One-shot wonders: From Goodfellas to Guardians, these extraordinary “oners” pack a punch
Directors like Kubrick, Scorsese, and Altman love mind-blowing single-take shots, which can elevate films like Extraction, Creed, and John Wick: Chapter 4
Film Features Roger Deakins
All hail the oner! Moviegoers love great acting, brilliant visual effects, a soaring score, and palpable chemistry between the stars, but few things wow an audience more than the single-take shot, aka, the oner. Great oners can serve several purposes. They can immerse you in an event and let you witness what’s happening all around a character or characters, heightening the stakes in the process, like in the opening scene from The Player (more on that in a moment). Similarly, they can put you in the shoes of a character (or situate you right behind them) so you see exactly what they do, in real time, like Stanley Kubrick tracking Danny’s Big Wheel ride in The Shining (more on that too). It makes the goings-on very, very personal.
The best, most recent oners include the staircase fight from John Wick: Chapter 4 and the corridor fight in Guardians Of The Galaxy, Vol. 3. Indeed, James Gunn knows how to direct action, and he tops himself with the oner in Volume 3, which pits Peter Quill, Gamora, Drax, Rocket, Groot, and the rest of our heroes against some formidable villains in a nonstop, minutes-long, continuous orgy of action, stunts, body horror, comedy, camaraderie, VFX, flying body parts, and spurting fluids. One bit sends the camera through a gaping hole in a baddie’s belly, while another finds Rocket climbing atop Groot, thus recreating a moment from the first film. And the sequence ends with a shot of the whole group, exhausted and in pain, not only having won, but doing so together.
Not surprisingly, that scene required months of preparation that encompassed storyboards, choreography, animatics, stunts … and five days to film. And while it looks like one shot, the sequence is actually comprised of nearly 20 shots, all seamlessly edited and enhanced with CG. Consider: the creatures didn’t exist, stunt performers needed to step in for the stars in key moments, and, well, the five days of filming. Whether all that trickery makes a oner less impressive is up to the viewer to decide. However, there is something special about a very long take, when it’s obviously done without CG enhancements or 21st century technology, that engages the viewer in a deeper way than sensing the dozens of technicians at a North Hollywood post-production house who are making that “oner” look seamless.
Oners are as old as the movies
You could argue that oners started with silent movies. Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 one-reeler The Great Train Robbery comes to mind, although its lengthy takes were more of a necessity than a creative choice. (However, Porter’s use of cross-cutting, which he experimented with in 1903’s The Life Of An American Fireman, were game-changers in the art of film editing.) Among early talking pictures, Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932) features a remarkable cut-free three-minute opening sequence. Orson Welles’ legendary Citizen Kane (1941) includes long takes and oners, as does his Touch Of Evil (1958). Alfred Hitchcock’s famous experiment, 1948’s Rope, where the entire film played as a oner, was actually comprised of four scenes deftly edited to play as 80 uncut minutes. Someone walks in front of the camera? That allowed for a sly cut. Critics at the time mostly dismissed the movie’s plot and considered the oner element more of a gimmick than anything else.
Moving forward in time—and sticking with American films—we can point to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), with its masterful and unnerving Steadicam tracking shot of young Danny riding his Big Wheel around the foreboding Overlook Hotel. The viewer is with Danny, but in this instance, not Danny (we’re seeing/experiencing much of what he’s seeing, but we’re following him). Jumping a decade to 1990 bring us to Goodfellas, in which Martin Scorsese’s camera, over the course of two scintillating minutes, follows Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) and his mighty impressed date, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), as they walk from the street, into the bowels of the Copacabana, and to their table, with Hill glad-handing cronies, greasing the staff, and soaking in the respect of everyone. He has it made, man.
In 1992, Robert Altman reignited his career with The Player, a scathing look at how the sausage is made in Hollywood—and by whom. The eight-minute opening scene drops us into a bustling movie studio where we see peons and movers and shakers alike in action, walking, talking, pitching (The Graduate 2!), crashing, and more. We’re at times on the outside looking in or on the inside looking out. There are insider cameos, references to tracking shots in Touch Of Evil and Absolute Beginners, and, best of all, into view comes the postcard that sets the plot in motion.
