Resurrection Director Andrew Semans Always Had That Big Ending In Mind [Interview]


When Rebecca Hall performs the monologue in the long take, what was your reaction on the day?

The reaction of the whole group was just ecstatic, because it’s a risky thing to do. It’s a scary thing to do and have a long monologue, all in one take, in the middle of a movie. In this case, if it doesn’t work, we’re kind of dead in the water. There’s no recovery from that. Now, by the time we shot that, we had been working with Rebecca for a couple weeks. We knew how incredible she is, so I think confidence was fairly high that she’d do well with the monologue.

We shot the first take, and I think within about 10 seconds of her delivering the monologue, I was over the moon. I was like, “She’s got it. She’s locked in. It’s going to be extraordinary.” She did one take and it was great. Then we did one more take and it was equally great, albeit slightly different because Rebecca always does things differently from take to take, which is amazing. We did two takes and that was it. We were like, “We got it.”

Did you use take one or two for the film?

We used take two. I would say take one is equally good, just a little bit different. We went back and forth, but we used take two.

What were the subtle differences in her performance between both takes?

I think the reason we went with take two, more so than anything else, is it was just better for the camera. But the differences were the first take was a little looser, it was a little longer and it had a little more anger in it, I felt. That’s what I was detecting, that there was a little more rage in her voice and in her description of this past experience.

The second take, to me, felt like there was more tragedy, there was more of a sense of loss. We ultimately went with the second take, but like I said, I think the movie would be — and the scene would be — equally satisfying, equally interesting with either one. She didn’t drop a line in either take.

What effect did you want that long take to have on the audience?

I think to cut away in the middle of something like that would’ve been a very bad idea. I think it would’ve taken the audience out of it. It would’ve compromised the performance or it would’ve felt like we were cutting around when we didn’t need to.

The whole idea of that monologue is we’re trying to be immersive in her memory. We’re trying to focus specifically on her experience in the past and her falling back into that experience. It just had to be in this single take.

It’s just a person talking. It is kind of theatrical, but we wanted it to be immersive. For that to be truly immersive, I think we had to just focus precisely on her face, her performance. Otherwise, people might have gotten restless, distracted, so we had to keep laser-focused on what she was doing.

It’s great to get to enjoy the performance, too. Sometimes it can be frustrating watching a great performance, then the camera cuts away.

Right. Sometimes you, of course, have to cut away for one reason or another, or maybe you want to engage with a different take on the person giving the great performance, so you cut away. But yeah, I hate that feeling when I’m watching something and I’m seeing a really exciting moment, and then there feels like an unnecessary cutaway. And it is deflating. In the script, at a certain point we took them out. I had written in flashbacks, into the monologue, but it was more just to kind of cover myself because I was worried that people reading would scoff at this monologue. And now, in retrospect, had we included flashbacks, it just would’ve been terrible. It would’ve been a disaster.

What were the specific flashbacks?

There were just flashbacks to images, moments, from the experience she’s describing. We never even shot them. It was something that we, especially after we shot the monologue, it was clear that they would be extraneous and we wouldn’t use them.



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