I love one location movies.
I enjoy seeing what great directors and writers can accomplish when restricting themselves
to telling a story with very few actors and tied to a single place.
Cutting out all the unimportant fat, meandering plot or superfluous dialogue and focusing
it solely on what is necessary.
Stories of characters being stuck in a small place with no way out or unable to trust the
people around them.
And seeing how the tension between them just naturally brings out their best and worst
attributes.
They feel like uncut cinematic plays and elongated short stories that are straight to the point.
A sort of narrative minimalism.
And for the filmmaker, it's a great cost-effective entry point, but behind its apparent simplicity
lies a certain complexity.
A challenge to make something compelling with less than most.
Everything at your disposal carries a larger importance.
The words you use, the space you're in and the meaning behind them.
But when pulled-off exactly right they are great examples of the tenacity and malleability
of storytelling.
Now I have touched upon this a bit on a previous video about creative limits but in this essay,
I want to explore the art of the One Location movie using three examples from films that
I admire.
The first being Alfred Hitchcock's sedentary voyeuristic thriller Rear Window.
The second is the hermetic and dialogue heavy 12 Angry Men.
And the last one is the recent and disorienting The Father, which I feel is a great movie
that many people are still sleeping on or haven't even noticed because the marketing
makes it look like a forgettable dramedy.
Although maybe that was a deliberate attempt to lull you into thinking that the movie wouldn't
be a devastating horror story.
In any case, these movies use three things to a certain degree:
Isolation, a pressure cooker atmosphere, and a mystery box.
If you are a new filmmaker and are thinking about making your first short film, I believe
these examples of how to do a One Location movie could be indispensable to you.
Also, spoilers will follow.
And today's video is kindly sponsored by Surfshark but more on that midway.
[Outdoor sounds] Some of the best One Location movies are able
to create a great sense of isolation.
In Alien we can feel the urgency of the crew being hunted down one by one by a cosmic intruder
as they are left with no way to escape alone on a ship surrounded by the emptiness of space.
But isolation can also be achieved by simply being stuck in an awkward dinner party like
in The Invitation.
An uncomfortable get-together that begins to turn once the hosts politely pressure the
guests into joining a cult.
Apart from having a closed space scenario, you can also create isolation by taking away
elements from the story.
In Locke it is by reducing all external interaction to audio phone calls.
In 12 Angry Men it's by not using flashbacks to present past information.
In Rear Window it's by immobilizing the story's perspective.
In this movie we share in the isolation of the main character, Jeff.
He is an often out in the field photographer that has recently been rendered temporarily
wheelchair-bound after an accident.
Like him, we have no access to the outside world only what he can watch and hear from
a distance.
We never get to see any other rooms in Jeff's apartment only the rear window and the lively
courtyard.
On one night, he notices the increasingly suspicious actions of one of his neighbors.
Alfred Hitchcock constructs a murder mystery only from a single vantage point and through
a proxy.
Jeff's girlfriend Lisa acts as his prime aid to his amateur sleuthing.
Because the perspective is tied down it gives a bigger emphasis to the use of sight in the
movie.
As shown in the beginning first shots.
We start with the main character's POV on the rear window.
Followed by a pan and tilt of the courtyard he shares with his neighbors.
This gives us a sense of texture, sounds, and feel for the location.
It is an extremely limited space but purposely populated.
The camera presents us to the main character, the daily routines of his neighbors (the decorations
and colors informing us on who they are).
The heat wave they are experiencing (explaining why the windows are open).
Then back to the main character, his broken foot, his name.
We get the background of his accident, his career, all this geographic and story context
without any single word being uttered... only through sight.
Even the source of tension is based on sight as well.
"Lisa what are you doing don't go-" Jeff's unique vantage point permits him to
see what is about to happen, but he is unable to do anything to stop it.
The helplessness in the situation is taken advantage of.
He becomes like us just another audience member hoping Lisa will find a way to escape.
But this physical immobility is also used to parallel his personal fears.
This movie is about a murder mystery but also about his relationship with Lisa.
He is allergic to staying in one place for too long and wants to keep exploring the world
as a photographer.
But his relationship with his girlfriend is advancing and he worries to that he will be
restricted by her.
It is because he is forced to stay in one place that he is able to see the importance
of Lisa that in life she is not someone that will tie him down but help him see more.
Isolation can be used to create atmosphere and suspense and in Rear Window it also serves
as a chance for personal growth.
[All protesting] "uh...nobodies hurt..."
A one location movie has the perfect environment to produce a pressure cooker atmosphere.
As mentioned previously, putting a handful of people in a small room for a prolonged
amount of time is naturally going produce moments of dramatic tension even without adding
a supernatural angle or ticking clock scenario.
One of my favorite examples of the past decade is the claustrophobic 10 Cloverfield Lane.
There is a world altering event happening outside a bunker holding three strangers and
yet the best parts of the movie are not about the alien invasion but the boiling tension
between the survivors.
That this seemingly safe place has a danger from within.
But the best example of this has to be in the even more succinct 12 Angry Men.
Twelve people of different ages, backgrounds, social classes and personalities are put in
a small room to convene unanimously on one thing.
