How Director Sebastian Schipper Shot 'Victoria' in One Exhilarating 138-Minute Take
When it came to last year’s Birdman, audiences marveled at the way the film looked as if it was shot in one extended, near-impossible take? Well the new German thriller Victoria, directed by Sebastian Schipper, one-upped the Oscar champ: Victoria was actually shot in a single take, playing out in real time over an increasingly tense two-plus hours.
The film follows the titular Spanish twentysomething (Laia Costa) living in Berlin whose late night out with a local named Sonne (Frederick Lau) and his three friends turns harrowing when they’re forced into pulling off a bank heist. It’s a slow-burn experience that at first recalls the moonlit meanderings of Before Sunrise but soon morphs into darker, Tarantino-esque territory. And the film’s technical feat, which ultimately took three takes to nail, is something to behold.
Schipper told Yahoo Movies that the idea to shoot it all in one take — there are no cuts, his cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen filmed for 138 minutes straight — came shortly after he daydreamed the idea of making a movie about a bank robbery. “It came from really the urge to do something differently,” said the 47-year-old filmmaker, who has three previous directing credits to his name (Gigantics, A Friend of Mine, and Sometime in August), and has also acted in films like Run, Lola, Run and The English Patient. He called their approach to the film, “organized chaos.”
With a 12-page script that outlined the basic story and its 22 locations, but included minimal dialogue, the actors were left to improvise their way through the film. “I told them what the scene was about, I told them what the character was about, I told them what was going on, and they translated that into their body language, into their facial expressions, and into their language,” Schipper said.
Watch the trailer for ‘Victoria’:
Schipper and his cast and crew rehearsed and shot test footage at the locations for two weeks before attempting the first take, though they never did a dry run through the film’s entire arc. “I thought about a [dress rehearsal], and walking through all the locations at one moment,” Schipper said. “But then I thought, ‘No, let’s not do that.’ Let’s jump in… This is an improvisation… I think there’s a lot of punk-rock attitude to it, and I thought, 'Let’s go.’”
Despite those 22 locations and the fact that the film was centered in urban Berlin (albeit between the times of 4:30 and 6 a.m.), Schipper never acquired municipal permission to shoot nor had stretches of the city blocked off. So many of the people you see in the background are not actors or extras, but regular people. Filming with a Canon EOS C300, Grøvlen shot mostly on foot or crouched in a van, though briefly shot while riding a bike behind the main characters.
Captured in this docuemtary-style verite, Schipper aimed to embrace not only the naturalism of what would unfold but also the imperfections. But with the disappointing first take, the director noted, “Everybody was very controlled. Everybody was very afraid to make mistakes, to mess it up.” The result, as he put it, “wasn’t it a movie. It wasn’t sucking you in.” He reassembled the cast and crew for Take 2 ten days later, telling them, 'Don’t be afraid of mistakes. Don’t be afraid to f–k it up. If that happens, let’s see where it leads to you. You know the beats, you know the scenes. You know where to pick it up again if someone drops the ball.’
“And so the second take became very, very chaotic. All of the sudden it seemed like they felt like they had to invent everything new and bring all kinds of craziness into the film. And by that point I was really devastated because I thought, ‘OK, maybe this is not possible. Maybe this is a brainless idea to shoot a film in one take. How are they ever going to do that?’”
They had 48 hours before they would attempt what would be the third and final take. “I said don’t go over-the-top and prove how crazy you are, but give me all you got, and don’t perform.” And they nailed it. Even a couple mistakes couldn’t diminish it, like when Costa took a wrong turn while driving a van shortly after the robbery, or Lau placed a beer on top of a piano with the label fully in sight (a big no-no for independent films fearing corporate suits) after he wasn’t even supposed to be drinking a real beer in the first place — they had prepped unlabeled, non-alcoholic bottles for him.
Schipper with star Laia Costa at the Berlinale Film Festival (Getty Images)
The next afternoon they gathered to watch the final cut, and Schipper cried. Hard. “Not because I was sad, but because I realized how nerve-wracking that was, and how far we went into unchartered territory. And how scared I was, actually. I had to keep it together… but when I realized we made it, it almost felt like we had made it to the top of the mountain that we wanted to climb, but there were moments when I thought we were going to die, creatively.”
The third time, as they say, is a charm. “If only the first or the second take would’ve existed, and that was the entire project, we wouldn’t be talking right now,” Schipper said. “It would’ve just been interesting experiment.”
Instead it’s becoming an international hit.
Victoria opens today in select theaters.
