Denis Villeneuve defends ‘Dune: Part Two”s running time: “I trust the audience”
nme.comDune: Part Two director Denis Villeneuve has defended the film’s lengthy running time amid debates about whether or not films are getting too long.The sci-fi epic has clocked up a running time of 2 hours and 46 minutes, just slightly longer than the first instalment of the adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, which was 2 hours and 35 minutes long.It’s been noted that films have gradually been getting longer in the last decade, sparking a debate about how necessary that is.
It picked up pace in particular last year with the release of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon, which were three hours and three and a half hours long respectively.Now, Villeneuve has had his say on the matter.
When asked about the runtime in a new interview with The Times, Villeneuve revealed that the film’s distributor, Warner Bros Pictures, didn’t tell him to cut the film down, saying “it was almost the opposite”.“I trust the audience,” he said, adding that the film’s length was a necessity because the story was “too dense” to tell in a more condensed way.“This was the only way I could succeed,” he continued. “Also, think of Oppenheimer.
It is a three-hour, rated-R movie about nuclear physics that is mostly talking. But the public was young – that was the movie of the year by far for my kids.“There is a trend.
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