There’s already been criticisms about Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” being too long, at almost four hours, but Jodie Foster is saying that it wasn’t long enough (via Variety).
I was thinking of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ — extraordinary movie, three-and-a-half hours long. And I thought, ‘I wonder why they didn’t do it eight hours long,'” Foster said, “to be able to explore all these other people, and give them another perspective. The great thing about limited series is you can have that novelistic idea of going off into tangents and tying them together.
Foster, who recently starred in “True Detective: Night Country,” uses that show as an example of the “beauty of having a limited series” by “expanding” on a story. The gist of Foster’s argument resides in her having wanted more “perspectives” showcased in Scorsese’s retelling of the Osage Nation story.
My view on this is simple. Cinema is an art form and the last thing you want is for stories to be stretched out so that people can view the finished product on a small screen, at home, while glancing on their phones every few minutes.
You can herald the artistic merits of serialized television all you want, but watching a 3-hour drama, without pause, and not having the thought of setting aside committed time to binge-watch it, still makes for a far more satisfying experience.