No. It isn’t. Pacific Rim was shot digitally, and clocks in at 132 minutes. That’s mammoth, and Guillermo del Toro’s career has been stratospheric. Another fine example would be Neill Blomkamp – South African director of District 9 (112 minutes) and the upcoming Elysium, starring Matt Damon. Google has Elysium running at 120 minutes, and Google never lies. Both longer than you’d expect. Michael Bay’s Transformers series is comprised of a series of movies all over two hours long.
Does this make those directors better? No, of course not. It does show, however, that they are more comfortable exerting their creative vision over that increased running time, with such massive budgets and movie studios watching their every move. Filmmakers today have never had it so good – anybody can pick up any camera and make a movie. Werner Herzog stole his first movie camera from a local film school, a scenario unimaginable now. Films are getting longer because the tools that allow longer films to come about with greater ease are being used by new directors at an increasingly early age. The new breed – Sam Mendes, Neill Blomkamp, Guillermo del Toro, Peter Jackson (to name but a few) – have the confidence, the equipment, the experience and the money to make films as long as they do.
What I’m saying is that the reason films are getting longer isn’t because of just one of those factors, but all of them combined. The older, more established directors – Stephen Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino – are using the skills they accumulated with film in conjunction with those factors to give them more freedom too. Francis Ford Coppola shot Apocalypse Now in 1977, and it nearly bankrupted the director. Nowadays, shot on digital, it’d be a piece of cake.
The directors of tomorrow are growing up with access to HD cameras and industry-standard editing software. Gareth Edwards’ film Monsters, released in 2010, was shot on DV cameras, on location or in the director’s flat, without permission from anyone. Directors are coming up fast and with skill, enough money, equipment, and inspiration, they’re going to want to tell longer and longer stories. And I intend to let them. Isn’t it just so exciting?