Legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese has defended the length of his latest movie. Killers of the Flower Moon clocks in at a staggering 3 hours and 26 minutes — longer than the already-lengthy Oppenheimer which was released earlier this year.
However, during an interview with the Hindustan Times, Scorsese defended its lengthy run-time. “People say it’s three hours, but come on, you can sit in front of the TV and watch something for five hours,” he said. “Also, there are many people who watch theater for 3.5 hours. There are real actors on stage, you can’t get up and walk around. You give it that respect. Give cinema some respect.”
Scorsese recently spoke out about blockbuster franchises, stating that we must save cinema from “franchise culture”.
“There are going to be generations now that think movies are only those — that’s what movies are,” he said. “They already think that,” he added. “Which means that we have to then fight back stronger. And it’s got to come from the grassroots level. It’s gotta come from the filmmakers themselves. And you’ll have, you know, the Safdie brothers, and you’ll have Chris Nolan, you know what I mean? And hit ’em from all sides. Hit ’em from all sides, and don’t give up.”
The biggest of cinema’s recent successes was Barbenheimer — the debut of both Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day. This, Scorsese says, offers hope that cinema isn’t dead yet.
“I do think that the combination of Oppenheimer and Barbie was something special,” Scorsese said. “It seemed to be, I hate that word, but the perfect storm. It came about at the right time. And the most important thing is that people went to watch these in a theater. And I think that’s wonderful.”
“The way it fit perfectly — a film with such entertainment value, purely with the bright colors — and a film with such severity and strength, and pretty much about the danger of the end to our civilisation — you couldn’t have more opposite films to work together,” he added. “It does offer some hope for a different cinema to emerge, different from what’s been happening in the last 20 years, aside from the great work being done in independent cinema. I always get upset by that, the independent films being relegated to ‘indies.’ Films that only a certain kind of people would like. Just show them on a tiny screen somewhere.”
IGN’s Killers of the Flower Moon review gave it 9/10 and said: “Killers of the Flower Moon offers a detailed portrait of the Osage tribe, the infamous murders committed against them in the 1920s, and the life of Mollie Burkhart, who saw most of her family slain. It’s one of Scorsese’s most brutal films, yet one of his most thoughtful and self-reflexive, as he crafts a subversive murder ‘mystery’ that leaves no lingering questions save for one. It’s a question that defines the tide of American history: Just how far are people willing to go for greed?”
Want to read more about Killers of the Flower Moon? Check out the recent trailer as well as the latest Killers of the Flower Moon clip.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
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