How do you communicate the passage of time in a movie?
You could do it in a single cut.
You could do it in a montage.
But perhaps the most effective is to make the audience experience the
slow passage of time first-hand as the characters do… in a long-take.
Hi everybody, Tyler here. So back in 2019, I was working on a project for a website called
8hours.com where we created a database of video essays on movies and television.
Part of the project was an idea I had to create video essays that were actually
by filmmakers and University Professors. This involved me interviewing people over Zoom, having
them record themselves with their phones, and I would cut up the audio into an essay structure.
One of the coolest interviews I did was with writer/director David Lowery
who was actually working on The Green Knight when I interviewed him.
I loved the movie he made called A Ghost Story following a man who dies and experiences time as
a ghost. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Lowery makes us experience time in a unique way–
traveling backward and forward through great stretches of time alongside experiencing the
weight of real-time, like a scene in which Rooney Mara eats an entire pie in one unbroken take.
I asked Lowery about his use of long-takes to express the feeling of endless time
extending forwards and backward and this is what he said.
Hi, my name is David Lowery, I wrote and directed A Ghost Story. I think the first time I was
exposed to a film that utilized time in a unique and novel way was Gus Van Sant's Gerry. That was
the first time I’d seen a movie that had extremely long takes in which quote/unquote nothing happened
and I remember reading reviews of it when it premiered at Sundance
and people were describing how boring it is and how there were these 15 minute long shots of just
two guys walking through a desert. And so I was a little trepidatious when I went to see it I was
just thinking like, ‘oh, do I really want to go subject myself to what is inevitably going
to be a really boring film?’ and what I saw instead was an incredibly thrilling movie.
It really really made me just sit up straight. It excited me like few films had up to that point
because I was watching a director use time in a way I’d never seen before. The idea that this
movie was boring was shocking to me because it was so clear that everything in there, the way
that duration was utilized was was so intentional and was used to tell a story, and to tell a story
that could only be told cinematically. The thing that makes film different than any other medium
really is the imposition of time. I think music is the only other art form that uses time but film
imposes time on an image and on sounds and when you use long takes, it sort of puts
that imposition front and center and that's what I was seeing in Gerry for the first time.
Do you realize I haven’t kissed you in over an hour?
A Ghost Story is very much about the passage of time and so I wanted that passage to exist for the
audience. I wanted them to experience that passage of time, for that passage of time to become
part of the experience of watching the film itself and so it just made sense to use long
takes. Sometimes that movie moves very quickly, you know, towards the end of the film we move
through centuries in you know a matter of three or four cuts,
but at the beginning, I wanted to really put time front and center and the passage of time
and all that that entails. And that does involve boredom, it does involve tedium, that does involve
the feelings that transpire when you're just sitting still for a long period of time.
But time is very pliable, you know, as we move through our lives day-to-day, we experience time
in different ways. Sometimes it moves very quickly sometimes it moves very slowly and I
wanted the film to encompass all of those things. I think that Gerry functioned very differently.
You know, Gerry was a movie that used time to show a dynamic and to let a dynamic emerge.
And it needed that time for that dynamic to fully catalyze itself, so that the story could reach
the apex that needed to reach. It was all, you know, all those shots in Gerry or most of them
are moving. They're all taking us somewhere and they last for a long time but there is a
clear progression of things happening in them. Sometimes you'll have two characters walking
and the pace at which they're walking and who's walking ahead of the other
says a lot about what is going on in the story in that moment and that is fantastic. I love letting
those types of dynamics emerge over a long period of time but with A Ghost Story, I was
more content to just sit there. When we have those long takes they, you know, there's not a whole lot
going on and there's a whole other school of slow cinema that I was drawing inspiration from there,
but it's definitely very different from what Van Sant was doing in Gerry
even though that it sort of predicates my own interest in that type of storytelling.
I think that when you are shooting a long take, I mean,
really it can change depending on what the content of that take is you know what
you're trying to capture. There's a scene in A Ghost Story where Rooney Mara goes to see
Casey Affleck's body in the morgue and then shortly thereafter
he wakes up and becomes the ghost and that was all done in one take. It was intended to be one take
and that one was a little trickier than others because we have to see the body and wait to
recognize the actor playing that body and then he also has to sit up and become a ghost. And
for that sheet to function in a way that, where you can pull back the sheet, lay it back over the
face again, and then when he sits up, to cover his entire body, that was just like classic special
effects. Like, you just need to figure out how to make that all work in one shot in the same way a
magician would try to pull off a magical trick on stage. You have to figure out how to do it without
breaking the illusion without using a cut and so you have to take those things into consideration.
