The greatest long take in cinema history, according to Quentin Tarantino
The long take is officially back in fashion. We can thank Netflix’s chilling drama Adolescence for that, which successfully used a single shot per episode to convey the horror of a murder committed by a child. But the long take has a long history, one that Quentin Tarantino is all too familiar with.
Perhaps the most impressive one-take project from a technical standpoint is the 2002 Russian movie Russian Ark, directed by Alexander Sokurov. The 96-minute film is one unbroken Steadicam shot, which took place at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, offering viewers an all-encompassing journey through Russian history with the aid of 2,000 actors who had to hit their cues with remarkable precision.
The dream-like, immersive movie was a landmark in cinema history; it took around four years to develop and prepare, but was shot remarkably on December 23rd, 2001, after only three failed attempts across 33 rooms in the dramatic, stunning heritage site. With an almost unreasonable belief in their ability, the team had only booked the location for a single day, making every second count.
Still, this didn’t win favour with the Kill Bill director, who believes a different scene is the very crème de la crème of the one-shot take. Instead, he prefers the 1973 film Paper Moon, which follows a real-life father and daughter, Ryan and Tatum O’Neal, who team up as slick con-artists Moses Pray and Addie Loggins in 1930s Kansas.
Forget Russian history, Tarantino shares that the one-shot form is at its best at the height of emotional vulnerability. In a review of the movie, Tarantino first had to show off his knowledge of the form: “And for all the cinematic virtuousness of some of the other seventies movie brats, especially when compared to Bogdanovich, the single greatest long take of their cinematic collective isn’t any of DePalma’s over hill and under dale Steadicam and crane combinations, or even Scorsese’s magnificent and witty tour through the Copacabana leading up to Henny Youngman in Goodfellas (though that’s pretty spectacular, as is the crane that ends up behind the bucket of blood in Carrie).”
What, then, did Tarantino deem top spot? He went on, “For me, it’s the car mount single take two-shot of Ryan O’Neal’s driving Moses Pray and overall-wearing, shotgun-riding tyke Tatum O’Neal’s Addie Loggins, as they bicker, fight, break up and then, finally, get back together (“I guess we’ll just hafta’ keep on veerin”).”
In the scene Tarantino praises, the father and daughter discuss the particularities of what they will do with the money they have conned their way into. The long take allows for emotions naturally evoked to see their authentic end. The father’s anger rubs off on his child, who incredibly keeps a steely composure as the pair bicker while driving through a stark landscape.
Their dialogue picks up pace as the unlikely duo rage against one another. “You got an excuse for everything!” O’Neal’s character spars with his daughter, who hits back, “Because you blame me for everything!”
The dialogue is charged and furious but finds a neat way to circle back to a solid plan, conjuring up an emotional whirlpool that, for other directors, might take the duration of an entire film to master. Bogdanovich needs only two minutes.
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