The actor who played Mike Teavee’s father in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory had only one line: “Not till you’re twelve, son.” Supposedly, it took him forty takes.
For some shows, one factor is letting actors improvise lines. I can’t link to a specific video off the top of my head, but lots of outtakes reels show an actor giving a dozen completely different lines than the one that made the final cut in a scene.
May be going off-topic with this, but I call bullshit.
There is a shot at the end where Jack N. is carrying his axe in the background, as Danny runs away in the foreground.
“Why am I running away, Mr. Kubrick? Does it have something to do with Mr. Nicholson carrying an axe and looking all scary?”
“No Danny*, he is just going outside to cut down a Christmas Tree! While you play hide and seek with the twins!”
“Why do I keep saying ‘REDRUM’ in a weird voice and writing it all over the place in red ink, Mr. Kubrick?”
“You are playing at being a pirate Danny, and that is what they sometimes chanted before boarding a particularly juicy ship!”
“Why are you telling me to sit and shake for minutes on end, Mr. Kubrick?”
“Why is my mommy in the film, Mrs. Duvall, acting all scared and wanting to push me out of a window into the cold, Mr. Kubrick?”
[You get the idea. *Actor’s name was also Danny, note.]
Either Kubrick was in fact up front with him about what his scenes actually meant and entailed, or he spent the entire film gaslighting the kid that he was in fact making a domestic comedy or something, which in a lot of ways would have been MUCH worse. Either way I call BS.
A few movies in which this was the case include “This Is Spinal Tap” and “Iron Man.”
DVD version of The 40 Year Old Virgin has a whole section on this. One scene that stands out in my mind was a kid reacting to all the condoms Andy had strewn about. Judd Apatow is a director known for letting his actors loose. Kind of a different take on different takes than Kubrick.
One word a filmmaker doesn’t want to see in a review is “stagy”. Unfortunately a word with multiple meanings, but the one I’m referring to is that the film feels like a recording of a stage play.
Long static takes. A lot of the actors all shown together talking to each other. Avoidance of closeup reaction shots. Etc.
Lots of shots from different takes, blended together feels more dynamic. Up to a point.
Note that some action sequences tend to go overboard in the opposite direction, confusing the viewer as where things are moving.
More takes gives more material to weave together.
OTOH, some background extras love to muck things up. E.g., hold a glass in one hand in one take and the other hand in the next. They hope the full take is used, increasing their screen time. Such games might not be noticed during filming so the editor has limited choices.
The aforementioned Timecode felt very stagy to me. Someetimes they barely bother at all shifting from stage to film, e.g., White Oleander.
Call away, but all the players seem to say the same story.
At the opposite extreme is the Mad About You episode: “The Conversation”. It’s 20 minutes of Jamie and Paul talking while they let their new-born cry herself to sleep. One take, one camera.
One Cut of the Dead: a fun movie from a story point of view, an amazing movie from a technical point of view. The first 37 minutes are a single shot with a hand-held camera, but—far from static—an action shot that moves extensively about in the inside and outside of a location. (As opposed to a set.)
(The full movie is on the Internet Archive.)
More impressive IMHO is some fight scenes in Daredevil are done with no cuts. Much harder than two people having a conversation.
Brian
Don’t forget William “One Shot” Beaudine.
Sorry --m skipped to post this and didn’t see he’d already been mentioned.
If you’ve seen his movies, you’ll agree that this is one director who COULD have taken the extra time to do re-shoots. OTOH, he was under severe budget restrictions, I hear.
The expectations of cinema in the silent era and in 2025 are rather different.
One part of this is that filming a conversation over family dining table is possibly one of the highest ratio of how difficult it is:how difficult it looks in all of film production. Family dining rooms are usually extremely cozy for narrative reasons and when you’re having a conversation, you want a lot of different camera angles to capture certain conversation dynamics. A lot of the time, the camera literally needs to be inside of a piece of furniture or a wall to capture an angle so now you need a set on a sound stage where walls can be taken out and every time you move a wall, you need to relight the scene.
You’re also deeply involving the props (items an actor interacts with in a scene like the food) and set dressing (items that actors don’t interact with) that, for complicated reasons, are two different departments and they need to co-ordinate and maintain continuity (ie: you move a China hutch out of the way to get a shot, when you move it back, someone from set dressing needs to look at a reference photo and put all the items back, THEN a different person needs to compare the table to the reference photo and make sure all the drink glasses are filled correctly and any food needs a new version flown in because the existing one suffered some damage).
We’re also willing to forgive a lot when we’re watching aliens battle each other but we’ve all eaten in a family dining room and so we’re extremely attuned to subtle marker of unreality. Making a home feel realistically lived in and meal look like it was realistically cooked by a home cook involves just a lot of different items and making even tiny mistakes can ruin the artistic intent.
Even if every actor does their job perfectly, it’s just a logistical pain in the ass where it’s also guaranteed that, because so many different departments need to perform at a high level, everything can go wrong will, dragging a shoot day into a long day.
That explains why in practically every commercial the whole family is sitting on one side of the table and we are seeing the view the table might see.
This reminded me of a continuity error I noticed (and posted about) in an episode of Cobra Kai. A short conversation with at least three different shadow angles from the shots being filmed at significantly different times near a window.
Noting the shadow angles in a show is a very deep rabbit hole. E.g., Grey’s Anatomy (back when I watched it) had sunbeams coming thru every window at random angles during daytime scenes. E.g., there’d be a sunbeam coming into windows in two bedrooms that are on opposite sides of the house a few moments apart. And the angle of such “sun beams” were quite often the same regardless of time of day. Remember: It’s always sunny in Seattle. (Even at 6am in the winter.)
It’s things like having an analog wall clock in the background that no one bothers to re-adjust (let alone just get rid of) that annoy me.
A few more to add to the list:
John Ford
Steven Soderbergh
Stephen Spielberg
W.S. Van Dyke
Jeff Probst is known as “one take Probst”, or was back in the day on Survivor. He memorizes the challenge directions and gives them in one take live. This makes for better TV and less need to do that annoying and obvious “voice over” description other shows do. Uh, sometimes they do that because he messes up, but usually what you hear live is what he said on set to the players.
I popped in to say the same thing!
Wait, let me do that again. I popped in to say the same thing.
I popped in to say the same thing.
Still rolling? Again. I popped in to say the same thing.
Okay, let me do it more seriously. I popped in to say the same thing.
Doesn’t my character end up smiling in the last shot? What if we get a little hint that that’s my arc? I popped in to say… the same thing!
Whoops, I mean I popped in to say… The. Same. Thing.
Was that it? Did you… hey, director, did you get a feel… okay, here’s straight: I popped in to say the same thing.
Stop it! She snickered, I’m going to do it again. I popped in to say the same thing.
How was that? That was… Hey, did anyone see where the director went?