Wednesday
Dec032008
Wednesday, December 3, 2008 at 4:13PM The Incredibly Shrinking 'Watchmen'
How much
Watchmen is too much Watchmen?
Apparently two-and-a-half hours, according to
Zack
and Deborah
Snyder. The missus told
Sci Fi Wire that they're whittling the running
time, adding, "We're getting really close...we're at two hours and 35 minutes."
So in other words: Wait till you see the DVD! If not just for the director's cut of the feature, but also for the animated Tales of the Black Freighter comic-within-the comic footage, which Snyder says will eventually be edited into the master version of the film.
"The Black Freighter version of the movie that we're working on--which has the ins and outs of the Black Freighter comic book woven through it, with an animated version of the Black Freighter--will be about three hours and 40 minutes. So there's a huge epic version of Watchmen, which will probably come out after the movie's theatrical release, for hardcore [fans]."
The Snyders didn't say how long the Watchmen would be when it arrives in theaters on March 6, 2009, but bet on something in the range of The Dark Knight, a little less that 150 minutes.
Reader Comments (8)
This movie length madness is continuing.
One part of being a great film-maker is knowing how to limit oneself. A good director knows how toplan and shoot a movie so that it doesn't run for hours.
All you need to do is to focus on a few good ideas and develop them fully.
Making long movies is the ultimate self-indulgence. It's like saying all my ideas are good and I will not drop any of them.
It just means that no idea gets fully developed and that the movies feels incomplete.
Some of the best and most complete and fulfilling movies run at an hour and a half. Neither short nor long just right.
I beg to differ...a patron should go to the theater and expect to be entertained for the entire day, with at least 5 intermissions with which to buy popcorn.
Oh yes, and the big theater chain in Phoenix (rhymes with "parkins") should sell beer as well.
I think fans of the Lord of The Rings films would say long movies are far from self indulgent. When done right, a long film can deliver something as close to the source material as possible. In the case of Watchmen where there's so much going on that's interconnected it's hard to just cherry pick a few good ideas. This is especially true after you've promised to bring a film that's faithful to story.
Alan Moore has said this story was unfilmable on the basis of how film works constantly moving the viewer forward where in printed form the reader can go back and make connection between different elements. I think films can accomplish this the only problem seems to be one of time. The longer a film gets the fewer showings it'll have along with the difficulty in keeping an audience rapt for its entirety.
So does a director shoot for an epic retelling to please all fans or aim for maximum viewings and a blockbuster? In general, things seem to trend more toward max viewings and aiming for that blockbuster in box office receipts than not. Which is not to say that good films can't come of it, Harry Potter is a fine example. However, it does mean a lot of those who read the story and know all the intimate details will come away disappointed for not having seen them. Snyder seems to be trying to head off scorn early in giving notice that there'll be more to the director's cut on dvd.
I've always had certain misgivings about director's cuts that come after the fact. Deliver to the theaters precisely what you want to be seen in all its glory and take the profits you get. Peter Jackson did so with Rings and by all accounts it paid off nicely. It's sad that such is more the exception than the rule.
Well, the Lord of the Rings films were nowhere near the source material. It was just a series of protracted fights interspersed with dull slow-acting. And I haven'tbeen able to watch any of the three films in full since I first saw them in the cinema.
Film is a different medium altogether from literature, even graphic literature.
A good adaptation comes from understanding the differences between media and distilling and converting the essence of a work in one medium to another.
For films this means making deliberated choices, not trying to cram too much in. In today's films there are so many cluttering side plots and side characters that don't move the story forward.
Doubtless Peter Jackson started the whole thing with The Lord of the Rings and it's up to the studios to put a stop to it. A film is never better just because it's longer.
The true mark of a master is brevity.
Not all stories can be successfully told in brief as is obviously the thought of many a director that has later released a director's cut to theaters or touts it for dvd before the theatrical cut is ever released. That a film is long does not equate to a bad director and keeping it short is no mark of mastery. Unless of course what one is trying to master is how many showings can be had per theater screen. Being faithful to source material does not mean every single detail and nuance of a book down to the level minutiae must be followed... but you still have to get the story told.
It simply defies logic to think all books turned film can be done so in cookie cutter fashion that locks them to set lengths and have them all be wondrous cinematic achievements. Some films should be long, some should be shorter than what they are and some... just shouldn't even be made but that's a whole other issue. There's nothing wrong with a long film when it does the job of getting the story effectively told. I doubt Snyder can pull off this story as a one shot to begin with without it going long and it's really not something that could be reasonably pushed to sequels to tell it without the crimp of time.
Snyder should go for broke but we all know this isn't so much about making great film adaptations of books. In the end it's about how many butts can be planted in seats, how many repeat viewings there can be, what the merchandising is going to look like et al. Snyder had said not to expect this to be something that will be promoted by way of Happy Meals and toy lines the likes of which Batman has been recipient of. Yet, there's already Watchmen action figures out there so I doubt his film is going to fly against much that way.
