This week I'm looking at some of the techniques Chris Terrio, Will Beall and Zack Snyder use in the new "Snyder Cut" of JUSTICE LEAGUE.
Look, I love a long super hero movie as much as the next nerd, assuming that it's fun -- which is a big assumption when it comes to the Snyderverse. Bleak, they do in spades. Fun, not so much.
Still, four hours is a lot of anything, except maybe a medley of songs by Stephen Sondheim. He is everything. Happy belated birthday, Stephen!
In any normal circumstance, a studio would insist on a cut shorter than four hours. It's just too much. But given the Snyder superfans, the Ray Fisher revelations and Whedon backlash and also just the pandemic, the Snyder Cut got carte blanche.
Which has meant we get to see the good and the bad of what happens when you do a four hour super hero movie. Like, for instance, you get more exposition. There are definitely a fair number of scenes of people in costumes standing around explaining things at each other. It's the main reason I don't recommend watching the film straight through, in fact; those moments really start to wear thin.
At the same time, the length allows Snyder to take his heroes through much more intricate emotional arcs. Every character in JUSTICE LEAGUE (except Aquaman, for some reason) gets to go on a really full journey over the course of the film, with plenty of time to resist and struggle and not totally learn yet but almost before finally understanding and getting with the program. The length Snyder was allowed to work with meant he didn't need to rush through anything. He could let each journey take as long as it needed and go wherever it wanted.
And in the process he finds all kinds of interesting stuff, particularly in Clark's post-resurrection moments with Lois and his mom, and in Cyborg's relationship with his father.
Again, the movie is entirely unusual in this way. Even if you're Spike Lee or Aaron Sorkin, you probably don't get to turn in a 4 hour script and expect it to be produced.
But even so, for me the patience that Snyder exhibits and the stories that come from it is a good reminder of the great stuff waiting to be discovered in all our work.
There's a famous story about David Lynch directing TWIN PEAKS. The actors would do a scene, and then when they were done Lynch would tell them to do it again, "But slower". Which threw many of them; especially in TV, directors are always worried about scenes moving efficiently. So they'd resist. But Lynch just kept coming back with the same request.
And what they often found was that there was so much more waiting for them in the scene. If you've seen the last season of TWIN PEAKS, you can see lots of examples of this--moments that you can't figure out why they're there, or why they're going so long, but then the longer they go suddenly the more interesting and emotional they become. You still might not now what the hell is going on, but now you feel it in the key of awe instead of frustration.
Writing scripts, we want everything to be breezy and read fast. But what would happen if sometimes in the writing we tried instead to write more, to go slow?
Maybe we'll discover something amazing.
