Between Christian Bale's extreme girth and the possibly ill-advised Shakespearean interlude, Adam McKay's Dick Cheney biopic Vice isn't your average West Wing walk-and-talker – but it turns out it nearly included a full-on Busby Berkeley-style choreographed song and dance number too.

It came about because McKay and his team were trying to stop audiences switching off during heavier bits about political chicanery and the minutiae of arcane governmental theory, much like that bit in The Big Short with Margot Robbie in the bath.

"I just felt that if it was linear, I'd run the audience into a ditch," editor Hank Corwin told the Hollywood Reporter. "I figured, and Adam figured, that we'd have to occasionally come up with nonlinear emotional highlights just to re-engage emotionally."

That ended up including a 10-minute extravaganza during which Steve Carell's Donald Rumsfeld shows Cheney how Washington works.

"They were walking through the cafeteria, and the cafeteria explodes into this surreal interlude [like] a full-blown musical out of the '40s," Corwin said. "You have Brittany Howard from the Alabama Shakes singing, and you have scores of people dancing. It seemed like every dancer in LA was there. It was huge."

In the end, though, it was just a bit too much. "What we found was, in the context of the film, it weighed the film down at the wrong time," Corwin explained. "The film wanted to move quickly in that area, and it would have slowed it down. It was very painful [to cut it]."