10 Genius Suspense Tricks That Made Movies Great

Though it's not entirely uncommon for movies to be shot as if to resemble a single, continuous take, Sam Mendes' 1917 is a special case given the enormous technical complexity of its production.

This wasn't simply a movie featuring two men sat in a room talking or a few benign events taking place across a small number of locations: 1917 was a shockingly sprawling suspense picture jam-packed with precise set-pieces and, eventually, a climax featuring 500 extras.

While it's no secret that the end result was stitched together from numerous long takes - and, yes, there's a time skip in the middle - the sheer precision required to execute these takes created an enormously tense atmosphere on-set which evidently informed the tenor of the film itself.

This is, after all, a streamlined survival film where we never leave the side of Corporal Schofield (George MacKay), and it's tough to deny that the frazzled performances of the principal cast were at least somewhat affected by the sheer stress of performing unbroken takes for up to 10 minutes.

Yet at the same time, the production evidently wasn't rigid enough that mistakes and happy accidents couldn't be incorporated, given that Schofield's trip during the iconic trench run sequence was indeed entirely accidental, yet natural enough to merit inclusion in the final scene.