Long Take 1917 (2019)
Director: Sam Mendes
Year: 2019
Director: Sam Mendes
Country: United Kingdom / United States
Director of Photography: Roger Deakins (ASC, BSC)
Steadicam/Camera Operators: Peter Cavaciuti, Charlie Rizek
Editor: Lee Smith
Production Designer: Dennis Gassner
Camera: ARRI Alexa Mini LF (3 prototype units)
Shot duration: 119 minutes (entire film, ~30 shots edited together)
Longest shot: ~8 min 30 sec
Two British soldiers, Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), are roused from sleep under a tree. An officer gives them an order: to cross no man’s land, the abandoned German lines, and the devastated French countryside, and reach a battalion preparing to launch an assault. The message they carry must stop the attack. 1,600 men will die if the two soldiers don’t arrive in time. From that moment on, the camera never leaves them. Not a single visible cut in 119 minutes. You walk with them, you crawl with them, you run with them. And you can’t look away.
Why This Scene Is a Cult Classic
Talking about a “scene” doesn’t make sense—the entire film is conceived as a single, continuous shot in real time. Mendes made this choice for one simple reason: these two soldiers’ mission is a race against time, and any cut would have offered the viewer an escape that the characters don’t have. By refusing to cut, Mendes denies you the right to catch your breath. Every meter of ground they cover is a meter you cover too. When they crawl over dead horses, you crawl. When they swim through a river full of corpses, you swim. The exhaustion you feel at the end of the film isn’t metaphorical—it’s physical. Real time transforms a war movie into a shared test of endurance.
How They Filmed It
The film consists of about 30 shots edited together with invisible cuts, which Deakins refers to as “blends” in his Blu-ray commentary. The longest take lasted about 8 minutes and 30 seconds. The cuts are masked by scenes in the shadows, sudden movements, transitions through dark spaces, or narrative fades to black. The boldest of these is a fifteen-second black screen when Schofield loses consciousness: when the image returns, it is morning. The character taps his watch—it has stopped. Mendes signals to the viewer that time has jumped forward, while maintaining the illusion of a continuous shot.
Pre-production took nine months. Dennis Gassner, the production designer, built scale models of each set so that Mendes and Deakins could choreograph the camera movements and the actors’ movements in advance. Every trench, every street, and every field had to be exactly the length of the scene; the duration of the dialogue determined the physical distance of the set. Before building the sets, the crew drove stakes into a farm field to mark the trenches and rehearsed with the actors for four months.
Deakins used three prototypes of the ARRI Alexa Mini LF, a large-format camera light enough to be mounted on a stabilizer. Four stabilization systems were tested and selected: the classic Steadicam, the ARRI Trinity (hybrid mechanical/electronic stabilization), the Stabileye (a remote-controlled head with electronic stabilization, used for more than half of the film), and a remote-controlled Mini Libra head for cranes. The team also invented a custom device: a “gyro post” for Peter Cavaciuti, the Steadicam operator, which allowed him to run forward in the trenches with the camera pointed backward, filming the actors from the front while running with his back to them.
The cameras were mounted on and removed from cables, 50-foot Technocrane cranes, motorcycles, 4x4s, and even a drone flying over the water. Cavaciuti and Rizek fell into the trenches several times. There was only one spare camera.
The most technically complex scene is Schofield’s final run across the battlefield. Deakins describes it with a smile: “The camera comes down from a 50-foot Technocrane, is carried by hand as it moves backward up the hill, and then placed on another Technocrane mounted on a truck that speeds off. And the camera operators who carried the camera were dressed in soldier’s uniforms; they were paid as extras.”
The shots averaged 20 takes per sequence. The most difficult ones required 50. Mendes described the pressure: “You’re seven minutes away from getting the shot, and someone trips, or mud lands on the lens, or a pyrotechnic effect goes wrong. The performance can be perfect, and everything else can fall apart. And you start all over again.”
Deakins often operated the camera remotely from a van, using a monitor. Lee Smith, the editor, edited in near real time during filming; the previous take had to be perfectly seamless before Mendes would agree to reshoot the next one. Smith summed up the experience: “It was like standing there, completely naked. All my usual armor had been stripped away.”
Outdoor lighting posed a continuity issue: natural light is constantly changing. The crew rehearsed scenes at the same time of day to ensure consistency. For night scenes, massive lighting rigs simulated the flashes of flares and gunfire.
What to Look For When Watching It Again
The day-to-night transition (~1:00). Schofield is knocked out. The screen remains black for fifteen seconds. When the image returns, it’s daytime. Look at his hand: he’s tapping his watch. It has stopped. It’s Mendes telling you that time has jumped forward—the film’s only explicit time jump.
The final race across the battlefield (~1h45) Look for the crew members dressed as soldiers. They just ran in carrying the camera and stayed in the shot. You probably won't be able to spot them—that's the point.
No Man's Land (~20 min) The camera constantly shifts its position relative to the characters: in front, behind, beside, in close-up, in wide shot. Deakins said that this sequence defined the visual language of the rest of the film—the answer to the question, “How do you film a dialogue scene without shot-reverse shot?”
Did you know?
The story is inspired by the accounts of Mendes’s grandfather, Alfred Mendes, who served as a messenger during World War I. He had been chosen for this mission because he was too short to be seen above the fog in no man’s land. Mendes also recounted that his grandfather had retained a lifelong tic—compulsively washing his hands—to remove the mud from the trenches. For the director, this gesture became a symbol of the physical mark that war leaves on the body.
When Deakins read the script and saw the instruction “one shot” on the first page, he thought it was a typo. Lee Smith, the editor, burst out laughing. When Mendes was asked how he decided where to hide the cuts, he replied, “What cuts?” The film grossed $385 million on a budget of $90 million, won the Golden Globe for Best Drama, and earned Deakins his second Oscar for cinematography.
Sources
Roger Deakins, interview with *The Hollywood Reporter* (January 2020)
Sam Mendes & Roger Deakins, CNN Style interview - "'1917': Inside the Making of a One-Shot Masterpiece" (December 2019)
No Film School - "Watch How Roger Deakins Shot 1917 in One Take" (2019)
No Film School - "How 1917 Pulled Off the Illusion of a One-Take War Epic" (2025)
Offscreen - "1917: The 'Hard Work' of the Digital Long Take" (2022)
Filmmakers Academy - "The Look of 1917"
StudioBinder - "1917: One Shot Explained"
Screen Rant - "1917: Every Kind of Shot Used"
CineD - "Inside the Look of 1917 by Director of Photography Roger Deakins"
The Conversation - "Sam Mendes' 1917 — and five other films that really are continuous single takes"
Vanity Fair - The Making of 1917 (Exclusive Behind-the-Scenes Footage)
See also:
"Adolescence" (2025) Long Take https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/adolescence - The Netflix series that took the challenge of a single continuous shot per episode to the extreme, six years after *1917*
Why the Length of a Long Take Changes Everything https://www.plan-sequences.com/blog-plan-sequences/pourquoi-la-dure-d-un-plan-sequence-change-tout - What 119 Minutes Without a Cut Do to the Viewer's Brain, and Why Physical Fatigue Is a Narrative Choice
