Long Take from *Climax* (2018)
Year: 2018
Director / Screenwriter / Co-Editor: Gaspar Noé
Country: France / Belgium
Director of Photography: Benoît Debie (SBC - Irréversible, Enter the Void, Spring Breakers, The Beach Bum)
Choreographer: Nina McNeely (Björk, Rihanna—from London)
Edited by Denis Bedlow and Gaspar Noé
Music: Thomas Bangalter (Daft Punk) + compilation: Daft Punk, Aphex Twin, Cerrone, Giorgio Moroder, Erik Satie, Gary Numan, Soft Cell, Kiddy Smile
Camera: short focal length, very wide frame, cropped in post-production to focus on specific dancers
Crane: 30-foot (~10-meter) Supertechno for full-dive shots
Movie runtime: 96 minutes
Key long takes:
The opening dance: ~10 minutes, single shot (16 takes, the last one used)
The second half (Descent into Hell): ~42 continuous minutes without cuts
Script: 5 pages; the rest is 100% improvised by the dancers
Filming: 15 days, in chronological order
Preparation for the dance scene: 2 days (1 day of choreography, 1 day of filming). Only 15 of the 21 dancers were available for rehearsals
Cast: 21 professional dancers (krump, vogue, breakdance, contemporary), almost none of whom have acting experience, except for Sofia Boutella and Souheila Yacoub
Filming location: an abandoned school in the Paris suburbs
Budget: $2.9 million
Inspiration: a voguing ballroom as seen in David LaChapelle’s *Noé + Rize* (2005)
Visual references: Christiane F. (Uli Edel, 1981), Salò (Pasolini, 1975), Un chien andalou (Buñuel, 1929), Possession (Żuławski, 1981)
Cannes 2018: Art Cinema Award (Directors' Fortnight)
An abandoned school in the Paris suburbs. Winter 1996. Twenty-one dancers (krumpers, voguers, breakdancers, contemporary dancers) have just finished a rehearsal. The camera rises above them on a 10-meter crane. The music starts. And for ten minutes, they dance. No cuts. The Supertechno descends, swivels, dives between the dancers, rises in a full俯拍 to reveal the group choreography, then descends again to capture a solo; Kiddy Smile leaves the DJ booth and cuts through the crowd; Romain Guillermic contorts his body as if possessed; Sofia Boutella strings together splits and high kicks with lethal precision, Thea Carla Schott undresses behind a curtain of trembling hands. The camera follows them all, captures them one by one, connects them through continuous movement, and never cuts. Ten minutes of a single take. Sixteen takes to get it right.
Then the sangria arrives. Then the LSD in it. Then the credits at the 46-minute mark. Then the second half of the film: 42 continuous minutes without a cut. The collective trip, the madness, the violence, the screams, the convulsions, the child locked in the electrical room, the pregnant woman hitting her stomach, the dancer setting himself on fire, and the camera still not cutting. Forty-two minutes. No cuts. No script. No safety net.
Why This Scene Is a Cult Classic
When asked how he created the opening scene, Noé replied: "It took between 15 and 16 takes because we hadn't rehearsed. So we started filming, and of course the first 8 or 9 takes were unusable. But we watched them together with the dancers and figured out how to do better on the next one. Then, at the end of the day, we got it right."
That’s the Noé method: no rehearsals, no script, no Plan B. Film, watch, start over; film, watch, start over—until chaos turns into choreography. The script for *Climax* was five pages long. Five. All the dialogue—the confessions, the accusations, the screams, the paranoid rants—is improvised by dancers who have never acted before. Horror Press noted: “It’s impossible not to feel the love and admiration Noé has for this film, given how precise the camera movements are—especially for a film that is nothing but improvisation.”
Springback Magazine described the opening dance sequence as “a perfect party distilled into pure, intoxicating syrup, injected into five intense minutes of vogue and attitude.” Then the second half (the 42 uncut minutes) turns that party into a nightmare. BFI Sight & Sound noted that Debie “lets Noé take the reins in a dizzying, single-take sequence (which, incidentally, seems to go on forever) that makes physiological chaos feel exactly like it must feel.” The absence of cuts in the second half isn’t a technical choice—it’s a sensory one. LSD doesn’t cut. The trip doesn’t stop. You can’t step out of the shot any more than the dancers can step out of the trip.
How They Filmed It
Benoît Debie described the process for the Belgian Society of Cinematographers: "It took us two days to complete this sequence, with an entire day devoted to choreography and rehearsals with the dancers. Choreographer Nina McNeely (who has worked with Björk and Rihanna) came from London to fine-tune the routine, while we rehearsed with a 30-foot Supertechno to find the right camera angles."
