Long vs. Boring

"Cut it till it hurts, then cut out some more." A very wise man once said that to aspiring directors, a reminder that every shot in a movie must serve a purpose. Just because you have a beautiful, picturesque, wide screen pan of the ocean crashing against the rocks, doesn't mean your audience needs (or wants) to see it.

This is much harder to do than it sounds. It does hurt to take out a scene that took hours and hours to make. As a director, it does hurt to lose that gorgeous ocean shot. I know first hand how hard it is. No doubt, so does the audience of some of my boring movies.

If you leave these unnecessary shots in, you lose the audience. It's not just that your movie will be longer with them in, it will be boring with them. But don't confuse long with boring.

The Godfather is long. Duel is boring.

The Godfather has lots of "scenic" shots and slow pans and angles from one stationary camera. Yet each one means something in a noticeable, understandable way. The slow pace is dictated by the personas of the characters, and perpetuated by the length of the shots. Because the shot itself communicates more than just what the characters are doing, the length doesn't become tedious. It's a long movie, interesting movie.

Duel has shot after shot of a car moving down the highway. This serves an essential purpose early in the movie to establish the solitude and emptiness of countryside, and heightens the terror for the car facing the semi all alone. Forty-five minutes later, the audience has gotten the point that it's a lonely highway. After an hour of wide-angle shots of a semi and a car on a two-lane highway still trying to communicate the same thing I learned half an hour ago, I'm bored.

Jim