Bill Maher’s religion documentary Religulous is still going strong in theaters, and its success is due in large part to director Larry Charles, and the 400 hours worth of good footage he shot and pared down into an entertaining, 90-minute film. In fact, Charles has so much footage left lying around that he’s trying to find a home for it on television.
Speaking to AICN Charles revealed, “My hope is that the movie is successful enough, and I’ve already talked to Lionsgate about this, but I would like to take the 400 hours and cut it into half hours and like sell it to HBO or something, so people can see a lot of the stuff that didn’t make it into the movie.”
Religulous’s star Bill Maher already has a great relationship with HBO, via his weekly roundtable television series Real Time. If Lionsgate is as open to it as Charles makes it sounds, this could be a very real possibility. Putting it on cable television would give Maher and Charles time to really get into detail. Says Charles, “I think it would be very entertaining and then you get to see a lot of the stuff that we shot that we couldn’t use in the movie and you would get to see expanded versions of a lot of the stuff like the Father Foster in front of the Vatican, you can see more stuff about him and there was a lot of great stuff that didn’t make it in from just those interviews.”
