One-shot wonder
VICTORIA Director Sebastian Schipper reveals how his single-take thriller was made…
Half-way through our interview with German director Sebastian Schipper, Agenda’s recording device runs out of juice. It is, frankly, a journo’s worst nightmare, though nothing compared to what would have happened had the director’s own equipment conked out while filming Victoria. A Berlin-based thriller about an ill-starred bank job and its bloodily chaotic consequences, witnessed and participated in by its titular heroine-cumgetaway driver (Spain’s Laia Costa), the film was shot, on 27 April 2014, in a single uninterrupted two hour-plus take. So tell us, Sebastian: just how galling would it have been if the hand-held camera so expertly wielded by DoP Sturla Branth Grovlen threw a wobbly?
“I don’t want to think about it,” shudders Schipper, an actor-turned-filmmaker whose credits include a fleeting appearance in Run Lola Run. “If the actors had messed up in minute 120, that would have been horrible. But if the camera had stopped running: well, that would have killed me.” One can only imagine the tension, then, as the third and final run-through got underway in the early hours of the morning. “There were 10 days between the first attempt and the second, then 48 hours between the second and the third,” Schipper remembers. “That was our last shot – literally.”
Kicking off in the late-night club where Costa’s character – a foreigner abroad with a taste for adventure – falls in with a posse of shifty locals, said shot proceeds to follow her through 22 locations that include an underground garage, a speeding car’s interior and the same hotel Matt Damon visited in The Bourne Supremacy. With scarcely a moment to catch their breath, the actors were not required to play their roles so much as live them. “When we began we only had a 12-page outline,” explains the director. “Scripts are overrated. Sometimes the script is seen as a bible with all the answers, and it makes the process of shooting the film dead.”
Comparisons to Birdman are inevitable, though Schipper is wary of Victoria being seen as somehow “purer” for avoiding the technical sleight-of-hand that Alejandro G. Iñárritu used to achieve his single-shot illusion. “It’s fabricating a rivalry that doesn’t exist,” he insists, preferring to view the two films “as part of the same, crazy family.” Nor is he keen to ally his movie with Russian Ark, Alexander Sokurov’s epic 2002 stroll through the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. “Going to a museum and robbing a bank are not the same,” he muses. “Ark was a great achievement, but it was really a different film…” NS
ETA | 29 APRIL Victoria opens later this year.
‘If the actors had messed up in minute 120, that would have been horrible’