For decades (or at least since the formulaic, high-concept ’80s) common Hollywood wisdom has decreed that inciting incidents (i.e., the action or decision that ignites the story tension in a script) need to happen within the first 20 to 25 minutes. What are the most noteworthy films that haven’t done this?
The inciting incident in Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds (i.e., that seagull swooping down and drawing blood from Melanie Daniels‘ forehead) happens at the 53-minute mark. In Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire, the kick-off moment (i.e., the kidnapping of Dakota Fanning‘s Lupita Ramos) doesn’t happen until somewhere between the 45- and 50-minute mark — before that it’s all character shading, character shading, character shading and more character shading. In the film version of Glengarry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin‘s “steak knives” speech comes around…what, the half-hour mark? 35 minutes? In Cristian Mungiu‘s R.M.N., the inciting incident (i.e., the townspeople saying “we don’t want any Sri Lankans working here”) arrives around the 45-minute mark.
Others?