Tom talk Hester

Another scene that was cut sounds like a touching character moment between Anti-Traction League leader Anna Fang (played by Jihae) and London exile Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan).

“There’s a scene with [Anna Fang] that I always really liked,” Hera Hilmer, who plays Hester Shaw, explains.

“Anna Fang is talking to Tom about Hester. And I just really loved that scene because it really was an insight into… not everything is what it looks like on the outside, and if you look deeper you understand more what people have been through and who they are.”

More Magnus Crome

The first cut of the film had more of Patrick Malahide as Magnus Crome, the Mayor of London, who regularly clashes with Hugo Weaving’s Thaddeus Valentine, the Head of the Guild of Historians.

“I had some scenes with Patrick Malahide, the wonderful actor that Patrick is” Weaving tells us.

“Those were truncated and made into one scene. We got to reshoots, so we ended up doing those two separate scenes into one scene. So we lost a bit of the political battle between these two figures and the ideology that they both hold.”

Mortal Engines is in cinemas now. Watch a clip below.

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