Adrien Brody is glad that The Brutalist is long enough for an intermission

Last year, discourse about film runtimes reached a peak (or nadir, depending how you feel about the topic) when Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon clocked in at 206 minutes. For him, that was a slight edit after 2019’s The Irishman came in at 209. But for a segment of the moviegoing audiences, it was too long to sit through in one showing, to the point that at least a handful of cinemas instituted their own intermission, a move that, while probably pleasing to some audiences, is objectively pretty disrespectful to a director that didn’t include an intermission in his film. 

Brady Corbet, director of The Brutalist, made a different decision. Whether the latest Adrien Brody-starring film took a queue from the discourse or not, the 215-minute film will open this weekend at Venice with a 15-minute intermission. Brody told Vanity Fair in a new interview that one of the things he “admire[s] so much” is how The Brutalist’s plot relates to “the journey of a filmmaker trying to achieve a great work, an uncompromising work, in today’s environment—where it is so challenging.” The actor went on to explain that the length of a film—even when that length is really long—is a vital part of the experience. “It’s hard to tell a lifetime in a film. That’s why we have so much episodic content. I think audiences will like the event aspect of this,” Brody said. “It’s very exciting to go see a movie and take a little break in between, and talk a little bit about something, and then it’s a new chapter. You come back in.”

Brody’s point about event cinema is an interesting one, especially in a moment when theater owners are often still struggling to get butts in seats. As recently as the 1960s, 2001: A Space Odyssey and roadshow musicals used an intermission not just for practicality, but to add to the prestige and pageantry of going to the cinema. Sometimes, you gotta give the people what they want—especially if it’s a break in the middle of a historical epic covering 30 years of time.