We can cite numerous other films boasting great oners—and we’ll include a few foreign favorites here along with other Hollywood titles: Hard Boiled (1992), Oldboy (2003), Atonement (2007), The Adventures Of Tintin (2011), Creed (2015), Spectre (2015), Baby Driver (2017), and Atomic Blonde (2017). Over the course of one insane 10-minute sequence, Atomic Blonde delivers gunfights, hand-to-hand battles, brief respites, and character development. And there are two relatively recent movies, Birdman (2015) and 1917 (2019), directed and shot, respectively, by Alejandro González Iñárritu and Emmanuel Lubezki and Sam Mendes and Roger Deakins. These were filmed in chunks (mostly 10 to 15 minutes), assembled with great craftsmanship and subterfuge, and presented as full-length oners. Not surprisingly, both Iñárritu and Lubezki won Oscars for their efforts.
The oner comes of age thanks to technology
The modern master of the oner is, without question, Alfonso Cuarón. The two-time Best Director Oscar winner has crafted many memorable sequences in his movies. Consider Children Of Men (2006) and Gravity (2013). Children Of Men features 16 shots of 45 seconds or more and two exceptional oners. In one, Clive Owen traverses a war zone. The more famous oner finds Julianne Moore, Clive Owen, Clare-Hope Ashitey, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Pam Ferris driving across a dystopian landscape when they’re ambushed by a large gang. The car moves forward, is banged and shot at, and hightails it backwards. Add to that dozens of extras, explosions, spurting blood, and motorcycle stunts. Amidst all that, Moore’s character takes a bullet to the neck and bleeds out. The production team (which included the aforementioned Lubezki as cinematographer) chopped up a car, installed hinged seats, erected a moving rig, set up mobile cameras. There had to be cuts, but we challenge you to find them.
The Cuarón-Lubezki tandem reunited for Gravity and both deservedly won Oscars for sending moviegoers to space—and leaving them (and poor Sandra Bullock) stranded there. The movie opens with a 17-minute oner that shows us Earth from outer space, presents the crew of a shuttle working on the Hubble telescope, sends debris hurtling at them, ultimately kills George Clooney, and leaves Bullock all alone. Cuarón sought to pay tribute to space documentaries, the cameras of which can’t cut away. To do so, he, Lubezki, and their crew, which included co-editor Mark Sanger, previsualized every aspect, deployed every practical and VFX trick available to them, and invented/improvised solutions as needed. That included a claustrophobic, bulb-laden “lightbox” in which Bullock spent countless hours. As Cuarón told the New York Times, “We wanted to slowly immerse audiences into, first, the environment, to later immerse them into the action, and the ultimate goal of this whole experiment was for audiences to feel as if they’re a third character that is floating with our other two characters in space.” Mission accomplished.
Great oners can pop up in the most unexpected movies. The new Disney+ family adventure Peter Pan & Wendy opens on some family photos in the Darling home, then follows young Wendy up a spiral stairway, then into a bedroom where she engages her brothers in a mock sword fight before making the acquaintance of Peter. To pull off the elaborate three-minute sequence, director David Lowery and director of photography Bojan Bazelli relied on the latest Steadicam innovation, the Steadicam Trinity, and an elevator-like, rotating platform that could follow and maintain the same speed as actress Ever Anderson as she ascended the stairs. But, yes, if you’re wondering, there are cuts since it wasn’t practical or safe to erect a three-level set.
So oners have been a part of movies from the very beginning of the art form. Sure, they’re fancier now, as directors and cinematographers uses motion blurs, stitching points, CGI and plenty of other bits of trickery to sell the illusion that, for instance, Chris Hemsworth is driving, shooting, and fighting his way out of danger during the 12-minute oner in Netflix’s Extraction. But whether the oner is the result of post-production prowess or on-set ingenuity (or, more likely, both), they can still put you inside a movie in a way that very few other visual techniques can. They can elevate a scene or even a whole movie. Indeed, may the wonders (of oners) never cease.
72 Comments
*ctrl+F “Russian Ark”* Bit of an omission.
Some institutional history: https://www.avclub.com/children-of-men-1798218422
I love seeing a reasonable, and intelligently-presented, contrarian take. Even when I end up unconvinced, I feel like my horizons have been expanded at least a little.
Yeah, I also really like how D’Angelo stuck to his guns down in the comments and in a few later articles – he was a really articulate writer who had a lot of brilliant things to say about cinematography on this web site. I pretty much completely disagreed with him about long takes though!
My problem with the film is that Cuaron has a setting completely at odds with the premise he borrowed from the book (which he apparently didn’t read). It didn’t make sense to me when I watched it, and then when I read about the book that seemed more logical.
