Director Alexander Payne thinks movies are too damn long these days.

He didn't mince his words about movies that ran overly long during his appearance at the Middleburg Film Festival to promote his new film, The Holdovers, according to IndieWire.

Alexander Payne's views on the length of movies

“You want your movie to be as short as possible. There are too many damn long movies these days,” Payne said.

Apparently, he's not against any long film; however, “if your movie's three and a half hours at least let it be the shortest possible version of a three-half-hour movie,” he clarified. “Like ‘The Godfather Part II' [and] ‘Seven Samurai' are super tight three-and-a-half hour movies, and they go by like that. So there's no ipso facto judgment about length.”

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“Film is a constant search for economy. You want the screenplay as short as possible. You want the acting as brisk as possible, given whatever the basic rhythm of that film is. And then in the editing, you want it to be as short as it can possibly be, but no shorter,” the director added.

Payne considers himself one of the filmmakers who could improve on the length of films, too. Even his new film, he mentioned that it could've been tightened up a bit regarding the runtime. “It's still a little long. We started screening it, and [at] the first couple festivals I was looking at the program, and it said 133 minutes. I had to call up the studio and go, ‘I don't think it's 133 minutes,” he said. “I thought we had gotten it down to around 124.”

Alexander Payne seems to know what's best, so we'll see how much he can pack into his next movies — whether they run long or not.