Pacing Scale

Below I've provided a scale of pacing by director from fastest to slowest. It is based mostly on my general estimates of the cut-rates combined with a more subjective value of the overall pacing. It semi-averages across the director's entire career so, for instance, Tony Scott's hyperspeed "Domino" and brisk "Top Gun" are tempered somewhat by "The Hunger." Basically, I am trying to say this isn't an exact science.

I'd also like to mention that I don't consider fast pacing to be an intrinsically good quality nor slow pacing intrinsically bad. I am of the opinion that Bay and Schumacher are awful directors while Hsiao-Hsien and Angelopoulos are genius. Just the same, the pacing should be consistent and fit the aethestic of the film as a whole.

Fastest

Baz Luhrmann
Sergei Eisenstein
John Woo
Michael Bay
Roberto Rodriguez
Luc Besson
Tony Scott
Joel Schumacher
Quentin Tarantino
Tom Tykwer
Oliver Stone
Stephen Spielberg
Martin Scorsese
Tim Burton
Howard Hawks
Alfred Hitchcock
Billy Wilder
Sam Peckinpah
Orson Welles
William Wyler
David Lynch
Francois Traffaut
David Lean
Roman Polanski
Akira Kurosawa
Peter Greenaway
Eric Rohmer
Jean Renoir
Wim Wenders
Kenji Mizoguchi
Jacques Tati
Yasujiro Ozu
Andrei Tarkovski
Tsai Ming-Ling
Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Theo Angelopoulos
Bela Tarr

Slowest