Pointing to box office hits like Oppenheimer, the filmmaker has criticised the idea that young people don’t like sitting through long films
Everyone knows that the ideal length for a film is about one and a half hours. There’s a reason that Letterboxd has a slew of “90 minute or less” lists and Netflix has a dedicated menu for viewers with places to be (or, more likely, an attention span crippled by social media’s endless scroll). Sometimes, however, 90 minutes just doesn’t cut it – either the story is too sprawling to cram into that scant timeframe, or it’s the kind of film where you want to luxuriate in its vibe for as long as possible. We’re talking three-hour epics and above.
The last two years alone have provided a few popular examples of these, from Babylon and Beau Is Afraid, to Killers of the Flower Moon and Oppenheimer, with the latter widely tipped to bring home this year’s Best Picture award at the Oscars. But wait! Aren’t our attention spans plummeting? Aren’t Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s minds too content-addled to follow a plot that isn’t uploaded in 50 separate segments on TikTok? “No!” says Dune’s Denis Villeneuve.
Now, you might think that Villeneuve has an ulterior motive here. After watching his upcoming Dune: Part Two, audiences will have spent a total of five and a half hours on the desert planet Arrakis with Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, with a third Dune film looming somewhere over the horizon. (“I don’t want to rush it,” Villeneuve says. Clearly.) Speaking in a new interview with the Times, however, he turns his taste for drawn-out cinema spectacles into a broader point about the current industry climate, urging directors and studios to have more faith in their younger viewers’ attention spans.
“I trust the audience,” says the director, reflecting on the relative freedom he was granted in making Dune a two-parter, with the forthcoming second instalment running ten minutes longer than the first. Anyway, he adds, Dune could never be condensed into one movie (à la David Lynch’s doomed version) because the story is “too dense”.
To further back up his impassioned, and wholly justified, defence of long films, he invokes Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. “It is a three-hour, rated-R movie about nuclear physics that is mostly talking,” Villeneuve says. “But the public [viewership] was young — that was the movie of the year by far for my kids.” This, he explains, is a recurring trend: “The youth love to watch long movies because if they pay, they want to see something substantial. They are craving meaningful content.”
This doesn’t just mean that we’re due a wave of longer films in the future, though. Villeneuve also expresses a desire for films to return to a more “pure” and experimental era, before they were “corrupted” by TV. “Frankly, I hate dialogue,” he tells the Times, despite appearing as a screenwriter on Dune. “Dialogue is for theatre and television. I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image. I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that is the power of cinema.”
“In a perfect world,” he concludes, “I’d make a compelling movie that doesn’t feel like an experiment but does not have a single word in it either.” Of course, there’s the question of whether mainstream audiences would actually watch a version of, say, Dune Messiah, where the A-list cast is completely mute. But maybe they would! As Villeneuve says, you’ve gotta have faith.