More on what is arguably the best made film of the year and one that features some of the most dazzlingly directed (and non-edited) single take shots in the history of cinema:



Taking the Long View

Children of Men and the value of an unedited shot

by Jim Ridley (Village Voice)

January 2nd, 2007 3:16 PM

A car speeds down a forest road, only to be surrounded in an instant by armed crazies who materialize from the nearby woods. In the visual grammar of big-budget action films, the sequence that ensues should be a scattergun barrage of images: Wheels! Guns! Blood! Shriek! Fireball! Crash! Add a soundtrack that amounts to a Dolby clubbing, and this visual shrapnel will come to resemble the excitement that the audience doesn’t feel.

Something different happens, though, when the scene plays out in Children of Men , Alfonso Cuarón’s film version of the P.D. James novel about a near future when infertility has tripped the doomsday clock on man’s extinction. The attack is seen entirely from within the besieged car, and its horrific aftermath is captured in a single brilliant take that shifts with fluid urgency among the terrified passengers. The sequence builds from quiet to chaos without even an eyeblink of a cut to break the flow—action cinema as on-the-spot reporting.

This is filmmaking of swaggering virtuosity, and the long-take bravado Cuarón displays throughout Children of Men—easily the most physically persuasive vision of the future since the rain-soaked noirscape of Blade Runner—has already antagonized some of the visually impaired critics who dismiss Brian De Palma with depressing predictability. But Cuarón believes that audiences so often mugged by montage will respond to the seeming simplicity and realism of a moment captured in a single unbroken shot.

’’Subconsciously, I think something is telling them there is not the safety net of editing— that you’re not hiding behind tricks,’’ says Cuarón, who previously used lengthy takes to anchor Y Tu Mamá También in the class strife and political turmoil of his native Mexico. ’’It’s the easiest thing you can do as a director: get a lot of cameras, shoot a lot of setups, and then hand the whole thing to your editor. But I think that, slowly, more interesting ways of doing cinema are getting into the mainstream.’’

The astonishing single takes in Children of Men—particularly one sustained shot that follows Clive Owen’s cynic-turned-savior high and low through the rubble of an urban war zone—seem likely to tickle movie geeks’ taste buds. But they never become, in the cautionary words of Cuarón’s cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, ’’an Olympics of long takes.’’ In blocks of real time, they convey, as movies rarely do, the sense of existing in a nightmare that can’t be blinked away.

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Went and saw it, and excellent. The girl/mother is awsome. that scene which Faizan mentioned feels real. I did wonder about the blood marks on the screen and I think it added to the grit and rubble. could almost smell the cement. I really enjoyed when the missile hit the tank, it just kind of imploded and shook and then the center of it sank in. usually we have cliche explosions where the screen is covered with yellow orange flames and black smoke with Tom Cruise emerging from it looking shaken but not defeated. In this film you never feel that the good guys are going to be okay. It doesnt give you that safe feeling.

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That is amazing, and perhaps a good illustrationg of how the accidental in any creative endevour is often more believable than the carefully crafted? When watching that scene through the blood splatter I didn’t feel at any point ’’oh how annoying and stylised’’, and maybe that is because it was never actually a planned lure.

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Anyone who has seen this film and was astonished by the miracle that Cuaron worked during the final moments of the film, should read to discover how it was (almost not) done!

Beware, spoilers ahead:



By far the most impressive of these is an amazingly long sequence in which the film’s hero (Clive Owen) navigates his way through a battle between insurgents and government forces while he tries to make his way into a building and rescue a woman and her newborn child - the first baby born in the world in eighteen years.

The timing of the sequence is astounding. It compresses into a single shot as much action as is contained in many entire films, and as impressive as the individual stunts and pyrotechnics are, the thing that truly blows you away is the fact that you’re seeing it all happen in real time, unedited.

National Public Radio has an audio interview with director Alfonso Cuaron, in which he explains how the shot was achieved. The sequence was prepped for twelve days, then shot over the course of two days, but only one complete take was captured on film - and that was nearly ruined when the director yelled ’’Cut!’’

Cuaron explained that he choreographed the action to the inch, but once the camera was running he had to depend on his cameraman and his actor to make the scene work - especially Owen, who had to react believably when things (inevitably) went off cue.

After some aborted takes, time was running out on the location. During the filmming of the final take (the one included in the film) blood was accidentally spit into the lens, prompting Cuaron to call ’’Cut.’’ Fortunately, an explosion covered his voice, and the cameraman continued filming; otherwise, the shot would have had to be abandoned. After the shot was complete, Cuaron mentoined the accidental blood spatter to his crew, who told him it was actually a miracle - un unplanned bit of action that actually improved the shot.

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I just saw the movie last night. Dragged to yet another science fiction film by my sci-fi addict husband, I was prepared to soldier my way through glitzy special effects and endless matrix-like fight sequences. The movie turned out to be one of the best ones I have watched in a long while. I think the camera work makes it absolutely superb, you literally feel at times like you yourelf are bunkered down in that grimy surreal street dodging bullets. I thinky our review of the film was spot on.

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Thanks you changed my mind. I was going to avoid because the trailer was bad.

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I agree. This was a remarkable film - certainly one of the three best I saw all year.

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