At the Locarno Film Festival, acclaimed director Alexander Payne discusses the significance of concise storytelling and the trend of lengthy films in modern cinema.
Alexander Payne Advocates for Concise Filmmaking
Alexander Payne is at the Locarno Film Festival to receive the Pardo d’Onore, where he is once again espousing the value of a tight storyline and shorter runtime.
Look, I get it. I see this as an issue that can start on the page, or even in your short film—I think sometimes, writers and directors don’t know where to trim the fat, and any of my film friends would tell you I prefer a short short film. It’s better for short attention spans, especially if you’re trying to fund a feature and get eyeballs on a proof-of-concept, and it’s better for shorts programming at festivals. Those are just the facts.
Payne’s Perspective on Modern Filmmaking
But Payne, a two-time Oscar winner, is pretty firm about it regardless of where he sees the issue. When asked about modern film writing, he told Variety in a recent interview:
I’ve evolved in my thinking about that kind of stuff. When I got out of film school in the 1990s, I left film school. I was against Syd Field and Robert McKee. I defecate on those tenets of screenwriting. Who’s to say act one stops at page 30? We were coming out of the ’70s, which had beautiful exploration and artistic films. I graduated from high school in 1979 so those are the films that taught me what an American commercial movie is. And then you got into the ’80s, and things started to go really downhill, certainly in American cinema. And my snobby film school friends and I would accuse those books of turning everything into a formula. Now I’m 64 years old, and I see so many films which are three or four hours long, and without very good reason. And I sit in a lot of modern films and I say, “Cut, cut. I get it. Cut.” There are a lot of films which will only play at film festivals. Cinema in general is a miracle, and any movie (well, except some) … they’re all small miracles. But even at its most avant-garde, cinema is still a popular medium. This is a long-winded answer as to why I prefer old films.
The Case for Shorter Films
It seems Payne’s current frustration isn’t with experimental filmmaking, but with bloat. He’s repeatedly said, since at least 2023, “You want your movie to be as short as possible,” and that “there are too many damn long movies these days.”
And as we know, the data backs him up. According to Matt Birchler, movies in the 1980s averaged 1 hour and 53 minutes, while those in the 2020s average 17 minutes longer. The evolution of the Marvel Cinematic Universe tells the same story—Phase One films averaged 124 minutes, Phase Two averaged 127 minutes, and Phase Three ballooned to 136 minutes, according to NPR.
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Payne told IndieWire that filmmaking is “a constant search for economy. You want the screenplay as short as possible. You want the acting as brisk as possible, given whatever the basic rhythm of that film is. And then in the editing you want it to be as short as it can possibly be, but no shorter.”
Payne’s beef seems to be with both the restrictions of strict screenwriting structure found in some very popular screenwriting books and a filmmaker’s inability to be economical. His preference is for punchiness and drive.
Finding Balance in Filmmaking
Despite what Payne might think of Syd Field, structure might be the thing that can help bloated movies find a bit more direction. So we’d say there’s value in being familiar with structure, even if you choose to shake loose of the traditional three acts.
The important thing to remember is that filmmaking and writing is all about the visuals, as Payne pointed out in another interview. So seeing your story as it plays in your mind could be one way to spot, early on, what needs to be cut.
“If you want to be a film director, you have to learn first to write your own screenplays, at least early in your career,” he said. “And don’t look at screenwriting as ‘writing.’ It’s already filmmaking. You’re not just writing; you’re actually imagining and directing a film in your brain, and a screenplay is the written record of that act of imagination. Sadly, it’s also the hardest part of filmmaking, so at least you get that behind you first.”
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