Christopher Nolan's new film Oppenheimer runs for three hours. Films are now too long – and boring. Hollywood director Bruce Beresford explains why movies broke through the three-hour mark
Christopher Nolan's new film Oppenheimer runs for three hours. Films are now too long – and boring. Hollywood director Bruce Beresford explains why movies broke through the three-hour mark
During the past 20 years, a considerable number of films have hovered around the three-hour mark. It’s a striking shift from the previous 70 years, when a film of even two hours was considered too long for its content.
Silent films were generally under 90 minutes; many were around 60 minutes. Exceptions were rare, the most notable being those of pioneer director D W Griffith: Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1917) were both over three hours. Neither film started a trend. Griffith’s career petered out through the 1920s and ended with his inability to handle dialogue scenes in the sound era.
During the early sound era – from 1930 – few films were as long as 90 minutes. Even the 1932 version of A Farewell to Arms managed to squash the Hemingway novel into 89 minutes. Before I’m challenged by film buffs, I should point out that the 1934 French version of Les Misérables ran for nearly five hours and remains easily the best of the many adaptations of Hugo’s epic.
In 1939, producer David Selznick ignored the standard belief that a two-hour film was probably half an hour too long. His adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind ran at three hours 40 minutes and was a huge success. Even today, despite charges of political incorrectness, it has retained its popularity. Unlike so many of the three-hour-plus epics of the modern era, the story and characters are complex enough to sustain the viewer’s attention.
I’ve worked out, or stumbled across, the two key reasons that so many very long films have been made since 1990.
First, home theatres can now have huge screens and high-quality sound systems. People are happy to stay at home and watch projects made for TV, which can easily run to 40 and 50 episodes of at least an hour each.
The COVID epidemic almost guaranteed captive audiences, which gave producers carte blanche to slow up the pace – often to a standstill. Their audience wasn’t going anywhere. Viewers were happy to spend an entire weekend in front of the screen with a few drinks and snacks.
Now, post-COVID, audiences who are trickling back into cinemas are subjected to many films running over three hours. A few are popular – Avatar and Elvis, notably – but many are rejected. A three-hour film with no toilet-break interval is a daunting prospect.
Another key factor in the rise of epic-length films is the ascendancy of superstar directors, allied to the breakdown of the studio system and the end of close supervision of ‘product’ by production executives.
The most celebrated example of interference is the RKO studio’s removal of at least an hour of Orson Welles’s second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).
The released version, a failure, was a disjointed mess. Worst of all, the negative of the removed scenes was destroyed. Any hope of a more complete version – a ‘director’s cut’ – was eliminated.
Similarly, Darryl Zanuck had no hesitation in altering the work of legendary director John Ford. He recut scenes in Ford’s superb western My Darling Clementine (1946), and even brought in another director to add close-up shots of the actors in Ford’s superb final scene, which destroyed the delicate mood Ford had created.
By the time of Heaven’s Gate (1980), Michael Cimino’s three-and-a-half-hour western, the situation had changed. Led by the French critics, the director as auteur was placed on a pedestal. Studio interference in the editing process was vehemently disparaged and minimised.
This led to some remarkable films but ignored the fact that some directors – perhaps all of them – need to listen to, and sometimes take, advice. And so Heaven’s Gate was a tedious film which bankrupted the production company.
There has been a tsunami of over-length films since 1980 – as well as many films that are overlong even though their running time is two hours or less. Audiences have struggled with Magnolia (1999 – three hours, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson), Ken Branagh’s 1996 Hamlet (four hours), Christopher Nolan’s incomprehensible Interstellar (three hours, 2014) and two epics from Quentin Tarantino – The Hateful Eight (2015; hateful) and the inventive but protracted Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).
This year, as well as Avatar and Elvis, Bardo (159 minutes, 2022) by the gifted Mexican director Alejandro Iñárritu is stylish and technically superb but plotless and burdened with impenetrable philosophising. Still, an audience watching it at home with slices of pizza and some soothing drinks could find it engaging, or at least tolerable.
Rather than making films for cinemas – and being aware of the vast home audience – producers today favour series, often detective or fantasy stories, with innumerable episodes. The pacing of feature films is no longer given high priority.
Bruce Beresford directed Oscar-winning Driving Miss Daisy, which is one hour and 39 minutes long