Wow, people got past his horeshit hackjob of Rope?Fuck this guy.
Plus Swingers.
When I first realized this wasn’t a slideshow, I almost shed a tear.
Right? I was legitimately surprised by that.
No, the article was shot in one long continuous take!
Saaaaaaame.
Someone gonna get fired…
Unless something has changed, slideshows aren’t as effective for advertising anyway. I heard several years ago from a client in the digital marketing space that advertisers with any degree of sophistication were rejecting slideshow-related programs because while you may get a high volume of impressions, the time per impression is obviously far shorter and cumulatively less effective. Someone spending a few minutes reading an article with a single ad visible the whole time is more valuable.
Not movies, but the oners in each season of Daredevil on Netflix were pretty spectacular.
Not movies, but the oners in each season of Daredevil on Netflix were pretty spectacular. There was a making-of thing about that hallway fight (first season of DD I think) – maybe I saw it here on the AVC? Anyway, the coordination and timing of the shoot was incredible: Charlie Cox does a little punching and kicking, gets tossed through a door, and his stunt guy comes out for some more intense punching and kicking. Then back and forth between the two guys (and numerous bad guys) – it was seamless.I mean, you know that Cox didn’t do all the stuntwork, but you couldn’t tell by watching that fight.
Just brutal. All of’em.
Thank you for linking these!
These were all fucking great, as was the Punisher’s prison fight.
I was going to include that, but Punisher’s fight wasn’t a one-take. But in terms of sheer ownage, it may be the greatest thing ever put to film.
Oh right, I forgot. I wasn’t thinking in terms of oners, just in terms of awesome.
Daredevil built a great tradition for itself with these. How many comic book shows can say that?
Also not movies, but the 1-season Quarry from Cinemax had some great oners (i think they did an oner every episode but i might be misrembering)
There was a pretty spectacular hallway fight oner in there, right? Shit. Never mind. *scrolls down after posting
I liked the tracking shot at the opening of The Player mostly because during it, Fred Ward is talking about the tracking shot at the opening of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. (I’m not sure, but I think Altman’s take runs longer than Welles’, because why would you set that up and not beat him by a few seconds?)
I loved that the pageboy or whomever he was mentioned Absolute Beginners, a hard movie to follow but I love the whole look and sound of it. I should get around to reading the book sometime.
And they also mention the Absolute Beginners one. In fact the article above mentions that both are referenced.
Minor quibble: It’s The Adventures of Tintin; the lead character’s name is one word. That aside, this is an enjoyable overview of oners; while I might wish for a few additional (or different) examples to be chosen, it’s still a fine starting point for discussion and exploration.And it makes me happy to see Scarface cited and have it actually be Hawks’s version. Nothing against DePalma, but it does sometimes seem like almost no one on the internet is aware of the original film.
And it makes me happy to see Scarface cited and have it actually be Hawks’s version. Nothing against DePalma, but it does sometimes seem like almost no one on the internet is aware of the original film. Amen. I’m pretty indifferent to the DePalma one, but it bothers me that its existence -and popularity I guess- seems to have negated the fact that it’s a remake. (One that departs wildly from the original, which is a fine thing, but I wish it would send viewers back to the Hawks version.)
I’m having a great time imagining the typical DePalma Scarface fan sitting down to watch a movie from the 30s. It’s like that video with the dudes acting super hard like they’re in a rap video only for the camera to zoom out and show them on roller skates.
When you mentioned DePalma, it brought to mind the Snake Eyes opening scene, which is a pretty long one take shot… I remember that shot being the best, maybe only memorable, part of the movie.
I think long shots like the one in ‘Guardians of the Galaxy 3′ shouldn’t really count in all this because of the extensive CG. So much is replaced in the frame that it becomes less of an balletic achievement and more of the type of film-work possible through computers. Whatever they do in post, it’s never going to match the organic thrill of that trip through the Copa in ‘Goodfellas’, which is – I should add – not only a technical achievement, but is also a narrative illustration, showing how Karen is being seduced by the gilded, seamless life she can have if she accepts the queasy bargain of becoming a gangster’s wife.
No “Boogie Nights?”
The “opening” few minutes of Twelve Angry Men (1957) – that is, the scene after the judge instructs the jury – is an amazing sequence, as the camera slowly moves around the room in a long single shot, focusing briefly on individual characters while you watch the rest of them still milling around and interacting in the background.