For me, if a director can't put to screen the film in its entirety I'm going to be less inclined to see it. If I do see it I'll be less likely to buy the dvd just to see what I didn't see. A deleted scene here or there ok but a whole hour + worth of material or 3 + hours of some story within the story? That's a bit much. Maybe as Colin put it, I'll just wait on the dvd release.
Directors' Cuts are a different matter. Used properly they are only a way of restoring the artistic vision that may have been compromised in a studio-enforced theatrical cut.
The prime example of this i Blade Runner, which is rubbish in the theatrical version, but brilliant when restored in the Director's Cut.
Films, books and comic books are completely different mediums. Books are better at portraying internal processes, films are better at portraying external action and comic books are better at compacting story lines.
It is impossible to transfer directly. In an adaptation you have to find out how to use the strenghts of one medium do distill the strengths of another. Remember that it is only recently that filmmakers have started turning out worthwhile adaptations of graphic novels and that most adaptations, regardless of source medium (games!) turn out unsatisfactory.
Also remember that opinion and wishful thinking is not the same as fact.
When I was doing my Master's thesis on Welles and the narrative techniques he used, I stumbled upon the script for his radio drama adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days. It aired a week or two before War of the Worlds, actually, which is now 70 years old.
What was fascinating about it was how Welles and his co-writer reduced so many of the destinations in the story down to almost nothing, just a listing of the time Fogg arrived in the city and one quick blurb about what he did there. For an hour-long show, you have to do that. You can't go over.
And I drew the comparison between that exercise and the famous breakfast table scene in Citizen Kane, which is one of maybe the five best scenes of exposition in all of cinema. He shows the entire undoing of a marriage, over many years, in about two minutes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg7VUk4DjIk
And that film, unlike any movie around at that time, really played with timelines and perspectives in a way that novels can get away with, as described in a previous comment, but movies hadn't.
There are reasons some films need to be longer than others, but when we have a Pirates movie coming up on three hours and Miracle at St. Anna pushing that limit, you begin to wonder how much of that is hubris. Even The Dark Knight has big time pacing issues. Tonight I'm seeing Benjamin Button, which is based on a short story so it has no reason to be three hours long. And yet...
The three hour thing also has a lot to do with the expectation of the audience. If you go back 50 years, more people went to the theater. Its presentation is longer, because it's actually the opposite of film, which is a show-it-don't-tell-it medium. Theater has to have the characters do everything through dialogue. So movies from the 40s, 50s, and 60s could get away with it because audiences were used to sitting on their asses for three hours, anyway. Once we became a film and television society, things got shorter. Also, the world began to move faster.
That doesn't mean the stories are bad once they go over the time settings in our internal clock, just that filmmakers and screenwriters have figured out how to create movies that are just as good in a shorter amount of time. We don't need as much dialogue, editing is faster, we're more attuned to getting in and hanging on. Do you think we could have a 40-minute first act like we got in Star Wars, even 30 years later? No way.
As for Lord of the Rings, none of those movies needed to be that long, especially the second, because it did the least. The third one was fantastic...until Peter Jackson tacked on 25 minutes we didn't need. The end of that movie - although maybe not the end of the Tolkien story - is when they go through the business of not bowing to any man. The rest of it is just holding people in their seats.
I understand why Snyder wants to be careful with Watchmen, and I wouldn't be surprised if he filmed the comic and just cut from there. It's not like he can make a movie that's better than the graphic novel. I get why you don't want it to be some truncated version of it. But people read on different schedules than they watch movies, too. You can't make a real-time version of very many books. I think DVD will help alleviate some of the problem for filmmakers, because just as audiences now expect slightly shorter movies, they're slowly learning that the DVD is really the version they should see.
But you couldn't make a Watchmen movie for theaters that borders on three-and-a-half to four hours and make money. Oddly, that's exactly how you make money on the DVDs.
Well said. I'm impressed. And I guess you couldn't resist the temptation of making it rather lengthy. Your reference to Orson Welles is a spot-on illustration of brevity being the mark of the master.
One of the few directors who is good at making long films is Ridley Scott, that's why I mentioned Blade Runner above. But he is also an extremely efficient story teller so you don't relly feel the time, only the depth when watching his films. The few extra minutes in the Director's Cut of Kingdom of Heaven transformed it into a different film, as did the few extra minutes in the Final Cut of Blade Runner.
Blade Runner (Final Cut) weighs in at just under two hours and it still has an amazing amount of content. I doesn't feel slow or hurried, the pace is just right. The trick is of course to choose very carefully what to show and what to leave to the viewer to figure out himself. It's the same as good literature but done in a different medium.