Scene Length Quotes

I feel like the great filmmakers who have a true voice, yeah they take the notes, they understand the notes, but it's really about the notes underneath the notes. When you do a test screening and somebody says, 'Well, I didn't like the love story,' but it was probably just too long.

Rarely in film acting do you get to do a scene for very long.

I find that most of my scripts have a lot more scenes than most films, so the average movie might have 100 scenes, my average script has 300 scenes.

In a normal movie, you'd never see one guy talk for an entire page, whether good or bad.

I'm good at description and imparting flow to a story, but I don't necessarily understand the value of long scenes.

When you have quick scenes, it becomes difficult to ascertain where your character fits and where they're going. I always enjoy scenes that have a movement to them.

I don't believe moviegoers don't have patience. Screenwriters are told a scene can't be longer than three minutes, that you have to cut to the chase. Not true!

For me, my storyline [in Big Little Lies] is very complicated and nuanced. [The script] was so beautifully written. It was very, very easy to play. ... I think one of the scenes is almost eight minutes.

When you make a film, you like to run it with an audience. They tell you you're narrow-minded or subjective, or that seems too long, or that doesn't work.

Film is much more visual, a scene is typically a lot shorter, you're dealing with a lot more characters, a lot more locations, and you're able to rely on things that you just can never do on the stage.

To me, as an audience member, movies always come to a screeching halt when they get to their action scenes. They always feel like they drag on to me.

Ultimately, you just have to do what feels right for the film. It really helps when you have great collaborators like my editor, Eduardo Serrano, who kept telling me various scenes should be longer.

I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.

If a scene is longer than three pages, it better be for a good reason.

I've been accused, many times, as a writer/director, of my pace being too leisurely and too long.

I think that's my approach: If it feels right for a scene to be whole, to hold on without cutting for a long time, then that's great. But other scenes, they don't want it.

The parts of a film should be in proportion to the whole, and a long film pasted together out of quick little scenes makes me dizzy.

All my cuts are always about three hours, at the start, mainly because any scene in the movie that's 90 seconds, I probably shot a five-minute version of. If you just extrapolate that through the whole movie, I have a very long version of every scene, usually because, if there's one funny joke, I'll shoot five because I don't know if the one I like is going to work. I'll get back-ups because my biggest fear is to be in previews, testing the movie, and a joke doesn't work, but I have no way to fix it because I have no other line.

If you write a bunch of different characters with a bunch of different opinions, you end up with these long scenes of everyone standing around talking.