Love And The Long Shot
I believe that long shots in action movies are one of the biggest “fuck you”s to Hollywood. I recently rented “Death Sentence” which stars Kevin Bacon and is directed by James Wan (of “Saw” fame, not the shitty sequels.) For those unexposed to the movie, the story takes place around a white-collar family man Nick Hume (Bacon) whose son is murdered during a gang initiation then after retaliation is targeted by the gang. In the middle of the film there’s a scene where Bacon is being chased by the gang through a parking garage and it is all in one continuous shot, and even better it’s one take (no cuts, no CG blending, nada.)
I consider “cinematographer” to be under my film repertoire and whenever I can see a shot like this I can’t help but tip my hat to the director and crew behind it since it shows they really busted their balls and want it to feel real. Side by side, the sequence at the end of “Children of Men” where Clive Owen is going after Chiwetel Ejiofor and the baby, and the sequence in “Bad Boys II” where Marcus and Mike are speeding down the highway going after Haitians, “Children of Men” wins hands down. Granted the two sequences are different beasts but I’ll explain why. It’s a lot simpler to put a camera on a tripod and film two seconds of an explosion then to have a handheld shot spanning over five hundred feet with squibs (artificial gunshots) and explosions and other things that goes for five minutes and covers every possible vantage point. Reason why I give more props to the long shots is because that takes a lot of timing, coordination, and collaboration in order to pull it off right so that the end result leaves the viewer believes he just saw a .50 caliber rip through six people.
But to get into the specifics of the “Death Sentence” shot I’ll explain the effort. It starts out with Bacon entering a parking garage and moving up floor by floor to the top where his car is while the gang targeting him is pursuing him. Now on paper you might think one camera operator follows around him but you’d be wrong. Instead of having one man rock a Steadicam and go only inside the garage it is passed around like an Olympic torch. It starts with one man in the hallway then he passes it on to a man on the next level near a gap between two levels (where Bacon is climbing through), to a man sitting on a crane/platform (so the view is now outside the parking garage by a good few feet) which lowers down to the first level where the gang is. The man then passes it off to another operator who goes in closer to the gang, backs onto another elevated platform to go up two floors to where Bacon is running and after that it’s all on that guy. My explanation sucks a bit, I’ll admit, but if you watch the clip you’ll get it.
TOP FIVE LONG TAKES
- . “Children of Men” - Theo’s pursuit of Luke and the baby. (Clip)
- “Panic Room” - Dubbed as “The Big Shot”, a floor by floor survey of the house’s three floors as its being broken into. (Clip)
- “Touch of Evil” - The opening shot going from the rooftop looking down on a parking lot, to past the US/Mexican border several blocks away. This was in the late ’50s. (Clip)
- “Children of Men” - Where Theo and everyone in the car is attacked.
- “Rope” - A Hitchcock movie, the whole thing is one continuous shot. Done in the late ’40s (Buy the fucking thing)
The whole purpose of the long shots is to show the viewer that no matter where, what and when the setting is there is a reality that lies in the film. It is more cerebral than your typical quick cut from here to here to here to here and only a second has gone by. That’s my time for now. In an unrelated note I’ve enclosed a picture that can only be described as EPIC (a term heavily being overused now but fuck it.) Picture courtesy of my coworker Timmay.
