Cut! Are movies too long?

updated 5:19 p.m. ET Feb. 28, 2007

LOS ANGELES - Director David Fincher knows some people may think his serial-killer saga “Zodiac” is too long at two hours, 40 minutes.

He’s wondered the same thing himself but decided the film needed that much space to tell the story he wanted.

“Zodiac” and other recent epic-length films such as “The Good Shepherd” reflect an age-old Hollywood balancing act: satisfying filmmakers’ artistic desires without causing audiences to squirm in their seats.

“I would have loved the movie to have been shorter. I just couldn’t find a way to dramatically do that,” said Fincher, whose previous films include “Fight Club” and “Se7en.” “Nobody wants to wear out their welcome, but you want the audience to have a meaningful and varied experience.

“Sometimes, maybe filmmakers can fall in love with the story they’re telling and maybe need to be more diligent in how they’re telling it. In our case, you’re talking about an investigation that took 35 years, and we just felt like there was no way to actually do what we wanted in any less time.”

Opening Friday, the film stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo in the convoluted, decades-long journey of police and newspaper men to crack the case of the “Zodiac Killer,” who terrorized the San Francisco area in the 1970s with taunting letters taking credit for a string of killings and threatening more.

No one complains about ‘The Godfather’
Long, long movies have been around since Hollywood moved beyond one-reel shorts in the early silent-film days. D.W. Griffith’s historical epics “Intolerance” and “Birth of a Nation” ran three hours, and Cecil B. DeMille approached that length with his biblical pageant “King of Kings.”

Few fans would gripe that three-hour masterpieces such as “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “Schindler’s List” or the first two chapters of “The Godfather” are too long. And cinema buffs reveled in the 1989 reconstruction of “Lawrence of Arabia” overseen by Steven Spielberg, which restored David Lean’s epic close to its original length of three hours, 40 minutes.

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Yet plenty of critics, studio bosses, theater owners, filmgoers and filmmakers themselves think too many movies run too long.

“‘The Godfather’ merits all that time and more,” said critic Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times and TV’s “Ebert and Roeper and the Movies.” “But 80 to 90 percent of the films I see could benefit from 10 to 15 minutes in cuts.”

Woody Allen’s films generally come in well under two hours and often closer to 90 minutes. Stephen Frears similarly delivers tight films with little fat, including his rich portrait of British monarch Elizabeth II in “The Queen,” for which Helen Mirren won the best-actress Academy Award. The film clocks in at a brisk 103 minutes.

“I do think that most films are too long. I’ve seen too many long films. I’ve learned to be sympathetic to the audience. If nothing else, keep it short,” Frears said. “You just say, ‘Look, we’ve done this bit’ or ‘They’ve said all this.’ Get on with it. You learn not to draw things out. All you’re ever learning is not to be boring.”

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