Long Takes Quotes

The long takes process doesn't allow for that many takes. In the past I have shot over 50 takes of different shots. Sometimes you end up using take 64, sometimes take four.

I was known for a while for doing very long takes, especially after Atonement.

As I got more confident, I was able to let actors improvise, and do long takes. It's 10%, 5% you learn and experience. The rest you just have or you don't have.

I love to do very long and complicated scenes.

If you've noticed that I don't use long takes, it's not because I don't like them, but because no one gives me the necessary means to treat myself to them. It's more economical to make one image, then this image and then that image, and try to control them later, in the editing studio.

Making movies is time-consuming and it's boring. You spend most of your time waiting between takes. It's like a big machine that moves slowly.

A lot of it is found in the editing room and part of that is due to some of the improvisational tactics we employ on set. Part of it is that the shot goes a little bit long and they end up coming down to fit time.

'The Fugitive Kind,' 'Rope,' 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' - I watched all these as a way of reminding myself that you can do a movie based on a play. You can do a movie that stays in one place for a long stretch.

Hitchcock loved long convoluted shots that contained a lot of tracking and camera moves.

I'm a big fan of being able to hold those long shots and use space. I don't know, I think everything's so quick cut these days, as if films are too afraid that the audience is going to get bored instead of relaxing and trusting their work.

My directing style is long takes. The longer take I can do, the more I can think of not doing it in cuts, the better.

If I can do a scene in one shot, it's in one shot. Most of my shots are pretty long. I think with 'Looking,' what we have in the first minute is a whole episode of a traditional TV show. I like to let things breathe; I like to let things have a certain tone.

You could do a scene that takes 15 hours, but in the movie, it's only 10 minutes. The scene where they put the sauce poisoning in; it took eight hours.

On 'Y Tu Mama Tambien,' we started exploring shots that are longer, where the camera is moving around the actors, and there are no cuts, and you feel like you're there.

I like finding a great shot and then just staying with it for a long time, not trying to pump things up with some kind of artificial energy by cutting.

With 'Call Me by Your Name,' they locked off the camera and let scenes play out in long, wide shots to make them feel almost voyeuristic.

The reason I like tracking shots has to do more with a sense of real time than anything else. In 'Gravity,' the use of tracking - of long extended takes - was partially because we wanted to film it like an IMAX-style Discovery Channel documentary. You don't have the luxury of cuts when you're in space. The camera is there; you're just observing.

I love the way the long scenes feel - one of the characteristics of '70s filmmaking is that you don't cut around a lot; you let things play out. I did that on 'Samurai Jack,' and it carried over into 'Clone Wars.'

That one long scene in the Leftovers I have with David Gulpilil was seven pages long. When we finished it, Mimi Leder said, "I thought you were gonna do this in bits and pieces. You just did the whole thing." And I literally couldn't remember the scene. It wasn't that I was in a trance. I said, "Just keep shooting takes until you see what you want." In 48 years of acting, which is also how long I've been married, that had never happened to me.

I think that's my approach: If it feels right for a scene to be whole, to hold on without cutting for a long time, then that's great. But other scenes, they don't want it.

It's pretty easy in theatre. The comedy's either physical or verbal, and you're looking at the whole frame at once. But TV executives want close-ups. I keep telling them to look at Preston Sturges' movies. He'll do a whole scene without a cut in it, and it's a riot.

With John Wick we wanted to do something like that. So rather than punching, kicks - and for the kind of way we wanted to shoot it, which is longer takes - our initial instinct was let's go with a throwing or grappling arm.