20 Movies That Took HUGE Risks (And NAILED It)
10. A 138-Minute Single Take Movie - Victoria
There are a small handful of films which have been shot in a single, uninterrupted take for real, but none are quite as impressive as 2015's German crime thriller Victoria.
The movie, which centers around a Berlin bank robbery, isn't merely a low-key drama unfolding in a single location - it's a staggeringly ambitious genre film which sees the cast and crew traipsing all over Berlin in the middle of the night.
Because shooting a film in a single take isn't hard enough with everything else that needs to be choreographed, Victoria has numerous location moves and car chases, where a cheeky member of the public could've easily intervened and blown a take.
On top of this most of the dialogue was improvised and it's 138 minutes long, running counter to the tendency for single-take films to clock in at a more manageable 90-or-so minutes.
The only safety net that director Sebastian Schipper had was that, in order to get financiers aboard, he shot a conventional version of the film first over a period of 10 days before having three attempts to shoot the single-take version.
After the first two takes were unsatisfactory, the third and final take was the one that became Victoria.