They Shoot a Lot of Feet, Don't They?

[The Narrator Returns]

Epic movie: Christopher Nolan uses 2m ft of film for adaptation of The Odyssey...

That’s one million feet less than they shot for Spanglish.

[Never Cursed]

I think when you account for how much larger an IMAX frame is than a 35mm, that actually isn't that crazy, at least compared to other directors who shoot a zillion takes of things. Going off what they say in the article, and assuming this movie will run as close to 3 hours as possible, that's something like a shooting ratio of 30 to 1, right?

[WrathOfAguirre]

That’s one million feet less than they shot for Spanglish.

Whaaat? If this was a trivia question and I had infinite guesses, I'd probably have died of old age before ever getting it right. Why and how is that even possible for a film such as that one? Never really was a huge fan of it, but now I'm a little curious about its making.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Two million feet of IMAX film comes out to around 99 hours, so for a three-hour movie that's 33:1. That would've been higher than average back when everything was shot on film, but compared to modern digital shoots—which typically use multiple cameras that might be recording even between takes—it's nothing. (200:1 isn't out of the ordinary for an action-heavy studio tentpole, and F1 supposedly came in at 2,000:1.) Kubrick's shooting ratio on A Clockwork Orange was around 37:1, and The Shining was 100:1 based on the runtime of the longer cut. To give an idea of how much bigger IMAX stock is than conventional 35mm, that 100:1 shooting ratio on The Shining required "only" 1.3 million feet of film.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

That’s one million feet less than they shot for Spanglish.

Didn't Step Brothers of all movies shoot like a million-and-a-half feet of film?

[beamish14]

That’s one million feet less than they shot for Spanglish.

Whaaat? If this was a trivia question and I had infinite guesses, I'd probably have died of old age before ever getting it right. Why and how is that even possible for a film such as that one? Never really was a huge fan of it, but now I'm a little curious about its making.

Its reported budget of 80 million and the amount of footage shot on that have always made me shake my head in disbelief

[Never Cursed]

That’s one million feet less than they shot for Spanglish.

Didn't Step Brothers of all movies shoot like a million-and-a-half feet of film?

All Adam McKay movies shoot a ton of improv. The assembly cut of Anchorman 2 ran 4.5 hours. My personal hell.

[hearthesilence]

Judd Apatow is known to shoot a lot of film because after a take is more or less done, he'll keep the camera rolling and start tossing out lines, one after another, at the actors, which they then repeat as if they're the new lines for the scene, and they just keep acting the scene. This might be standard now for a lot of mainstream comedies like the ones McKay does - almost all of them come out of stand up comedy and improv (similar to the pool of talent SNL traditionally draws from) and I imagine it plays up to their skills in that regard where they get to riff or try out new jokes or quips, then figure out later which one works best (per taste).

[MichaelB]

In sharp contrast, the shooting ratio on Dekalog was something like 2:1, which was the price that Krzysztof Kieślowski had to pay in order to shoot in 35mm instead of the more usual 16mm for a Polish TV production.

Which in practice means that a huge number of shots would have been single-take efforts.

[hearthesilence]

In sharp contrast, the shooting ratio on Dekalog was something like 2:1, which was the price that Krzysztof Kieślowski had to pay in order to shoot in 35mm instead of the more usual 16mm for a Polish TV production.

Which in practice means that a huge number of shots would have been single-take efforts.

FWIW, when Juliette Binoche was performing at BAM back in 2009, they ran a concurrent retrospective that had several Q&A's with Binoche. She did one for Blue where she stated that Kieślowski preferred to shoot setups in one take - she had to push for two. His initial excuse was to simplify the editing process with less options, but Binoche pointed out that Kieślowski had made most of his films in Cold War Poland and came to the same conclusion - tight resources in that environment would have influenced his work ethic.