Charlie Kelly can command a oner way better than any of these other jabronis.
Wild card, bitches!
Holy shit. An article with several videos that isn’t a slideshow. Are you OK, AV Club?
The “Non Nobis” oner from Brannagh’s Henry V is just magnificent. All these little dramas playing out as Henry crosses the battlefield.
I don’t see any mention of Russian Ark or Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria.
If it helps, I mentioned it as the first comment, but then I’m in the greys.
How did you get out? I’m been permagreyed since the Kinjacalypse.
Or Tom yum goong (The Protector) (2005), which slaps.List is pretty light on any non-American studio releases. Russian Ark is a glaring omission, though, because 1917 or Birdman (or The Revenant or Children of Men, etc.) use digital stitching to achieve the effect. Sokurov literally made a one-shot feature and did it practically.Tilman Büttner, the DP and steadicam op, had to keep his shit together for a 95-minute continuous shot. They did 4 takes, the last of which being the movie.
extraordinary “weiners” pack a punch
Or so you hear.
Oh I do . . . I do.
I saw someone mention Daredevil for TV oners. Any others out there?True Detective is the one that comes to mind for me.
The It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode “Charlie Work” has an absolutely inspired 10 minute long shot.
Yes, there’s a 6-minute tracking shot in the first season that is both logistically impressive and thematically important. I find a lot of oners gratuitous and showy, but this one was justified and superbly executed.
There’s a nice Reverse Goodfellas oner in the opening of S1E4 of The West Wing that can be found here (2:03 to end):
ER did a ton of long-takes.
ER had some really innovative cinematography for network TV. Those long Steadicam shots trailing patients from the ambulance all the way through the ER to the operating room were iconic and like nothing else on TV at the time.
I mentioned it in another comment but Quarry did a oner in every episode.
The Bear had an entire 17 minute episode oner.
The very good Hulu show The Bear did a full 20 minute episode all in one shot titled “Review”. It was a stressful episode made more stressful by the unrelenting take.
Picard sitting in his quarters after taking on all of Sarek’s emotions
Mr Robot did it a few times. One was an entire episode made to look like a single shot. However, there’s a better oner in another episode that’s a scene of an ambush at a hotel in China that’s absolutely nuts.
There’s that episode of The Bear that does it pretty well. The season three premiere of Barry. That one funeral episode of Haunting of Hill House. The last ten years have allowed television to go nuts with oners.
Game of Thrones has a great one in Battle of the Bastards.
Oners lose a lot of their effectiveness when the shot is heavily CGI. The impressive part of a oner is the logistics involved in blocking and shooting. The corridor fight in GOTG3 didn’t impress me at all.
I’ll always praise Joss Whedon’s long take on the opening of Serenity (2005) as one of the best. Yes, it’s over 4 mins long and probably two scenes spliced together- but it’s seamless and holds up to multiple viewings. It gives you the size and scope of an entire lived-in spaceship along with its great cast/cast of characters.
I’d say Touch of Evil is the best all-round, but I just love the Goodfellas one. Just everything about it is a joy.
The second, shorter one from Henry’s POV as the other wiseguys are introduced is a lot of fun as well (esp Jimmy Two Times). Both of them really draw you gradually into their world and make it feel exciting and inviting.
That’s exactly it. You can really understand the attraction to that life, despite all the downsides. Karen tests the water with “What do you do?” and even tests the response with her point about his hands. But once she’s asked twice and he’s come up with a semi-plausible explanation, she feels she’s done her bit and can now just enjoy the ride.
“I’m a union delegate” is an all-time great transparently bullshit answer.
Didn’t The Bear do this in episode 7?
The finale episode of [the only season of] Quarry based on the Max Allan Collins books features a firefight in a Vietnamese village that maybe the longest oner of a TV series.
I can’t beleive you forgot Contact with Jody Foster. It has not one but two awsome onners.The first the opening scene to the movie which is the pullout from Earth to the Galaxy and Beyond:
The next one is Ellie’s Run up to the bathroom medicine chest after finding her dad collapsed on the floor.
PT Anderson is also quite fond of his oners. They’re pretty flashy early in his career like the opening scene of Boogie Nights, but grow more subtle as his career goes on, like Alma observing Reynolds’s team make the dress.
Just came to comment that I, as well, clicked on this being absolutely SURE it was going to be a slideshow. Touché.
Speaking of one-take shots that pack a punch…this fight scene from Tony Jaa’s The Protector is legendary –