Cinema Without Cuts: What Makes One-Take Films and Shows Special

How films get made without any cuts.

With the rise of short-form content, it's getting harder to hold today's viewers' attention for a film's usual hour and a half to two hours. The forced solution: make every shot shorter, events more dynamic, and the plot simpler and more gripping, so viewers don't suddenly get bored.

But some directors don't want to bow to these new realities, choosing instead to prioritize novelty, conceptual ambition, and technical challenge. Their films and shows, shot in a single take, demand enormous attention to detail and leave no room for error. The DeTalks team looked at a few of them.

Rope (1948)

The man who started this technique was Alfred Hitchcock. Back in the late 1940s, he was the first to shoot a film 'without cuts.' And although his picture wasn't technically one continuous whole, but rather stitched together from ten long segments, that can be excused by the fact that at the time, a single shot was limited to twenty minutes for technical reasons.

As his first color and 'single-shot' film, Hitchcock adapted Patrick Hamilton's play 'Rope' (1929). The film follows two students who set themselves an intellectual challenge — to commit the perfect murder. They throw a dinner party for close friends, having first strangled a classmate with a rope and hidden his body in a chest in the middle of the room.

Hitchcock wanted to shoot everything with a camera that moved continuously through the space. Cinematographer Joseph A. Valentine said the following about it.

Valentine has described lighting as his biggest problem, particularly eliminating shadows cast by cameras, microphones, and crew, recalling that in the scene using ten microphones at once, electricians had to operate five dimmer panels in sequence.

Birdman (2014)

This film, by director Alejandro González Iñárritu, known for The Revenant, and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, dates to 2014.

The film follows Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), a 'washed-up' actor once famous for playing 'Birdman' in a superhero film trilogy. Hoping to regain some recognizability, Riggan tries to adapt, produce, and star in a Broadway version of Raymond Carver's story 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.'

At the same time, the protagonist is haunted by the 'shadow' of his former fame, and no longer separates himself from his character: his inner voice — Birdman — mocks and criticizes Thompson. Riggan imagines himself with telekinesis and levitation, and the character tries to convince him to leave the theater and make a fourth Birdman film instead.

At the 2015 awards, the film won Best Director and Best Cinematography from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Emmanuel Lubezki used wide-angle lenses and shot actors at unusually close range. The resulting 'fisheye' effect underscored the character's sense of anxiety and tension. New objects, events, and characters quickly gave way to others within the frame, all while remaining part of the overall 'chaos.'

This technique complemented the 'one-shot' approach. In fairness, it's worth noting that the film itself was shot in many segments up to 20 minutes each, which is still many times longer than a typical shot of 5-6 seconds. The 'long take' scenes were also filmed so that the transitions could be hidden in editing, creating an illusion of continuity. That meant every movement or lighting change was carefully performed and planned, like a stage play.

Lubezki has described the moving dramatic scenes, especially where the camera transitions from one location to another, as very difficult to light, recalling how a team of specialists ran behind them with reflector flags or whatever else was needed to keep his shadow out of frame, comparing it to a kind of ballet, shared Emmanuel Lubezki in a comment for Variety.

In one scene, a nearly nude actor had to run through a crowd in Times Square. But the production, due to budget constraints, couldn't afford to clear the street of bystanders and fill it with extras instead.

Iñárritu has described being worried about safety, and about someone possibly looking straight into the camera or wandering into frame, noting that if that happened, there would have been no way to cut around it, since it was one long take, so if a scene fell apart, there was nothing they could do about it, adding that everything had to be perfect, commented the director in an interview with Variety.

In the end, the scene was shot in four takes. To distract onlookers, the production hired street drummers and dancers to perform nearby.

Iñárritu has said that everyone wanted to watch the drummers, whereas a half-naked man in the middle of Times Square? They'd already seen that, said the director.

Victoria (2015)

A Spanish woman named Victoria meets four guys at a Berlin bar, and later joins them in a plan to rob a bank. Unlike previous single-shot films, this one truly is one continuous take. A 140-minute 'take' spanning two hours genuinely immerses the viewer in the heroine's life, releasing them from it just as abruptly as it pulled them in.

It begins with Victoria meeting the guys and taking a risk. Two and a half hours later, the others leave the girl for good, and there's no risk left to take. The absence of cuts or gaps helps the viewer feel closer to the protagonist, missing not a single second of her life, and even thinking alongside her.

Critics have described how viewers see every second of her transformation through a camera that never leaves her, offering a level of intimacy a traditional film could never provide, wrote Collider.

Utøya: July 22 (2018)

In 2011, a car bomb exploded near government buildings in Oslo. Two hours later, far-right extremist Anders Breivik organized a terrorist attack on a youth camp run by the Norwegian Labour Party's youth wing, on the island of Utøya, 25km from the capital. A young man in a police vest opened fire on those at the camp, mostly young people and students. The attack killed 68 people, including the stepbrother of Crown Princess Mette-Marit.

In 2018, director Erik Poppe made a film about a girl named Kaja who tries to survive the attack and find her sister. The film is shot in a single take, and its 97-minute runtime roughly matches how long the actual attack lasted. The killer, or any specific danger, never appears on screen, but its presence is constant throughout the film — gunshots in the background, the characters' growing awareness of what's happening.

Poppe has described the film as pure feeling, anger, and hatred, saying that artists need to stand up and fight the 'infection,' and asking what use is art if it can't confront our hardest problems, said Erik Poppe in Wired.

Adolescence (2025)

Cinematographer Matthew Lewis has said there's no stitching at all — it's all one shot, whether he wanted that or not, responded Matthew Lewis in a comment for Variety.

The show Adolescence tells the story of a 13-year-old boy arrested for murdering a classmate. Each of the four episodes was shot in a single take, and working out the 'choreography' for each one took about three weeks. Director Philip Barantini added that they rehearsed until the movements became muscle memory.

Lewis has explained marking out the necessary locations on a map and studying how the camera would move between them, then rehearsing it like a dance, the specialist explained.

Barantini and Lewis have described having a model of the police station and using small figurines and a camera to mark everything out, recalling that once the set's walls were up while it was still under construction, they'd go there when no one else was around.

They've added that Matt would stand there with an iPad while one of them played every character's role, and that they'd just walk around the room saying, 'Okay, we can't do it like this, let's try it differently,' commented on the preparation the show's director and cinematographer, in an interview with Variety.

Barantini has explained that for each episode, the team shot a minimum of ten takes or versions, and for the fourth episode, for instance, as many as sixteen.

Asked 'Why shoot in a single take?', director Alejandro González Iñárritu gave the following response.

Iñárritu has said that we live our lives without cuts, that from the moment we open our eyes, we live inside a 'Steadicam,' and that cuts only happen when we recall or talk about our own lives.