What Does Steven Spielberg's Average Shot Length Say About His Movies?

Look, I don't think I have to list Steven Spielberg's achievements here to convince you that he's one of the greatest directors of all time. The guy understands how to take a movie to the top of the box office and how to get people to show up. More than anything else, Spielberg understands how to get the audience to engage with a movie.

Often called a manipulator of emotions, Spielberg has always painted with a subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle brush. 

Now, Spielberg's shot length has come under the microscope. How do his movies differ in their shot length, and what does that say about Spielberg and his audience engagement? 

A recent tweet from Vashi Nedomansky went into the details of Spielberg's shot length in some of his movies. Other directors were mentioned in the tweet, and we're going to look at each director individually, but this article obviously focuses on Spielberg. 

So after looking at this tweet, let's focus on Spielberg and take a look at Spielberg's shot length selection based on each of the analyzed movies. 

Credit: Vashi Nedomansky

As you can see, these shot lengths vary based on tone, genre, and even length of the movie overall. His action adventures seem to average almost five seconds shorter shot length than his weighty dramas.

It's safe to say when Spielberg deals with a serious topic like the Holocaust or the Pentagon Papers, he doesn't feel the need to frenetically cut, instead letting emotions linger. He even does the same for a weighty topic like Saving Private Ryan, which you would think might be cut like an action movie, but instead lingers within the human emotion and loss during the mission. 

The movies in the middle are most interesting to me. Jaws, War of the Worlds, and Jurassic Park—all of which actually have stories that blend fast and exciting scenes with scenes of conversations or talking heads. The longer the takes go, the more we see the talking heads with less and less action, except in quick spurts, which may help cut into the shot length. 

Again, Saving Private Ryan might be the outlier here, but I think the tone changes the story. 

What do you think? 

Let me know in the comments. 

Source: Vashi Nedomansky