Long Take 2: Children of Men (2006) - The Battle of Bexhill
Movie Title: Les Fils de l'homme / Children of Men
Year: 2006
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Country: United Kingdom / United States / Japan
Director of Photography(DP): Emmanuel Lubezki (ASC, AMC), nicknamed "Chivo"
Camera operator: George Richmond ( handheld camera)
Focus puller: Jonathan "Chunky" Richmond, George's brother, using a wireless system
VFX (visual effects): Double Negative - seamless digital compositing of shots
VFX Supervisor: Frazer Churchill
Camera: Arricam Lite and Arri 235 (handheld cameras)
Lenses: Zeiss Master Primes
Film: Kodak Vision2 500T 5229 (35 mm)
Duration of the clip: 6 minutes, 18 seconds
Preparation and choreography: 14 days
Duration of each reset: approximately 5 hours
Number of assembled outlets: 5 outlets, in 2 separate locations, connected digitally
Filming locations: the former RAF air base at Upper Heyford (Oxfordshire) and Pinewood Studios
Major cinematic reference: *The Battle of Algiers* (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
Music: Krzysztof Penderecki, Threnody in Memory of the Victims of Hiroshima + John Tavener, Fragments of a Prayer (commissioned for the film, mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly)
Main sources: American Cinematographer (December 2006), BFI (2019), Collider (2023), All The Right Movies (2024)
Theo (Clive Owen) runs through the streets of Bexhill. All around him, it’s war. Refugees are fighting the British army. Bullets whistle past. A tank rolls down the middle of the street. People are screaming, falling, getting back up, and falling again. Theo enters a building, climbs a flight of stairs, crosses through an apartment where a family of refugees is hiding, exits through another door, goes back down, and finds himself outside under fire. He’s looking for Kee and her newborn—the first child born in eighteen years. The camera is glued to him. It doesn’t cut away. It doesn’t pull back. For 6 minutes and 18 seconds, you’re in the combat zone, unprotected, with no editing, and without a moment’s respite. And at one point, blood splatters the lens. No one wipes it off. It stays there for the rest of the take.
Then, suddenly, something unexpected happens. Theo finds Kee and helps her down the stairs with the baby. They step out onto the street. A cry. The cry of an infant—the first these armed men have heard in eighteen years. A British soldier shouts, “Cease fire!” The rifles are lowered. The Fishes bow their heads. The tank’s turret comes to a halt. For a few seconds, in a single take, without a cut, the war stops. Then an explosion reignites it.
Why is this scene a cult classic?
This is the ceasefire scene, and it only works because it's a single take.
Cuarón and Lubezki had a theory: a film about the collapse of humanity should resemble a war documentary, not a science-fiction blockbuster. The long take in Bexhill is the radical culmination of this intention. Six minutes without a cut—that’s six minutes during which the viewer can’t catch their breath. No shot-reverse shot (the classic alternating shot-reverse shot used in dialogue scenes) to frame the action. No slow motion to stylize the explosions. No action music to guide you emotionally. There’s a man running, a camera following him, and chaos all around.
But there’s more at stake here than just immersion. Cuarón structured his long take around a moral twist: for five minutes, you think you’re watching a conventional war scene. And then the baby appears in the frame. The sound of a crying infant echoes across the street. And something impossible happens in modern blockbuster cinema: the guns fall silent. What a cut would have made manipulative—a close-up of the soldier, a reverse shot of the baby, a close-up of the finger releasing the trigger—becomes here a secular miracle, because you experience it in real time, within the same shot as the characters. If Cuarón had cut, you would have had time to think: “OK, they’re pulling the ‘symbolic child’ trick on us.” But here, you’re trapped. You believe it before you have time to doubt it.
Clive Owen summed it up: “In the middle of it all, it’s just me and the camera operator, because we’re doing this very complicated, very precise dance that, when it’s time to shoot, has to look completely random.” Everything seems accidental, improvised, and real, even though every step, every explosion, and every extra is choreographed down to the millimeter .
How They Filmed It
The entire sequence was shothandheld. No Steadicam (a camera stabilized by an articulated harness). Lubezki, for his part, wanted to use one: he had envisioned a mix of 60% Steadicam and 40% handheld for the entire film. On the very first day of shooting, Cuarón said, “Put the Steadicam away.” Lubezki took it out of the truck every morning for weeks. Cuarón sent it back every time. Lubezki eventually admitted that Cuarón was right: “He wanted the film to have balls. And it does.”
George Richmond, the camera operator, carried the Arricam Lite by hand for sixteen weeks of filming. For the Bexhill scene, he had to run, climb stairs, cross rooms, and go back out onto the street, all while keeping Owen in the frame, with his brother Jonathan adjusting the focus remotely via wireless from a hidden position.
It took 14 days to prepare the shot. Each new take required about 5 hours to set everything up again: the sets damaged by the explosions, the positions of dozens of extras, the pyrotechnic effects, and the vehicles. Cuarón, Lubezki, and the crew had nothing to show the studio for several days. Executives from Universal came to the set to understand what was taking so long. Lubezki summed up the pace to *American Cinematographer*: “We thought we were going to do it in three or four days. We ended up doing it in two weeks.”
The final shot is actually a composite of five separate takes, filmed at two different locations (the RAF base at Upper Heyford and Pinewood Studios), digitally stitched together by Double Negative. VFX supervisor Frazer Churchill explained that his job was to “combine multiple takes to create impossibly long shots” and to “create the illusion of continuous camera movement.” The transitions are invisible, hidden in the movements through doorways, in the black walls, and in the smoke from the explosions. But each individual segment remains a true long take shot with a handheld camera, without any special effects or CGI during the take.
