One episode of *Mad About You * with Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt was fillmed in one shot, one camera (with a break for commercials, obviously.)
It’s the episode where they’re letting their baby cry herself back to sleep as they sit on the floor outside the bedroom.
Yes! An excellent scene in an excellent movie.
My choice comes from TV: Due South. In the episode “Mounty on the Bounty”–Fraser wants to convince Kowalski to accompany him on a hunt for a Ghost Ship–the Robert McKenzie. The Mountie & the Cop had just had a fight & decided to break up. (Their professional partnership, that is. Although Slashfans can see levels…)
In order to show why he’s incensed that someone’s using the memory of the McKenzie to run a nefarious scam, Fraser tells the story of how the ship was lost on The Lake They Call Superior. With mounting suspense & dramatic music, the Mountie convinces the Cop it’s a worthwhile quest.
Paul Gross wrote the episode. Well, 2 episodes, actually. And he planned to use the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Interviews with survivors convinced him to invent a ship. But the viewer can feel the drama of the true story.
Good call. The slow transformation of his visage from puzzlement to inspiration is delightful.
My nomination goes to Brian Blessed as Augustus in I, Claudius. I won’t go into the plot machinations because it would take all day. Suffice to say that as Augustus lies dying, his wife delivers a speech that, for the first time, reveals to him the true extent of the conniving and manipulation she has performed behind his back. The camera closes in on his face during this time, and you can watch as the full realization of his helplessness sinks in, just before his eyes glaze over completely in death. It’s a long, single shot, lasting for perhaps one or two minutes. But I’ve never witnessed a more convincing depiction of death. Utterly amazing.
Another film with long, intense scenes is Robert Duvall’s The Apostle. Probably not single camera/no edit, but very subtle and powerful nonetheless.
The shot where Bill Murray is filming the Campari commercial in Lost in Translation is amazing. He’s sitting in a chair doing take after take and basically getting laughs by making faces at the camera. That’s the sign of a good actor: holding the viewer’s attention when you’re basically doing nothing.
Children of Men has a number of long action sequences that were filmed in a single take (or what is meant to appear to be a single long take).
Notably:
The car ambush and subsequent chase where Julianne Moore’s character is killed (the car was actually a hugely complex rig that allowed the camera to move in and out among the exterior and interior between passengers)
The getaway from the farm house
Much of the running battle through the 'fugee camp
And of course there is the famous restaurant scene in** Goodfellas ** where Henry and Karen walk through the kitchen and then great everyone.
On re-reading the OP, I’m not sure my examples are what he/she is looking for. However I think they are worth mentioning for the shear complexity of the scenes. And I feel that the unbroken shots in CofM do add a bit of intensity.
Terrence Malick movies (Thin Red Line, The New World) seem to be nothing but long, single shot takes of the actor giving a monlogue (internal or spoken) over very pretty scenery.
That reminds me of a scene from the recent War of the Worlds. I’m sure it isn’t one take but it is made to look like one. It’s the part where after getting out of immediate harms way with the van, Cruise and the kids tear down a highway with stalled cars all over the place. The camera comes in and out of the van and swings away to wide shots and swoops back in the van.
It’s pretty incredible.
Some classic Stanley Kubrick from Full Metal Jacket. The camera follows R Lee Emry for a full minute as he walks around the baracks berating the recruits.
I want to preface this by saying I know nothing about film making, or acting, and I’m not trying to take anything away from any of the aforementioned scenes. I’m not trying to thread-shit, here.
Can somebody explain to me why a long, unbroken, single-shot/single-take scene in a movie would be considered impressive, or a noteworthy accomplishment, when that’s pretty much all stage actors do? I’m sure there are thousands of scenes and/or monologues in plays that are 5 minutes or 15 minutes. I’m sure there are probably hundreds or thousands plays that are entirely one unbroken scene. Why is it a big deal to do a 3-minute one in a film?
Again, I really don’t intend this to sound snarky. I’m purely ignorant on this subject. I’ve always wondered how the Oscar for “Best Editing” is chosen. I don’t even really know what it means, let alone how one could do it better than another. I’ve never watched a movie and said afterward “that was some damn fine editing”.
Heh, that was actually my first thought upon reading the OP as well. The very first scene that came to mind was Kevin Spacey’s roughly 15-20 minute monologue at the end of The Iceman Cometh.
