Much has been reported about Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” which runs a whopping 3 hours 35 minutes, being screened with a 15-minute intermission.
“It was always scripted, the intermission,” Corbet tells IndieWire. “It’s funny, it’s gotten more attention in a way than we expected it to. I personally have a hard time sitting still for three-and-a-half hours, so I needed it. And it was a public-facing decision.”
If it were up to me, “The Brutalist” would run straight through, without an intermission. It doesn’t help that the first half of the film is much stronger than the second, and the intermission only makes this flaw more glaring.
Last year, there had been reports of some movie theatres inserting an intermission into screenings of Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” This angered Scorsese’s editor Thelma Schoonmaker, calling the insertion of an intermission at some screenings as a “violation,” going as far as to mention that she’s looking into the theaters “who are doing this.”
I’ve never been a fan of intermissions — they could easily disrupt the flow and momentum of a film. ‘The Brutalist” should be seen from beginning to end, uninterrupted. I recently rewatched it via a screener and it works much better that way, its flaws less apparent, and the momentum less shaken.
In a recent interview, Scorsese defended the length of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” saying “People say it’s three hours, but come on, you can sit in front of the TV and watch something for five hours.”
He added, “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.”