Why the BBFC watched paint dry for 10 Hours: filmmaker Charlie Lyne explains

Good news: a film that consists of watching paint dry for more than 10.5 hours has been deemed 'suitable for all' by the British Board of Film Classification. 

Charlie Lyne, the British filmmaker behind Paint Drying, shared the classification on Twitter earlier on Tuesday.

Paint Drying has been in the works since November, when Lyne started a Kickstarter campaign to gain funding to make an intentionally boring film as a "protest" against the mandatory classification filmmakers must pay for in order to show their films in cinemas. (You can show an unclassified film in cinemas, but only if you get permission from the local authority first.)

He promises that, contrary to suggestions that illicit content has been spliced in during editing, the film is completely uninterrupted footage of a wall. Lyne also admits that he hasn't watched it fully himself. 

"My central issue with the BBFC is that it has a government mandate," Lyne tells The Telegraph. "I'm not against a ratings board, I think that it's good that people should be able to be informed about what they watch, but it's the fact that if they refuse to rate a film, then that film is effectively banned." 

Lyne's campaign, called Make the Censors Watch Paint Drying, was to cover the costs of the certification: a submission fee of £101.50, and an additional £7.09 for every minute of the film, plus VAT. For most filmmakers, certification costs around £1,000.

Within a month, enough people had contributed to make the film 10 hours and 7 minutes long, after VAT: raising a total of £5,937. 

"I really did think [the campaign] would have limited appeal," says Lyne, "I didn't expect it to have a life outside of the film industry."

The censors can only watch nine hours of footage in one sitting. Two BBFC examiners watched the first nine hours of Paint Drying on January 25, the remaining 67 minutes the next day, after which they delivered their verdict: U certificate. 

The BBFC was founded in 1912 by the film industry to classify films independently of the government. The non-profit organisation, whose main aim is to protect children from inappropriate content and help the public decide what to watch, told US website Mashable that its censors weren't "phased" by watching more than 10 hours of uninterrupted white wall. 

A spokesperson said: "Examiners are required to watch a very wide variety of content every day, so this didn't phase them."

Lyne said: "I kind of expected them to be very professional and treat it like any other film, not draw any more attrention to it. But I did expect criticism from other people - censorship and certification is a subject that people are passionate about on both sides."

The filmmaker said that some people have accused his project of being "pointless", and have said it "won't change anything". But Lyne says that he only wanted to prompt discussion, rather than major change: "It's not like if the BBFC hasn't got to fall to its knees and close the building by the end of the week, it's failed. People are discussing how the BBFC works and that makes it worthwhile."

There has certainly been an increase in awareness around the BBFC: on Tuesday afternoon, the organisation's website crashed after news of the certification was posted on Reddit.

Lyne is currently in discussions with one London cinema about a potential one-off screening of Paint Drying, now that the film has been certified, but nothing has yet been confirmed.