Films with Longest Production Time

Shot primarily on weekends over the course of four years.

An experimental film by director E. Merhidge, the director worked mainly alone and had to act as uncredited roles in the film.

A stop-motion animation film. Director Christiane Cegavske worked primarily alone.

Filming took place once or twice a year, starting in summer 2002 and ending in October 2013. The cast and crew gathered to film scenes for three or four days annually.

The first segment filmed in 1986, while the final six were completed in 2003.

Due to the minimal length of the script, director David Lynch struggled to finance his debut film.

Filming took place twice a year, once in summer and once in winter. The cast and crew gathered for a few weeks each time, whenever they had gaps in their schedules.

Originally titled The Storyteller, filming began in 2002, with director Andrew Getty constantly starting and stopping the film's production. Getty died in 2015, two years before the film's release with only editing and color correction remaining, leaving editor Michael Luceri to finish the film on his own.

Shot in 24 countries.

Filming took place on and off for a period of seven years, beginning in the autumn of 2000 and was followed by an additional six years worth of post-production.

Howard Hughes' fighting plane film, referenced in The Aviator. A long shooting schedule, made longer when Hughes decided to add sound at the advent of "talkies".

Filming included over 250 hours of footage. Originally planned to be a 30-minute piece for PBS, Hoop Dreams developed into a 170-minute documentary that took three years to edit.

It took six years to make, with huge sabbaticals between shoots due to production problems.

Filmed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, who began work on the film as teenagers, with a cast that mostly consisted of amateur actors.

Howard Hughes' other fighting plane film which was shot between 1949 and 1951.

A documentary film. Director Tony Kaye filmed this documentary over a period of 16 years; he funded it by spending $6 million of his own money.

Works started in 1960 and finished in 1967.

The first portion of the documentary film took place in 2008, while the final portion was shot in 2011.

Filming spanned four years in order to work around the ensemble cast members' schedules.

After production was shutdown by the Polish cultural authorities in 1977, the film's director, Andrzej Zulawski, returned to Poland in 1988 and smuggled the remnants of the film to the Cannes film festival where it was screened for the first time. The missing segments of the film were filled in with shots of modern day Warsaw while Zulawski's voice-over explained which segments were missing.

An adaptation of the Shakespeare play directed by Orson Welles. The total production time stretched from 1948 to 1952.[24] Welles also produced Filming Othello, a documentary about the making of this film, from 1974 to 1978.

Filming began in 1958 and continued until 1964 when lead actress Meena Kumari divorced director Kamal Amrohi. The film was put on hold for nearly six years until fellow actors Nargis and Sunil Dutt convinced Kumari to finish it in the early 1970s.

Animated over seven years using 100,000 hand-made drawings.

Filmed on location in 25 different countries.

The first six years were devoted to recording interviews conducted in 14 different countries.

Work on the film began in 1987 and was finished in 1992.

Disney animated film; production spanned 1951 to 1958.

Work on the film began in 1964 and was finished in 1993.

Work on the script began in 1934, shooting lasted from 1940 to 1944, and the film was finally shown in 1954.

Although the actual production for this documentary began in 2003, Terrence Malick has been filming footage since the 1970s and the film features scenes that were filmed in the 1970s, such as the scene featuring Aboriginal Australians.

Bae Yong-kyun, a professor at Dongguk University in Seoul, spent seven years making this film with one camera and editing it by hand.