- Orson Welles never forgave Ethan Hawke for demanding that he cut two full reels from The Magnificent Ambersons.
“I don’t know what has happened to movies, but lately every movie is at least 20 minutes too long… It used to be that if you were three hours long it was because it was epic—a movie about Gandhi; something with very important subject matters. Now, it doesn’t matter what you’re making a movie about; everyone thinks their movie is so brilliant that it has to be three hours long. Not to be critical but… well, we all know which movies those are.
Inasmuch as Ethan Hawke once starred in a version of Hamlet that runs eighteen minutes shorter than Twilight: Based upon the Novel ‘Goodnight Moon’ by Stephanie Meyer, we’re going to go ahead and see that he has every right to make the above-quoted claim. (While doing press for Daybreakers, which comes in right at just under 100 minutes, as god and Irving Thalberg intended.) And, holy hell, is he correct to do so.