The long take

Oh, yes, and what's more, because we don't believe in all that papist claptrap... It's quite a tough scene to do because it's all just one shot, basically. I think we do a close-up, but we were trying to do it all in one take. And quite a lot, especially for Graham to remember. He was really good at it. He was really on top form. What do you mean? I could, if I wanted, have sexual intercourse with you... Oh, yes, Harry. ..and by wearing a rubber sheath... I just really like the difference between the interior of the Protestant's house

32:32 · jump to transcript →

It was a joke that we missed out of this, which I always wish we'd put in. When we come over the top, first of all, I was supposed to say to, I said, Jenkins, you go and get the buggers on the left flank, and I'll get the heterosexuals on the other flank. When we did the dialogue scene here, we had explosions going off. We had, I think, because we were trying to do it in one take, we had something like 60 explosions going off in one shot, which is a phenomenal number of explosions.

45:28 · jump to transcript →

Now, this is all one take from the beginning here. It's as long as a piece of film is. I think it's about three and a half minutes. It's just one take right through all the cleaning lady's little poem and then going to Eric and then following Eric and then going out into the street with Eric and following him up the road. It's all one take. It's quite a tour de force. But it didn't teach me nothing, I recall.

1:24:59 · jump to transcript →

Oh, yeah, so now here we are with Joanna. No, this is the other side of her, the public persona. Never guess she was a whore by night, would you? I wonder which she enjoyed best. I have an idea. I think we did about 20 takes of this. I can't remember why. It was a bit awkward. Yeah, it was because you ran it all in one take, I remember.

25:28 · jump to transcript →

Oh, and he fluffed a bit. Yeah. Well, an actor's note has to be in one take. I'm sure he could have done it generally speaking. The end always got a bit undynamic, I remember. Yeah, oh, that's right, because he's got a hand with the gun. Yeah, that's right. There was a problem with the gun. Never mind. Got it in the end. What the hell is this? You think she's that dangerous? It depends on what you discover.

25:57 · jump to transcript →

This is an interesting shot. I remember this is a five or six minute sequence that's all done in one take. And it speaks to the skill and talent of Andy Potts and John Laughlin. They were able to sustain this all in one take. I remember we shot three takes, and I believe this was the first one that Ken used.

1:07:13 · jump to transcript →

John Mackenzie

I had to stick my neck right out to keep this out of the forensic bloke's hands. Here we are in George V's dock, which is now a built-up area full of posh houses. They still keep some of those cranes in there. They're sort of decorative pieces between the houses. They're like bits of sculpture. This sort of scene, I remember, I thought, I've got it. I had a very short day to do all this. And I thought, well, the only way to do this is to do it in one take, one long take.

35:37 · jump to transcript →

John Mackenzie

Some of the clients you mob are out. Working against the clock like this and doing this long, long take, tracking, and keeping it interesting and getting slightly bigger all the time can be, as I say, if it comes off, can be very good, but it's totally the acting that carries it. There's no tricks. You can't cut into a close-up if it goes slightly wrong. At least I didn't have time to do that. They were impeccable, both of them.

36:37 · jump to transcript →

I love this scene. This is day for night, parked out in Malibu. Now we're on a stage. Remember that one, you had that one screening to see how the audience response? And you had in one take so much fake sweat that the audience was like, thought that your character was dying. Remember that? Yeah, that's right. It was like, but wait, I thought we were going to find out the conflict was that...

51:21 · jump to transcript →

He said, oh, he totally got it. Everything gelled, I think, after this night. When we finished it, I remember we started a night shoot. By the time we started shooting, we were done by 12.30. That's right. We finished really early. We had shot everything we could. We would just take one, take two, this way, and we were done by 1 o'clock in the morning. Look, as to you, I'm not going to be somebody like Diane Corda to kegger. This girl was different, man. When we go out, we wouldn't even have to go out, you know? We'd just hang out.

1:10:29 · jump to transcript →

Needless to say, we got out of the way-- For this, yeah. - -when we got to this part. And we only had one take. We had one helicopter to blow up. So all of these angles had to be shot simultaneously... ...and Scheider's reaction there was a very honest reaction. I don't think he expected the explosion to be as loud and as big as it was.

1:44:42 · jump to transcript →

Roger Moore

I suddenly realize when I look at it, and I say, well, that wasn't Martin Grace. That wasn't Bob Simmons. That actually was me. And I realize I did quite a lot. And you don't just do one take. You do it and do it again. I enjoy doing them.

2:07:35 · jump to transcript →

um and um do it all in one take for and and do it as a credit sequence and we're setting up the idea here that this is a very high-end brothel as well obviously yeah and that's kind of conveyed as much by the style that you're using as it is by the appearance of the clientele isn't it yeah correct yeah correct and it it is a brothel not um

2:51 · jump to transcript →

Eleanor Bergstein

rather embarrassed and saying, maybe I should leave. And I said, no, you don't understand. If there isn't a third person here, it's not dirty dancing. Okay, so here is Patrick doing this in one take.

1:29:26 · jump to transcript →

which is actually scripted improvisation, like most of the lines are not what's in the script, and you get one take and you move on. And so I became very good at improvisation, but I think at the time we were filming, I'm going to be very honest, I don't think I would have trusted myself to improvise that much. I was still too young to trust my instrument enough to improvise in scenes. Mac? Yeah, the moonwalk and the Dukes of Hazzard slide. That was it. That was the stuff he got to try.

1:02:51 · jump to transcript →

Barry Levinson

Raymond, just put that down. This whole sequence is one shot and one take.

1:12:11 · jump to transcript →

Watch what happens now in the next few minutes because it's all of our best work. Mark's best work, Tony's best work, our best work. And Dylan was really terrified. Donovan, rather, was really terrified because the sheet of blob going over his face gives you a feeling of being suffocated. It was safe, but you can't do a long take. That stuff being pulled up over his face, that's really his face being stretched. That is not Tony's effect yet.

22:54 · jump to transcript →