Last night at the Oscars, it was said that the filming of *A Beautiful Mind * was shot in chronological order, which apparently is a rarity in the filming business and very hard to do.
All my knowledge of this industy comes from People Magazine and outside of weather factors, why would it be hard to shoot a film in order?
Shooting in chronological order makes scheduling a nightmare because it means that many more actors than normal must make themselves available for the entire duration of the shoot rather than shooting all their scenes in a compressed time period. Add to this factors like the weather (sometimes integral to certain scenes) or specific light qualities (sometimes available only at certain times of the year) and you have a recipe for a very long shooting schedule with a high risk of running over budget.
If an actor’s appearance is required to change dramatically during the course of the movie (for instance, losing large amounts of weight), then shooting chronologically becomes even more of a problem.
There can also be a loss of momentum when an actor shoots one scene on - say - and then isn’t required for another scene until the following Tuesday.
Not to mention shooting on location. It can costs tens of thousands per day to shoot at a particular location (for say a medium sized TV show or small film). It can be particularly ugly in an urban setting.
So you want to try to shoot all the scenes of a particular location and/or the nearby ones all at the same time if you can.
Here’s a few examples I can think of for filming out of order:
Robin Williams in Kenneth Branagh’s Dead Again appeared in a scene towards the beginning of the film and a second scene nearer the end. According to Branagh on the DVD commentary, Williams was on the set for about 2 or 3 days, filmed his scenes and left. This is much easier than filming one of Williams’s scenes, then filming the rest of the film, then hoping Williams is still available when the time comes to film his other scene, since due to unforeseen delays, you never know when you may get around to filming that second scene.
Ben Affleck recently did this with Kevin Smith in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Affleck appears in two scenes, one at the very beginning and another towards the middle, but according to the DVD commentary, they were both filmed in about a day and a half and then Affleck went home.
The Godfather has some good examples for not filming in order - Brando’s character is there throughout the film, but there are long stretches where we don’t see him: while he’s in the hospital or while Michael is in Italy for example. Instead of making Brando wait while they film all the stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with him, his stuff was likely all filmed around the same time, then off to Italy to film Michael’s scenes or possibly film the scenes with James Caan so his stuff can be wrapped up. (I don’t know the order in which it was filmed, this is just for example.)
Other reasons for shooting a film out of order would be a technical glitch of some kind. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is a good example of this because the shark notoriously took forever to get working, so they filmed whatever they could just to have productive filming days when the shark wasn’t available.
Sometimes there’s a problem with the sound or the lighting and a scene or two needs to be re-shot a few days or weeks later.
Maybe a location isn’t available when you need it, so you film something else that day. Hell, all these technical people and actors are getting paid for being there anyway, might as well make them work.
I was just reading about E.T. and it’s 20th anniversary. That film was shot in sequence, because it was almost all kids, and Spielberg didn’t want them to lose the thread of the story or of their character development. This led to Dee Wallace Stone doing a whole lot of nothing for days at a time; she says that’s when she learned to meditate.
Crunch, I don’t mean to be persnickety, but you chose a poor example.
I own to books on the making of “Jaws”. It was shot in sequence, ROUGHLY. That is to say, the first day of shooting was the morning after the shark attack. They had the shots where the deputy is puking, a few birds circling overhead. ( Yes, they did indeed throw down some bread to draw them in.) They did the early stuff, the town stuff.
They did the attack stuff, as best as they could. The shark was late arriving from Universal, and then didn’t perform on time OR well.
Still, Carl Gottleib the screenwriter does break it down into the basic sections of the story. They did the attacks early on, the town meeting stuff, etc. Then…when they really were out of material, they moved to sea. This is how the story progresses anyway.
There were many days when they sat on the barge out at sea…waiting for the shark to work. And, to not go insane, they’d set up little shots…of the ocean. The sky. The ocean and the sky. A bird OVER the ocean in the sky. Apparently, a lot of this stuff wound up in the movie. Can never have enough B-Roll…
Some films are shot SERIOUSLY out of sequence. The recent film “Spy Kids” shot out all of Antonio Banderas’ shots in two weeks, because he had a previous film job. I mean, EVERY shot they needed of him, they got, even if it meant recreating scenes later with body doubles, or shooting around his angles.
The movie I shot in 1995 called “No Way Home”, with Tim Roth had some of this. Deborah Karr Unger had to be shot out in time to get to Toronto to do " The Game". So, we did what we had to do to get her out in time…
Cartooniverse
I didn’t mean to imply that Jaws was shot seriously out of order, I was just using it as an example of a technical problem that may cause a director to film what he can. Upon re-reading, I can see how it comes off that way though.
So if it’s such a pain to shoot in chronological order, why did they do it in A Beautiful Mind? Who is it better for?
OMG. Tim Roth.
Please tell me more. I LOVE HIM.
Do you have his e-mail or maybe some undies of his?
Actually, this would be an instance where shooting chronologically would make perfect sense. Tom Hanks was on Inside the Actor’s Studio the other night and mentioned that Philadelphia was shot chronologically for just this reason.