That's something that is very specific to that one shot and that shot was intended
to be one shot. It was described in the screenplay as a single take
and when Rooney walks out, from the time she walks out to the time that the ghost sits up,
we had a stopwatch there on set we're just saying, ‘okay we're going to let a whole minute go by. We
want a whole minute to go by and he's going to sit up.’ And that was all very intentional, but
on top of that, you have all this business with the bed sheet that could go horribly wrong. So
you have to plan all that stuff out, try to make sure that that's gonna work, so that, I think
we did that probably like five or six times. We really got it working and that shot was originally
quite a bit longer and had a lot more going on. There was a lot more at stake, you know. We had,
I think it was, I think the final shot in the movie is probably like three or four minutes long.
In the original version it was probably five or six and it was, you know, there are a whole lot of
things that could go wrong at any point whether it was getting the dialogue right, getting the timing
write, the bed sheet to work right, getting the ghost performance right the first time, and then,
on the other hand, you have a scene like the pie scene where, once you've set it up it's ready to
go and there's not much that can go wrong in it because all you're doing is capturing reality.
It's much closer to documentary filmmaking in that you're capturing a real moment and that real
moment is going to last as long as it needs to last but it's not documentary filmmaking because
you're also contextualizing the image through cinematic cinematic affectation, so we lit that
scene it was designed a very specific way and we had the camera placed in a very specific way and
all those things were thought out in advance, but once you start recording, you know, hit record,
once the actors are performing, the scene transpires without any sort of input from
me as the director. You just step back and let reality take over, so I think you know that scene
was one of the hardest scenes for me to do in the movie. It was one of the hardest scenes I’ve ever
shot because, as a director, I keep wanting to get in my own way. I keep thinking like, ‘if this gets
boring, let's have the camera on a dolly, so we can do a slow push-in or what if we have the light
do some sort of dramatic change halfway through the scene so all of a sudden she's shrouded in
darkness?’ I kept trying to think of ways to get in my own way and because I was scared,
I was scared of letting time go on for that long and prioritizing time in that scene in such a way.
And in the same way that I was scared of going to see Gerry way back when because I thought I
might get bored, I had that same fear as a filmmaker that I might be boring people
and so I kept looking for ways to make it interesting but ultimately, I knew deep down that
if we just executed the scene as planned, it would be interesting. It would be emotional and so all
I had to do was just get out of my own way, find the best way to shoot the scene. I had to light
it with my cinematographer and then we just step back and let it happen. I think if a filmmaker who
is inspired by the same films that I was inspired by and wants to utilize long takes,
I think that the key is to make sure that there's a reason for it because anybody could just set
up a camera and let it roll for a long time and you're going to have a long take, but the reason
a movie like Gerry isn't boring is because those shots are there for a reason. The reason Tarkovsky
films work or Chantal Akerman's films work is because they're all sustained for a very specific
reason and the movies require that, so they never feel that long when you're watching them.
You understand they're long, you process the fact that these shots are lasting for an unusual
length of time, but they're so appropriate for the film that it doesn't feel that exceptional
while you're watching the movie. It just feels like a natural part of the film-going experience
and so I think the most important thing is to have a film that demands–and not all films
to need it–I haven't made that many movies with long takes because the movies I’ve made
don't really require them, but A Ghost Story was one that needed that, that needed to have that
sort of relationship with time–needed to put time front and center. So it made sense. I’ve loved
these movies for years. I’ve always wanted to make a movie with long takes, but I wasn't going
to do it until I had a movie that needed them, so I think that's probably the most important thing.
8hours.com has been on an extended hiatus since the pandemic began,
but make sure to check out the website, it’s really cool. You can search movies, directors, or
concepts to find videos. I’m hoping it will start up again soon because it’s a really great idea.
And check out the 8hours YouTube channel for more videos with David Lowery
and other fascinating people.
This video was made possible by Black Magic Design. I’ve been working on a series of
one-off videos to go alongside the Apocalypse Now series and Black Magic Design reached out to ask
if I’d like to try their 6K Black Magic Pocket camera. I love it. The picture is incredible
and it is so light and easy to take around and shoot.
It has a Super 35 sensor and takes EF photographic lenses
allowing for a shallower depth of field than the Micro Four-Thirds sensor. The big touchscreen
interface is really sleek and easy to use. And it can record directly onto a solid-state drive.
You can also load custom 3D LUTs onto the camera to get a preview
of what the footage will look like after color correction.
And it comes with DaVinci Resolve,
which was already a beast of a program back when I was using the first pocket camera
and now it’s basically a one-stop-shop for editing, mixing, color, and export.
I’m still working on making the set in my new apartment,
but I’ll do a little tour of my setup once I have everything ready.
Thanks so much for watching and make sure to click the playlist,
so you can watch the other videos we did with David Lowery.