Apparently the under water sequence in Harry Potter 4 (the film) took 18 months to finish.
Daniel Radcliffe spent 6 months training for it and 41 hours under water shooting it.
And guess how much of that work made it into the movie?
8 minutes.
18 months of hard work to make 8 minutes of a movie!
That’s a lot of time and effort!
The thing is though… the audience don’t care.
If they don’t like it, they don’t like it.
There is no correlation between the amount of effort put in and the reaction.
Brandishing your time sheets at the audience is not going to convince them to like your movie.
Taking your time to create something you are proud of certainly helps how you feel about the project but the audience don’t watch the movie, then look up the production time and then gauge their reactions off that.
If that were the case then studios would start competing over who can make take the longest to make a movie.
The number of releases would drop to zero as studios become patient and take their time.
Box office sales would no longer be the reported metric it would be production time.
‘Warner Brothers set to break records as they plan to work on a movie for a century!’
For the record I like the under water sequence.
Where I think a filmmaker might invite frustration is when they assume effort guarantees praise.
Thomas Duggan 