10 Film Directors Who Totally Tricked The Studio

7. Orson Welles Shot The Opening Scene As A Single Take To Calm The Studio Down - Touch Of Evil

If you somehow needed extra proof of Orson Welles' filmmaking genius, look no further than the production of his 1958 film noir classic Touch of Evil.

The film memorably opens with a single-take sequence in which the audience follows a car with a bomb on-board as it crosses the Mexican border into the U.S. and subsequently explodes, but Welles didn't conceive this brauva three-minute one-shot just for the fun of it.

Welles had earned an unfortunate rep among studios by the late-50s for being unreliable and exceeding production budgets, and so Universal only bankrolled Touch of Evil after making Welles agree to file a shooting report at the end of each work day.

But Welles had a plan. In order to get the studio off his back, he would not only film the bulk of the opening scene in a single take on a single day, but he spread the 5-minute sequence over 10 script pages to give the impression that he'd actually shot more material than he had.

And so, once Universal got word that Welles had shot 10 pages - that's roughly 10% of the movie - in just one day, they relaxed and let Welles off the leash. Genius.