10 Greatest ‘One Shot’ Scenes In Movie History
8. Gravity
More than a marvel of cinematography, Gravity's opening scene is a marvel of visual effects. Not satisfied with the seminal one-take work seen in Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón decided to raise the stakes significantly by opening this movie with an unbroken, 17-minute disaster in space.
The scene helped to spark buzz for the film ahead of its release, with critics getting an early watch all amazed by now beautifully (and then terrifyingly) put together it was. Speaking to the New York Times about it, Cuarón said; "We wanted to slowly immerse audiences into first the environment and then to immerse them into the action, and the ultimate goal of this whole experiment was for the audiences to feel as if they are a third character who is floating with our other two characters in space".
Float you do, as, unlike most one-shot scenes that safely adhere the camera to a rail alongside the performers, the fact this scene is largely visual effects meant that it was free to float around space in any direction it wished.