And then there’s the blood on the lens. During one of the takes, fake blood from a squib (a pyrotechnic capsule simulating a bullet impact) splattered onto the lens. The instinct would be to cut and start over. Lubezki refused. His straightforward explanation: “The blood landed on the lens. We were going to do another take, but it was getting dark, so we kept it.” Pragmatic. The blood remains on the lens for part of the sequence, and no one wipes it off. It has become one of the most talked-about details in the film, because it breaks a convention as old as cinema itself: the viewer never sees the camera. Here, you see the camera getting dirty. You understand viscerally that it is in the same war zone as the characters. It is not protected. Neither are you.
Cuarón had initially considered using CGI (computer-generated imagery). He had just finished *Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban*, where digital effects had been ubiquitous. Lubezki refused, pointing out that they had chosen to make a film with a documentary-style look. For the car ambush sequence, the cinematographer insisted on a custom-designed mechanical rig created by Gary Thieltges (Doggicam Systems). For Bexhill, it would be purely handheld. No safety net.
Sound is the other element crafted with precision: Cuarón alternates between silence and cacophony (bursts of automatic gunfire, loudspeakers barking out orders). During key scenes, two composers shape the experience: Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Threne in Memory of the Victims of Hiroshima,” dissonant and anguished, accompanies the urban chaos; John Tavener’s *Fragments of a Prayer*, commissioned for the film and sung in Latin, German, and Sanskrit by mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, begins the moment the baby appears. The sonic break mirrors the visual break. The war comes to a halt against a backdrop of sacred music.
What to Look For When You See It Again
The blood on the lens (around the 4-minute mark of the shot). Look for the red splatters on the lens. They remain visible for much of the sequence. It’s the most famous mishap in the history of the modern long take, and it made it into the final cut because Lubezki refused to reshoot the take.
The moment the ceasefire begins (around the 5-minute mark of the scene), Theo and Kee come out of the building with the baby. The newborn is crying. A soldier shouts, “Ceasefire!” All the weapons are lowered. Look at the soldiers’ faces: Cuarón lets the shot last long enough for you to see the shock on each of their faces individually. None of them has seen a baby in 18 years. This is the moral turning point of the entire film, and it’s achieved without a single cut.
The tank in the street (toward the end of the shot) A tank rolls through the center of the frame. Think about the logistics: this vehicle had to arrive at the exact moment in the shot, in the middle of a scene with dozens of extras, pyrotechnics, and a cameraman running with the camera in hand. Each reset took 5 hours. Miss the tank, and you’re back to square one 5 hours later.
Did you know?
The long take in Bexhill is peppered with homages and details that attentive movie buffs often spot on their third viewing:
*The Battle of Algiers* (Pontecorvo, 1966). Cuarón studied the film during pre-production. The same pseudo-documentary style, the same urban chaos, the same refusal to aestheticize violence. Lubezki is explicit: it served as their model for the lighting and cinematography in *Bexhill*.
Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958) A critic from the Chicago Tribune noted that Jasper (Michael Caine) calls Theo “amigo, ” just like Schwartz’s character does in Welles’ opening long take. A subtle nod hidden in seemingly innocuous dialogue.
The Godfather (Coppola, 1972) Cuarón borrows Gordon Willis’s visual motif of oranges = imminent death. Before the ambush in the car, Miriam eats an orange. Before the battle of Bexhill, Kee and Marichka eat oranges. You’ve been warned: someone is going to die.
The London 2012 Sweatshirt Owen wears a sweatshirt featuring the London 2012 Games logo in the Bexhill scene. This detail was added in 2005, six years before the Games, when London had just won the bid. The sweatshirts have become collector's items.
A Dynasty of Cinematographers: The Richmond brothers (George on camera, Jonathan handling focus) are the sons of Anthony B. Richmond (ASC, BSC), a seasoned cinematographer. George has since filmed *Kingsman* and *Kingsman: The Golden Circle*, two more masterful showcases for action long takes.
The Lubezki Effect The film earned Emmanuel Lubezki his first Oscar nomination for cinematography. Three nominations later, he became the first cinematographer to win three consecutive Oscars: *Gravity* (2014), *Birdman* (2014), and *The Revenant* (2015). Bexhill was the turning point in his career.
Sources
Emmanuel Lubezki, *American Cinematographer* (December 2006, via theasc.com)
ASC Gallery - Children of Men (set photos by Jaap Buitendijk)
BFI - "Children of Men: Why Alfonso Cuarón's Anti-Blade Runner Seems More Relevant Than Ever" (2019)
All The Right Movies - "45 Interesting and Dystopian Facts About Children of Men" (2024)
Collider - "This Memorable Scene from *Children of Men* Was a Total Accident" (2023)
WellesNet - "Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men: A Tribute to Orson Welles and the Long Take" (2007)
No Film School - "How They Shot the Long Take in Children of Men"
Couch to 4K Wiki - "Production History (Children of Men)"
Saturation.io - "Children of Men (2006): $76M Budget & $70.6M Box Office" (April 2026)
Wikipedia - Children of Men
ShotOnWhat - Children of Men (2006), technical specifications
See also:
Children of Men - The Car Ambush - Same movie, same refusal to cut, radically different technical approaches: the Doggicam mechanical rig versus Bexhill's pure handheld style.
Real vs. Fake Long Takes—The Complete Guide —How Five Separate Takes Become Six Minutes of Unbroken Illusion: The Mechanics of Seamless Editing.
Long Take: *The Russian Ark* (2002) — The direct predecessor of single-take films: 96 minutes, a single take, the starting point for everything Cuarón does in Bexhill.
Mastering Camera Movements in Long Takes —Why Richmond’s handheld approach works where a Steadicam would have undermined the documentary intent.