Because it’s not just the actor – it’s the camera crew, and the director, choreographing the entire take. For every person you see in the frame, there are probably three or four people off-stage doing things perfectly. In most stage plays this is not the case.
For example, the scene from Children of Men listed above – the long flight from the building – includes in-place pyrotechnics rigged to a sequencer, rolling tanks that have to be at full speed when they hit their “mark” (and which may need to turn their turrets to track a particular character - I don’t remember), extras who can theoretically mill about convincingly, and more. In that particular scene, the cameraman rehearsed the ten-minute choreography over and over again, including the different zooms and pans he had to do with the camera he was carrying, until he was able to walk the entire scene backwards, filming the actor’s actions, all with perfect timing.
And then the actor had to turn in a perfect performance with all of that occurring around him (as opposed to in a quiet theater with no distractions). Having been on stage many times, I can attest that there’s a good reason they turn down the house lights.
ETA: Here is a DVD extra that explains the technical difficulty of making the long shot work while your actors still nail the scene.
Another distinct difference between stage acting and screen acting is that the stage, even for patrons in the first few rows, provides little more opportunity for closeups than sitting near somebody at a dinner table or across the room in a restaurant. The audience is primarily an “audi-ence” for hearing the words and seeing the big picture of the action.
Movies have conditioned us to watch (without much trouble) the nuances on a face that can be as big as 30’ high. We also have other things to hold our attention beyond the mere words being spoken. Chase scenes, love scenes, sex scenes, scenery, huge panoramas of cities and fields and all sorts of things that seem at least phony in the theater.
To bring down the scope of a movie audience’s attention to some tight close-up or a sustained focus on the same actor or small group of them and to hold that focus for longer than a few seconds is going against conventions established in the silent movie era and carried forward to the present.
In short, it’s different worlds.
Agreed on all counts except one: There are two lines at the beginning of the scene. Secondo asks Christiano, “Are you hungry?” and then say “I’ll do it” (referring to making the omelet). But he speaks very quietly. Perhaps that just strengthens the impression, as most people seem to think of that long shot as having no dialogue. Great film.
I just had to look it up on Youtube to see it again. Even without having watched the rest of the movie again first, it’s amazingly affecting.
Lovely.
Hey - did you guys realize Stanley Tucci is the guy who played Michael Steadman’s arch-rival in early episodes of thirtysomething? He did this wonderful stuff with his hands, just sitting quietly at his desk.
I’m mostly the same way. But watch this clip:
It’s the final shootout from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Watch how you can always tell where all three characters are at all times. There’s a circular area in the middle of a huge graveyard; it’s almost an arena. In the center is the secret to two-hundred-thousand dollars. A long camera shot shows Blondie, Angel Eyes, and Tuco all spread out to the edges of the circle. Then it’s medium shots,from the waist up, each one in turn. Then over-the-shoulder, then faces, then finally close-ups of their hands and eyes. Each has a different holster, and a different sleeve, so you can even tell the characters apart when that’s all you can see. The pace of the cuts speeds up. The music matches the tension. The end is almost too quick to follow, but you can tell who draws first and even which way he’s looking when he does. A gunshot rings out, and we’re instantly back to the long shot of all three, as someone falls into an empty, shallow grave.
That’s the best example I’ve got of how a scene can be shot and edited. From when Clint drops the rock until the gunshot rings out, it’s about four-and-a-half minutes, and absolutely fucking brilliant. It’s even worth watching a second time, after you know what one of the characters knows.
(This is also one of the best examples of the benefits of letterboxing. This movie is usually completely butchered to be shown on TV, in content, story, and composition.)
That horrid, horrid shot is actually a digital composite built from six takes.
I don’t suppose it’s particularly long in contrast to the rest of the scenes posted here, nor is it a particularly vivid example of a master actor practicing his craft, but I’ve always really enjoyed the “ethyl I’m dying” scene from The Royal Tenenbaums.
The 10- or 12-minute opening scene of Bela Tarr’s excellent *Werckmeister Harmonies * (2000) is fantastic. LOTS of other good extended sequences in that movie, too.
In the excellent Japanese film Who’s Camus Anyway? (2005), about a group of Japanese film students, the opening shot is a long sequence in which the students discuss films with long opening sequences. Brilliant.