The ‘When Harry Met Sally’ sequence that Rob Reiner shot 60 times: “The scene was like four pages long”
Rob Reiner was a gift to cinema, creating countless movies that have endured as beloved classics, from the coming-of-age tear-jerker Stand By Me to the beloved family fantasy favourite, The Princess Bride, but one of his greatest works had to be When Harry Met Sally, the best romantic comedy of all time.
It’s a film that spans time, beginning in the late 1970s when the titular pair, played brilliantly by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, meet following their college graduations, where their first encounter sees them sharing a car. However, this cooped-up environment, with only each other for company, proves to be somewhat of a nightmare as they find themselves clashing over topics like men and women being friends.
Over the coming years, they bump into each other several times until they eventually form a friendship which is filled with understanding and an underlying romantic tension that neither of them act on for far too long, such that you can’t help but love both of them, even when Harry’s being cynical and Sally’s being a little neurotic, rooting for them to finally give into what they’ve known all along: they belong together.
Equally heartfelt and hilarious, Nora Ephron’s script was perfectly brought to life by Reiner, and his real-life romance with Michele Singer, whom he met while making the film, influenced the movie’s narrative, but instead of having the pair go their separate ways, he made sure that Harry and Sally got their happy ending.
It’s such an incredibly cosy movie, especially a perfect one for the autumn/winter season, and it really does feel like Harry and Sally are real people, which is because there is so much attention to detail poured into the film, like one scene that took Reiner 60 takes to nail. As exhausting as it sounds, it proved to be the only way to perfectly execute the movie’s trickiest shot, making for an unforgettable sequence.
The film contains several scenes in which characters talk on the phone to each other, and while the one where the pair watch Casablanca in their respective beds was pretty easily done with the two scenes just spliced together, the four-way call proved to be much more difficult.
The scene involves Carrie Fisher’s Marie and Bruno Kirby’s Jess in bed together, both using separate phones to talk to Harry and Sally, with all four characters appearing on screen at the same time, a scene Reiner had called “one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done with four actors”.
He continued, “Camera never moves. I had to rig the phone system. Sometimes their cues were not what they were hearing from the guy they were on the phone with. Their cue would be from something that was being said on the other conversation, but it was all intertwined, like a Fugue for Tinhorns. You know, it just kept going.”
It wasn’t easy, but he knew he had to get it just right because he had only one shot that could not be cut, “And the scene was like four pages long. And if anybody blew a line, no good. You had to start all over again. And we did 60 takes”. It paid off, though, because who can forget the iconic scene?
