One was given to understand that a feature film must have minimum run time of about 75 minutes, but streaming giants are now changing this format. Movies are being shortened, maybe because the attention span of viewers are getting shorter. Wes Anderson, whose Asteroid City, competed for the Palm d’Or at the recent Cannes Film Festival, has made a movie for Netflix that is just 37 minutes long. It will premiere soon.
Titled The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, it has been adapted from Roald Dahl’s 1977 short story. Anderson has taken one more Dahl story earlier for the screen, Fantastic Mr Fox, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel and Ben Kingsley.
Anderson’s relationship with Dahl began even before he made Mr Fox. He told IndeWire: “In my case it’s a little bit of a weird thing,” Anderson said about partnering with Netflix. “I knew Roald Dahl since before we made ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox.’ I met Lindsay Dahl, his widow, when we were shooting ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ like 20 years ago. For years I wanted to do ‘Henry Sugar.’ They set this story aside for me because I was friends with them. Lindsay kind of handed the torch to Luke, Dahl’s grandson. So I had this waiting for me. But I really couldn’t figure out the approach. I knew what I liked in the story was the writing of it, Dahl’s words. I couldn’t find the answer, and then suddenly I did.
“Suddenly, in essence, there was nowhere else you could do it since Netflix owned it,” Anderson continued. “But beyond it, because it’s a 37-minute movie, it was the perfect place to do it because it’s not really a movie. You know they used to do these BBC things called ‘Play for Today’ directed by people like Steven Frears and John Schlesinger and Alan Clarke. They were one hour programmes or even less. I kind of envisioned something like that.”
“Henry Sugar” will be more akin to Anderson’s 2007 short film “Hotel Chevelier,” a 13-minute prologue to his feature film “The Darjeeling Limited” that starred Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman.
First published in 1977, Dahl’s “Henry Sugar” is a collection of seven short stories. Cumberbatch is playing Henry Sugar, the protagonist of the titular story, which poses the question: “If you could see with your eyes closed… would you use your power for good or for personal gain?” Netflix bought The Roald Dahl Story Company in September 2021.
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