Film Length Quotes

I mean, like, I can go in a room and say, look, 'Watchmen' should be at least 15 minutes longer than 'Batman.' I mean, that's, like, any geek will tell you that.

I didn't want people to sit there and watch 10 minutes of film, and all they write about is 48 frames.

You always have three movies that you have to reduce into one. You have the screenplay. And then, you do a workshop and you add more scenes. And then, on the day you shoot, there's more action and interaction. It's like a souffle. It has a tendency to just grow and explode, and it's just too long.

I did not make this a long film for its own sake. I wanted to make an entertaining film and offer it out there for those who want to see it. If word of mouth suggests there is an audience out there, hopefully their cinema will show it.

No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.

For my own films, I would like to see 'Bullet in the Head' remastered. The original cut was actually almost three hours.

My first cut was three hours and 17 minutes. And then I just became very shrewd about the editing.

Sometimes when you're editing a movie, you have the thing that you don't expect - which is you make it longer and longer as you go along.

I don't know what has happened to movies, but lately every movie is at least 20 minutes too long. It used to be that if you were three hours long it was because it was epic - a movie about Gandhi; something with very important subject matters.

You can't show a four-hour movie in a theater, really.

I've learned that I really want to shoot short films on a short schedule. There can be very good films that run 110 minutes, but 90 minutes is beautiful.

I like films that are about two hours not more.

I've played 'The Wizard of Oz' for my kids, but by today's standards, it seems really long. I don't know if there's enough action in it for them. And there's the whole black-and-white sequence in the beginning where she's on a farm. It takes a while to get to the colored part, and then it gets more exciting, and things start to happen.

That is one reason so many of the Japanese pictures are not good, they cannot spare all the footage necessary for that bow, which is repeated over and over again.

In any movie, there are a number of scenes that get cut in an effort to keep the film from running too long. Some are of little consequence, but others are important scenes that are very painful to lose.

The greatest comedies that were made by anybody were made in two reels; I don't care who it was.

The ones [comedies] that I always liked, whether it's Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, or Fast Times of Ridgemont High, they were all about two hours, or a little bit over two hours. With that extra 15 or 20 minutes, you can get to real character and you're not just stuck in plot.

I don't like extremely long movies. I tend to get a bit impatient. There are definitely exceptions, like 'Lawrence of Arabia,' but for the most part, I feel that movies should usually be shorter and not longer.

I'm used to doing U.K. indie films, like, six weeks of filming, tops.

Damn, my first cut that I showed to distributors was probably about two hours and 20 minutes, even though my contract said two hours. So, I had to lose 20 minutes. It's incredible that it just keeps happening.

Over-length is one of the things that most often results in the destruction of the movie in the cutting room.

There's an old saying in Hollywood: It's not the length of your film, it's how you use it.

I wanted people to know that I'm not just a guy who does weird videos on the Internet. I actually am a filmmaker, and I can tell stories, and I can create something that's 90 minutes long that feels just like any other movie you see in the theater, and hopefully enjoy.

All my movies, like Revenge, are under two hours.

At the first screening, there were a lot of areas that we went around and around about. Then we had our second screening. It played better. It's almost a reasonable length film now!