Brutalist Director Defends the Merit of Long Films

How can one adequately depict the life of a Hungarian-born Jew who survived the Holocaust and emigrated to the US, enduring poverty and indignity in pursuit of the American dream?

The director of the highly anticipated film The Brutalist believes the answer lies in extending the runtime of his film to do the story justice.

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, The Brutalist stars Adrien Brody as Hungarian architect László Tóth. With a duration of 215 minutes and a 15-minute intermission, the film is notable for exceeding the typical two-hour runtime that has become the cinematic norm. In recent years, extended films have attracted criticism from both audiences and critics weary of prolonged screenings.

According to Brady Corbet, the film’s director, the lengthy runtime was necessary to tell a complete and intricate story. At a festival press conference, an emotional Corbet spoke about the seven years of dedicated work that went into the project. “This was an incredibly difficult film to make,” he confessed. “It felt urgent every day for almost a decade.”

Corbet dismissed critics of the film’s length, comparing the conversation about runtime to that of criticizing a book for its number of pages. “I’ve read great novellas and longer masterpieces,” he said. “The idea that we should conform to a specific format is outdated. As Harmony Korine once said, cinema is stuck in the birth canal, and I agree with him. It’s time to help cinema evolve.”

The film features a stellar cast, including Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, and Isaach de Bankolé. At the press conference, de Bankolé received applause for his comment that “the length of the movie has nothing to do with the story of life. Life can be short or long, depending on how we approach it.”

This year’s Venice Film Festival has seen a trend of longer films. Notable mentions include Todd Phillips’s Joker: Folie à Deux (138 minutes), Luca Guadagnino’s Queer (135 minutes), Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga chapters 1 and 2 (181 minutes and 190 minutes respectively), and Lav Diaz’s Phantosmia (246 minutes). Festival director Alberto Barbera reminded attendees to consider film lengths when planning their schedules.

Barbera commented on this shift in film duration, noting that while films traditionally lasted between 90 and 120 minutes, longer films are becoming the norm. He attributed this change to the impact of TV series and an attempt by the theatrical sector to offer viewers more complex, richer, and longer experiences in cinemas.

When asked why The Brutalist was made as a film instead of a TV series, Corbet, who previously won awards at Venice in 2015 for his debut film The Childhood of a Leader, said, “In my experience, television is not a writer’s medium but an executive’s medium.”

Adrien Brody shared his commitment to supporting filmmakers striving to create indelible films despite the obstacles in the medium. He compared The Brutalist’s story to that of his own mother, a photographer who emigrated to the US during the Hungarian revolution of 1956. “Much like László, she lost her home and pursued the dream of being an artist. This film, although fiction, feels very real to me,” he said. Brody has defended the film’s runtime, stating, “It’s hard to tell a lifetime in a film.”

Research by What to Watch indicates that the average running time of the most commercially successful films has increased from 110 minutes in 1981 to 141 minutes in 2022. While the majority of the highest-grossing films of all time last over two hours, with some even exceeding three hours, audience opinions remain varied. A market research poll revealed that the “ideal” movie length for American audiences is 92 minutes. Only 15% of 2,000 surveyed individuals found films over 120 minutes acceptable, and a mere 2% were comfortable with movies longer than 150 minutes.

The topic resurfaced when some cinemas inserted intermissions during screenings of Martin Scorsese’s 206-minute long Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese defended his film’s runtime, insisting that cinema deserves some respect.

Sarah Atkinson, a professor of screen media at King’s College London, said intermissions could potentially boost audience levels and concession sales for cinemas. However, she noted that directors like Scorsese view them as compromising their artistic vision. In contrast, filmmakers like Corbet have integrated an interval into their films, including a countdown to inform audiences when to return to their seats.

Atkinson added, “Films aren’t just getting longer, they’re growing in scale.” The Brutalist was shot in 70mm to reflect the widescreen experience of its 1950s setting, a trend also seen in films like Oppenheimer and Dune: Part Two. This shift towards larger cinematic experiences is part of an effort to preserve the unique status of film, distinct from home streaming and comparable to theatre.

The focus on spectacle and cinematic scale underscores a larger movement to maintain the distinctiveness of film as an immersive and unparalleled medium.

Source: Variety, Vanity Fair, What to Watch