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Director Steve McQueen defended the run-time of his new four-hour documentary, Occupied City, which covers the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, according to The Independent.
Occupied City, an A24 production, is based on the book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945. The author is Dutch filmmaker and historian Bianca Stigter, McQueen's wife.
McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave, lives in Amsterdam with his family and told PA Media at the London Film Festival that he thought an hour and a half, the average run-time of a film, would do the story a disservice.
“And what the time is, it’s time reflecting on something which, in effect, could have been 24 hours long, could have been 40 hours long,” McQueen said. “And therefore, you have a situation where we did the best we could with what we had in order to translate this urgent and immediate situation which happened over 85 years ago.”
The film takes a look at 130 locations in Amsterdam with connections to the Jewish community before and during the Nazis' occupation of the city.
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Stigter said the the length of the film is a “necessary” ingredient to tell the story. She explained that the film focuses on “an experience that you are wandering through this town in the present, and in the past, for four hours. And if you had made it shorter, you could not get to that point.”
McQueen revealed that the project did not originally start out as an adaptation, but something that looked at past and present footage.
“So they put the two together and narration and images of the present could be the way to do it. So it was one of those things [that] just fell into place,” he added.
The film also hits close to home for the couple. Stigter said that it was a “unique experience” for her, noting that some of the locations were their children's school.