Also when shooting for Blue began, Kieślowski apparently rehearsed every scene as many as five times before turning on the camera for a final take. By the end of production, Binoche had convinced Kieślowski to flip that ratio around. (Early on, whenever an unsatisfactory take would fall short of a standard met in rehearsal, she would needle Kieślowski, saying they would have avoided the problem had they filmed their later rehearsals as actual takes.)

Her most striking comments compared Kieślowski's process with those she experienced on Hollywood productions. The latter moved much slower and she described them as stifling, weighed down by the demands of shooting a standard laundry list of set-ups and shots. This was in stark contrast to Kieślowski, who knew exactly what he wanted and filmed only those shots before moving on to the next scene.

[beamish14]

That’s one million feet less than they shot for Spanglish.

Didn't Step Brothers of all movies shoot like a million-and-a-half feet of film?

All Adam McKay movies shoot a ton of improv. The assembly cut of Anchorman 2 ran 4.5 hours. My personal hell.

Him, Paul Feig and Judd Apatow are so incompetent as filmmakers and particularly with their capacity to edit

[brundlefly]

Not the conversation I was expecting when I saw the thread title. (Complimentary.)

[Red Screamer]

He may have been exaggerating a bit, but I remember Barbet Schroeder saying that Rohmer was able to shoot something like 60 minutes of footage for the 55 minute La carrière de Suzanne, a skill for planning that was pretty central in establishing his career & Les Films du Losange as an independent production company.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

He may have been exaggerating a bit, but I remember Barbet Schroeder saying that Rohmer was able to shoot something like 60 minutes of footage for the 55 minute La carrière de Suzanne, a skill for planning that was pretty central in establishing his career & Les Films du Losange as an independent production company.

Nestor Almendros gives similar accounts to Rohmer’s efficiency in Masters of Light. He comments not only in his ability to shoot absolutely what he needed, but to be able to edit a feature film in a week.

[MichaelB]

He may have been exaggerating a bit, but I remember Barbet Schroeder saying that Rohmer was able to shoot something like 60 minutes of footage for the 55 minute La carrière de Suzanne, a skill for planning that was pretty central in establishing his career & Les Films du Losange as an independent production company.

Absolutely, which is why his budgets were tiny - sometimes his crew consisted purely of a cameraman and sound recordist.

I seem to recall someone saying that a typical Rohmer budget in the 1990s was the equivalent of a mere $100,000—which is the price that he had to pay for combining total artistic control with a prolific output. But it was clearly worth paying.

Oh, and I can attest from witnessing him shooting I Hired a Contract Killer that Aki Kaurismäki’s nickname “one-take Aki” is amply justified. And Alma Pöysti, star of the recent Fallen Leaves, said:

It’s also beautiful to work with an old-school director, to work on film, surrounded by a team that has been together for 40 years. We come from the digital world, where you do a hundred takes. With him, you get one. It requires a whole different kind of concentration, because we can’t fuck up. Nobody can. The pressure is on and you get a kick out of it.

Kaurismäki, like Rohmer, also keeps his budgets low and until the mid-2000s he was also very prolific. Same formula.

[Peacock]

Żuławski discusses this in one of his commentaries. That European independent filmmakers would rather shoot lots of coverage and takes but that budgets force them to be incredibly selective… which in turn leads to interesting creative choices. But that this visual creativity arose not from some kind of European superiority but from economical reality.

[WrathOfAguirre]

Not the conversation I was expecting when I saw the thread title. (Complimentary.)

Forum moderation is a lost art (albeit because most forums have died off), but glad it’s alive and well here.

[MichaelB]

Robert Bresson was not a single-take merchant, but for economic reasons he too was restricted in how many he could shoot—particularly after he switched to colour for Une Femme Douce. Like Kieślowski later on, he'd rehearse the hell out of his cast—in his case to remove any inflections from their performances—and would only shoot when he felt he'd reached that stage.

[WrathOfAguirre]

Robert Bresson was not a single-take merchant, but for economic reasons he too was restricted in how many he could shoot—particularly after he switched to colour for Une Femme Douce. Like Kieślowski later on, he'd rehearse the hell out of his cast—in his case to remove any inflections from their performances—and would only shoot when he felt he'd reached that stage.

