Steadicam

And if you're, like, a film buff, a film geek, and you know these points of reference, you know, right off the bat, like, this is like crack to you [laughs] because you're like, "Oh my God, he's shooting an, a, a, a eight-minute long continuous take while his characters discuss the greatest continuous takes [laughs] in film history," right? But the funny thing, though, the funniest joke o- of this all, and I feel like this doesn't get talked about as much as, as just the, the self-referential take part of it, is that the kid that Fred Ward's walking around with, he's, he's conversing with, uh, the studio security head by referencing European films, international films that do the same thing.

He talks about this single Steadicam shot that opens Julian Temple's film Absolute Beginners.

And of course, the American studio security chief, one of the, one of the big guys on campus here at this big Hollywood studio, doesn't know...

He's never heard of Absolute Beginners.

And then Photoshop came along and everything is shot for real.

But I, you know, when you start directing, you can get a little overexcited with Steadicam and cranes and I would imagine nowadays drones and people just, oh wow, I can do this million dollar shot and like do all these whizzy shots and it's actually more mature, can be, to just let the camera sit and let stuff happen through frame.

In the same way, I got overexcited with editing grading i still call it grading in photoshop so i switched over to photoshop pretty early on and i started grading editing grading the photographs and i think too overly dramatic a way I mean, I was already using kind of dark grads to darken the sky, but I started really vignetting and over-lightening the ground, and it didn't need to be so...

And I remember seeing a review of an exhibition of mine in 2005 where somebody said, these are great photographs, but it's like over-edited.

He's the guy who did a lot of Altman movies like Long Goodbye, McCabe and Miss Miller, and Images.

This is five or six years after the invention of the Steadicam.

And there's so much Steadicam in this movie.

And it's beautiful.

plus anamorphic, which I'm 90% sure this is anamorphic.

Yes.

We like that.

And Kubrick understood the mechanics of cinematic claustrophobia.

He used the newly invented Steadicam to follow Danny Torrance on his tricycle through those long, oppressive hallways.

Those sweeping, continuous shots.

Exactly.

I don't think that fallen took it to the level at all the way that you guys did in this movie.

And, uh, maybe it's just because the sheer number of people and the, the spectacle of the, of the sequence, but, uh, I know it's a lotta choreo- choreography with actors and, uh, it seems to me though that with all of the whip pans and all of the, uh, you know, uh, you know, Steadicam movements and here and there and trying to, to pick up those pieces, can you talk a little bit about how you … I- i- Is this a third floor, uh, animatic visualized, previsualized sequence? How, how are you guys, uh, planning all this out? Is it a second unit thing? Were you not even there? How, how did this come together?

That's a good question.

We explored so many ways in which that, trying to figure out what that language was.