Ellise Shafer Brady Corbet, who is premiering his three-and-a-half hour historical drama “The Brutalist” at Venice Film Festival on Sunday, is shrugging off discourse around movie runtimes being too long. “This film does everything that we are told we are not allowed to do,” the director said during the film’s press conference. “I think it’s quite silly actually to have a conversation about runtime because that’s like criticizing a book for being 700 pages instead of 100 pages.” He continued that for him, it’s more about “how much story there is to tell.” “Maybe the next thing I make will be 45 minutes and I should be allowed to do it.
We should all be allowed to do that. The idea we have to fit into a box is quite silly,” he said. “We should be past that, it’s 2024.
As Harmony Korine once said, cinema is stuck in the birth canal. And I agree with him, so we should help it out.” Corbet choked up a few times during the press conference, saying at one point: “This was an incredibly difficult film to make.
I’m very emotional today because I’ve been working on it for seven years and it felt very urgent every day for the better part of a decade.
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