Bresson’s version of this offshoot thread: They Shoot a Lot of Hands, Don’t They?

[WrathOfAguirre]

I always thought Malick was the gold standard of shooting too much (I recall typically reading anytime I looked up info about The Thin Red Line that “over a million feet of film was shot”), because of his practice of having the crew always at the ready, and to shoot everything.

This thread has readjusted my understanding.

[hearthesilence]

He may have been exaggerating a bit, but I remember Barbet Schroeder saying that Rohmer was able to shoot something like 60 minutes of footage for the 55 minute La carrière de Suzanne, a skill for planning that was pretty central in establishing his career & Les Films du Losange as an independent production company.

Absolutely, which is why his budgets were tiny - sometimes his crew consisted purely of a cameraman and sound recordist.

Nestor Almendros gives similar accounts to Rohmer’s efficiency in Masters of Light. He comments not only in his ability to shoot absolutely what he needed, but to be able to edit a feature film in a week.

Almendros is key. Don't forget he famously shot with available light (either daylight or practical light), so as long as he didn't meet any resistance, any production he filmed would've been fine with nearly a cinéma vérité documentary crew.

Contrast that to Days of Heaven where much of the crew was pissed because (not unlike what happened on Badlands) they were hostile to methods that didn't abide by standard Hollywood practice. They were much happier with Haskell Wexler who freely used anything on the grip truck but was, to be fair, thoughtful enough to match the look of Almendros's work even though he didn't agree with his methods.

[MichaelB]

Almendros explicitly says in his book that had it been shot in the US rather than Canada, "I could not have been hired".

He also said that Malick actually knew a lot about photography, which Almendros said was surprisingly unusual for a film director.

[hearthesilence]

Absolutely. The commentary on Criterion's Days of Heaven makes this clear - Malick really knew his film stocks and he played close attention to the test results as pretty much everything he learned from that film carried over to his next ones (even though there was the obvious decades-long lag). As the editor Billy Weber said, once he realized "he could get away with murder" after the test results came back, he was unafraid of Almendros methods regardless of how many people would badger him, claiming he wouldn't get enough exposure.

It should be emphasized that digital has also allowed a lot of filmmakers to overshoot, you just don't hear about it because it means a few more hard drives, not tens of thousands of dollars of film being burned off.

[hearthesilence]

Forgot one thing - while a director like Nolan or Apatow will have the clout (and commercial track record) to allow them to shoot that much film, it's a different matter if you're, say, an indie art film with a bond company keeping tabs on you. IIRC, when it was more common for indie films to shoot in 35mm, bond companies weren't shy about stepping in and confronting a director with a cap on how much film they can burn through each day. I think Christopher Doyle said this would happen on any American film he shot, and he would definitely notice given how much he's typically open to shooting. (Another reason why he was a good fit for Wong Kar-wai, who wasn't reluctant to shoot a lot himself.) I'm guessing nowadays, most indie filmmakers just go digital because film is usually considered too much of a headache, from securing financing to dealing with bond companies among many other hassles associated with film. I just saw The Sound of Falling (granted a German production, not an American indie) and the cinematographer said they always wanted the look of film, but they ultimately just shot it in digital and processed everything afterwards to look like film stock to make everything easier for them.

[Matt]

In the features on Criterion's edition of Jacques Audiard's Read My Lips, cinematographer Mathieu Vadepied breaks down in simple language some of the differences between shooting on film and digital. With film, he says, you're locked into a certain look depending on the film stock, the lights, and the processing lab. There's only so much room to move within the limitations you're given. With digital, you can just shoot raw and get any look you want in post.

I would hate to be on the editing team of any film that shot as much footage as some of these mentioned. Logging the footage alone would be a monumental and demoralizing task, let alone trying to sift usable and potential final takes out of all of it.