To reach a verdict beyond the shadow of a doubt of a person's innocence or guilt.
Now, that's a tall order.
I mean most of us can't even convene on what movie we want to watch with people we know
and here we're talking about deciding over someone's life.
Unlike Rear Window that focused on the use of sight, here the means of creating tension
is by the use of words.
The presentation and dismantling of facts and arguments.
The reason why this is a pressure cooker is because the story is designed as an unbroken
moment happening in real time.
There are no jump cuts, no flashbacks, no side stories, no internal monologues.
All we see and hear (important or otherwise) is externalized in this room.
This uncut moment maintains the tension throughout and is reinvigorated by every new argument.
And yet everything starts off as somewhat polite and reasonable as a quest for facts,
but as things progress, we start learning about more than just the case.
The movie takes into practice that if you want to know someone you should let them talk.
The more they say the closer they get to what they really think.
Their prepared answers disappear, and their unedited side comes to light.
So, as they keep talking, we find out who is more open minded, more complacent, excitable,
and who are really looking for the facts and who are letting their prejudice control their
judgement.
The pressure cooker is used as a narrative tool to let it come out to the surface.
With Juror #10 it comes out in the form of bigotry and for Juror #3 it's a personal issue.
If you notice the true character arc is shown by the main unshakeable antagonist.
He goes from: "Here's what I think, and I have no personal
feelings about this, I just want to talk about facts."
Which sounds reasonable enough.
To the unrestrained: "You all know he's guilty!
He's got to burn!
You're letting slip through our fingers!"
And finally, to a self-realisation: "Not guilty..."
He let his personal experience with his son color his judgment.
By punishing the young defendant, he would be punishing his son.
As the ever-resilient Juror #8 best put it: "Wherever you run into it, prejudice always
obscures the truth."
The one location movie is a perfect place for arguments to run their course.
Where pleasantries fade under pressure and truth will eventually be revealed.
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And now we return to the show.
"Where is Anne?"
"I'm here...I just went down to do some shopping and I'm back now..."
Another interesting method to take advantage of is the ability to create a tightly knit
mystery box.
In The Thing, the mystery is the identity of the shapeshifter that is among the men
in a remote outpost in Antarctica.
In Locke, we start-off with no context to where the main character is driving and why...
so, each phone call gives us answers but also deepens the mystery as to why the driver is
seemingly sabotaging his life.
And like we saw in Rear Window, the mystery is if Jeff's neighbor is a murderer.
So, as you can see there are different ways to play with this element but one of the recent
intriguing ones for me must be the way it's used in The Father.
The mystery box here is the way the story is told.
We start off with the simple premise that the titular father, Anthony is getting older
and increasingly forgetful to the degree that he needs a caretaker.
But Anthony is completely resistant to the idea and assures us that he is fine, and he
can live by himself in his flat.
As the story progresses, we start noticing that everything is far from alright as the
flat he is in keeps changing.
Here the mystery is tied to the main character's perspective and how his reality is shifting.
The importance of the location is even accented in the script:
"In every case, the space is identical.
The d cor is the only indication that we might be in a different place.
The intended aim is to create uncertainty and the impression of being simultaneously
in the same location and somewhere different [...] "
At the start we are in Anthony's tanned colored apartment a few scenes later it's his daughter's
more modern light blue flat.
Later on, even the hospital waiting room has a striking resemblance to the previous locations.
The decorations get mixed up disappearing or appearing in a puzzling manner.
All this to create confusion.
And this continues with the characters as well.
The daughter Anne sometimes looks like the nurse Catherine that we officially meet at
the end.
Anthony's caretaker Laura's appearance seems to be conflated with that of his late daughter
Lucy.
Events and are played out of order.
We don't know what is the present, past or future because it's all jumbled up.
In some cases, even looping scenes without noticing.
It's hard to make sense of everything because that how the main character sees his surroundings.
Dementia has robbed him of his bearings.
The main character starts of from a place of certainty.
"I am not leaving my flat!
I am not leaving my flat!"
To being aware of his confusion.
"...Isn't it?
Tell me Anne this is really my flat?"
The location is a symbol of Anthony's waning identity.
How it's becoming increasingly unrecognizable mirroring how he is losing himself.
When he ultimately reaches the nursing home, he makes a painful realization:
"Who... exactly am I?"
All his bearings are gone.
He is no longer sure of anything not even his own identity
And like him we don't know what is true.
A mystery he must live in as it becomes a reality he can't escape.
A one location movie may seem simple at first but can hold so much possibility.
It can force us to find personal growth, create a much-needed introspection or accept an uncomfortable
reality we prefer to avoid.
A realisation we would not find if we were not stuck in one place.
I think these days it's not too hard to imagine being stuck in one place for a prolonged amount
of time.
I wonder what type of stories that going to produce?
Anyway, next week we will have a recommendation list of ten great One Location movies you
should definitely watch but we also want your opinion.
So, let us know down in the comments what are your favorite selections and why and we
might feature your comment in the video.
Make sure to stay notified for all our future videos leave a like, share with a friend,
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The music was made by Eduardo Gonzalez and if you liked what you heard check his information
down in the description.
See you next time at the Screened Film Club.