Extraction, a thriller streaming on Netflix by director Sam Hargrave, contains “a dizzying 12-minute ‘oner’—‘a shot with no evident edits’—in which Chris Hemsworth, as a desperate mercenary, leads a young child through a city of 17 million people while battling armored gunmen, bounding across rooftops, knife-fighting in the street, and, for the most part, evading speeding cars,” explains Tim Molloy.
“We’ll say it again,” he reiterates. “It all looks like one continuous shot. So how did the camera stay with the actors as they battled through the carnage?” Read the full article here.
“I would grab the camera during most action sequences,” Hargrave tells Julie Jacobs. “The day I hired our DP, Tom Sigel, I said, ‘Hey, just upfront, just letting you know there will be times that it will be easier for me to just take the camera myself and shoot what I see in my head than it would be to describe to you what I need and do multiple things.’
“The one long sequence where I operated the camera the most was something we called the ‘oner,’ and my reasoning for doing that was because of my stunt background and some of the places and ways I wanted to capture the action. I wanted to put the audience in the seat of a car with the driver, be there right next to Chris as he fights, jump with him from building to building, because I wanted it to be as if an audience member was doing this extraction with Chris Hemsworth in real-time.
“So to do that, I wanted to put the camera in some very precarious situations,” the director continues. “There were numerous close calls that I felt more comfortable putting myself in that position. And then the other side of it is, there’s no one to blame when you’re operating the camera and you get this sequence. It is exactly what you want people to see.” To read the full interview, click here.
Read more: How Extraction Shot That 12-Minute Continuous Fight Scene
Read more: Inside Chris Hemworth’s Intense, 12-Minute Action Sequence in Netflix’s Extraction