The amount of time required depends heavily on the standards in the industry that’s doing the shooting and the style of the particular director.
John Ford (The Grapes of Wrath, How Green was my Valley) was a director who preferred to do only one take on each scene, unless something went wrong in a major way during that take, in which case he might do a second. His theory was that the more the actors ran through a particular scene, the more they started doing it by rote and the less natural their performances became. Not surprisingly he could get a move done rather quickly.
In the early days of Hollywood, they completed movies much quicker than they do nowadays. For one thing, there was no danger of websites for people who inspect the final edition for mistakes such as the placement of hair bows. Movies were also generally shorter in the 20’s and 30’s than they are now. One exception to this rule was Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, which took five years to produce.
Movie industries in other countries often have different standards than the American industry does. If I recall correctly, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia was filmed in six days.
I find the latter claim implausible to the point of absurdity. Sam Peckinpah, even in his later nearly incoherent years, was very attentive to production details. The number of location changes in that movie alone would make that implausible.
I don’t recall the movie now but I saw a scene that looked as though it had been reversed into a mirror image. The only reason I noticed it was that the text on an actor’s tee shirt was backwards. Can the physical film be edited “upside-down”? Was this an error or could it have been intentional for “flow”?
This happens a lot. Star Wars has a brief snippet where they reversed the film, and Vader’s chest plate was flipped and the chest pieces on the uniforms were on the wrong side.
There’s a guideline (that isn’t followed very often anymore, unfortunately) called “crossing the line”. For example, it’s where if someone is on the left of frame, looking towards the right at someone, then when shooting the opposing shot, the other person needs to be to the right of frame looking towards the left. It’s a continuity factor that doesn’t look right if not done that way.
Sometimes the opposite shots can take some time to film, perhaps done at the end of a busy day or the next day, after the lights and equipment get moved out of the way. By then the continuity may be confused and shoot from the wrong angle. That’s when flipping the shot may correct that error, but of course potentially introduces other errors like inverted words or hair partings etc.
These days that kind of error is rarer because it can be covered up digitally, or they keep better track with access to instant video playback.
Another way to correct that kind of flipping, especially in an action sequence like a car chase, is to insert a shot of something else entirely, such as a wide of the city, or a close up of the actor, which basically resets all angles to zero again.
In LOTR - Return of the King, the scene on the slopes of Mount Doom with Frodo and Sam (“I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you!”) was a great example of that. One POV was one of the first things and the other one of the last shots they did in principal photography, which lasted about 18 months.
One angle was filmed on a wet weather cover set in a New Zealand squash court, and they meant to do the other angle the next day. However, the weather cleared up, they shot another scene and some time later they moved to another island and just never got around to filming the other half. So the back-and-forth shots you see on screen were filmed about 18 months apart. Of course, this example doesn’t even take pick-up shoots for each film into account, that in the case of Return of the King took place over three years after principal photography.
I’m sure they had to have some good people in charge of continuity.
Sometimes it’s done deliberately, for budgetary reasons.
The first actor is shot on the left looking right. You can see the right side of the set in the background. The second actor is also shot on the left looking right. And then the film is reversed. This is because the set is only half a room. By reversing the shots, they can give the impression of a complete room, with the right side also doubling for the left side. They then have to use techniques like giving the actors costumes with reversed insignia, so that it comes out the right way round when reversed.
This was used sometimes on the original Star Trek, where you sometimes see Kirk’s parting change sides, while the Starfleet insignia remained the right way round.
I read that Mike Leigh always shoots in narrative sequence, so that his actors don’t get ahead in character development. I’ll have to scour imdb to see if this results in continuity errors.
Yes but it can be done very well. For instance in The Sound of Music, there is a the ‘backyard’ of the house. There is a lake which Maria and the kids arrive after the Captain has brought home the Baroness for the first time.
The house that is the background is not near the lake.
So you will see
A shot of the Captain and the Baroness looking out.
A shot of the boat arriving.
A shot of the Captain getting pissed off.
A shot of the boat turning over. (there is a continuity error here)*
But then Maria and the kids, soaking wet come up. There are many shots of the a wet Maria with the lake behind her and with the house behind her.
So when they shot at the house, someone had to drench Julie Andrews for those shots. The shots match. As do the performances from her and Plummer.
It’s hard work making movies.
*The youngest girl couldn’t swim. They put her next to Andrews but Andrews fell backwards and the kid fell forward. Nobody was fishing her out of the water till some set person dove into the shot to save the girl from drowning. When it comes back to the group an older girl is out of place and holding the little girl.
The most extreme example I know of is Mughal-e-Azam, begun in 1947, completed in 1960. The star Madhubala went into declining health during this period and she visibly physically declines and ages during her scenes. Still, it’s considered the all time great Indian romantic movie. It’s like Gone with the Wind combined with Cleopatra and Titanic all in one. When Madhubala started filming, her boyfriend was the male romantic lead. Over the course of filming they broke up and became estranged to each other but still had to make love scenes for the same characters they played when they were in love. Overall sounds like the ultimate nightmare for continuity.
The longest continuous single take I’ve ever seen is the assassination scene in Children of Men.
Do you know the film ‘Russian Ark’? 99 minutes in a continuous single take. It was an absolute nightmare of logistics to film. The DVD version has one of those ‘The making of…’ features which is absolutely fascinating.
I had the privilege of working on a 10-minute film directed by a friend of mine as a trial submission to various film festivals.
Anyway, our Prop person was responsible for continuity. Before each take, she would snap a few digital pictures of the actors and background to have a reference for when we needed to reset.
We had 3 main shooting weekends, but those were spread out over 5 or 6 weeks. We ran into an issue on the final weekend when we got surprised by 8 inches of snow. Unfortunately, the first two weekends we didn’t have any snow on the ground. We spent one whole Saturday removing snow out of a field about 300 feet by 100 feet, plus the road in front of the field, and about 30 feet beyond the road. (The movie took place during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944/1945, and so having a little bit of snow in places was OK, but just not 8 inches worth.)
We filmed one scene where one of the soldiers had a cigarette. We went through nearly two packs of cigarettes filming that scene. Every time we had to retake the scene, she had to make sure the cigarette was the right length, just to make sure we didn’t jump from a short cigarette to a long one. The funny part was that nobody on the set was a regular smoker.
Aside from nonce pieces such as “Russian Ark”, are there major feature films (especially over the last 30 years or so) that were shot on notably short time frames? Any hugely famous, critically-acclaimed piece that was shot in, say, two weeks?
I wonder about a film like “The Incident”, which had very few location changes (IIRC, just one or two). Going from memory, about 90%+ of the action takes place on the same subway car.
Clint Eastwood is pretty well known for being very efficient as a Director. I just checked Gran Torino, and it says filming took 33 days, and was scheduled for 35 days.
I thought I remembered it from Roger Ebert’s ‘Great Movies’ review of Bring me the Head…, but I guess I must have been confusing it with something else.
Pete and Pete shot in five days, totally on location, and further hampered by union rules limiting the overtime of the kids - not that the union reps ever showed up to the wilds of New Jersey.