The Supertechno (a 10-meter articulated crane) is the main prop in the opening dance. It allows the camera to rise above the dancers in a full bird’s-eye view (revealing the choreographed formations from above), then dive down to ground level to capture a solo, and then rise back up again without any cuts, in a fluid, continuous motion. Noé told THR: “We shot with a short focal length and a very wide frame, then cropped certain parts of the shot in post-production to focus on specific dancers.” The opening shot was therefore reframed afterward; what you see isn’t exactly what the camera captured, but a crop from a much wider shot.
Filming took place over 15 days, in chronological order—a rarity. Noé shot the first half (the rehearsals, the conversations, the party) and then the second half (the trip, the madness, the violence) in sequence. The dancers experienced the story’s progression in real time, which means that the unease you see in the second half isn’t entirely acted: after a week of filming in an abandoned school, with a director yelling, “You’re too mellow—start screaming while you dance,” the fatigue and tension were real.
Debie described the visual references: “We wanted the film to open with something extremely different—an image reminiscent of *Christiane F.*, a drug addict and prostitute—that would then shift to something highly stylized as trance and madness take hold of the characters.” The transition from the first half to the second (from joyful dancing to a nightmare) happens without a visible cut. The colors shift, the lighting changes, the camera turns around (the image is reversed at one point), and suddenly you’re in hell without even realizing you’ve crossed the line.
Total budget: $2.9 million. Producers Edouard Weil and Vincent Maraval initially financed the film with their own money. Noé wanted to make a fast-paced film in the style of Fassbinder: “They told me I had two weeks, but I stretched that to three weeks—15 days in total.”
What to Look For When Watching It Again
The Supertechno from a bird's-eye view (~opening dance, minutes 3–5) The camera rises to 10 meters and reveals the choreographed formations as seen from above. Then it descends again to capture a solo. This vertical movement—the wide shot diving into the details—is the shot’s signature move. It follows the same logic as the crane shot in *Kill Bill* ( the diner seen from above before the massacre), but with dancers instead of yakuza.
The 42 Continuous Minutes (~Second Half) After the credits at the 46-minute mark, the film doesn't cut for 42 minutes. Look for the moment when you realize the camera hasn't cut for a long time—that's about the moment the dancers realize the sangria was spiked. The absence of cuts and the loss of control happen at the same time.
The Inverted Image (~second half) At one point, the image flips. The ceiling is at the bottom, the floor is at the top. You might not notice it right away, and that’s the point. LSD distorts perception. The camera distorts the image. The long take prevents you from using a cut as a reference point to reorient your brain.
Did you know?
Noé found most of his cast himself by scouring Parisian krump battles and voguing ballrooms. Léa Vlamos, a member of the Iconic House of Ninja, invited him to a voguing ballroom. Noé was “mesmerized by the energy and the crowd.” Then he saw David LaChapelle’s *Rize* (2005), the documentary about krumping in Los Angeles, and came up with the idea: “Why not make a disaster movie with dancers?”
*Climax* is Gaspar Noé’s most radical film, and he is a filmmaker whose filmography includes *Irréversible* (2002)—a film edited entirely in reverse, featuring an 11-minute long take of a rape—and *Enter the Void* (2009), shot from the POV of a dead man floating above Tokyo. In this collection, *Climax* joins *Timecode* (2000) and *Victoria* (2015) as films in which the single take is not a moment of bravura but the very format of the film itself. But whereas *Timecode* is an intellectual concept and *Victoria* is a thriller, *Climax* is a sensory trip—a film you don’t watch but experience.
Debie also filmed *Irréversible* for *Noé*—the 11-minute long take in the Rectum Tunnel. The same crew, the same method, the same refusal to cut when everyone else wants it to stop. *Climax* is *Irréversible* in reverse: instead of starting with horror and moving toward beauty, it begins with beauty and descends into horror. Same tool (the single take), same function (to prevent you from looking away), opposite direction.
Sources
Gaspar Noé - The Hollywood Reporter, "Cannes: Gaspar Noé on the Sleazy Paradise of *Climax*" (May 2018)
Gaspar Noé - Wonderland Magazine, "The Master of Provocation on *Climax*" (September 2018)
Benoît Debie - SBC (Belgian Society of Cinematographers), "Benoît Debie on Filming Climax" (2018)
BFI Sight & Sound - "Climax First Look: Gaspar Noé's Dance Demonic" (May 2018)
Springback Magazine - "Gaspar Noé: Climax" (March 2020)
Horror Press - "Climax: Gaspar Noé's Masterpiece of Dance" (June 2025)
The Horror ×2 / Substack - "Start the Dance: Climax (2018)" (detailed analysis)
Wikipedia - Climax (2018 film)
See also:
Long Take from *La La Land* (2016) https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/la-la-land - The other great dance long take in the collection: same crane, same choreography filmed in one continuous shot, but a party that’s still a party
Long Takes and the Psychology of the Viewer https://www.plan-sequences.com/blog-plan-sequences/plan-sequence-psychologie-spectateur - Why 42 Minutes Without a Cut Affect the Brain Like LSD Affects Dancers: The Long Take as a Device for Sensory Disorientation
