3. The Shoot
We had planned three full days for shooting this first scene—which sounds like a lot of time, but really it was like shooting eight pages a day. I already knew that we wouldn’t get it the first day, so I let the actors get comfortable with the crew and the camera, and I only pushed them at the end of the day to get a better feel for the next day. The good thing about shooting for three days is that even if performances become a little lackluster at the end of a day, actors go to sleep and the next day the lines sound fresh again; however, I was very careful not to get really deep into “the performance” too early, before all the choreography was totally synced up.
I’m the kind of director that hates to look at the video assist—I like when actors feel that you are watching them directly. They perform for you and not just for the boom operator or the lens. This time I had to look at the video assist because of the logistics of the shot, and we cut dialogue and extended some pauses for the sake of rhythm. I’d ask the actors to improvise something different each time, until we found something that really worked and incorporated it on paper. I also talked a lot to the actors during each take, trying to control the rhythm of the pauses and actions as if I were “editing on set.”
I would never have been able to do something like this if Dagmar hadn’t had a natural instinct to follow movement. She listens to a performance and can always anticipate movements in a way that I still find hard to understand. It’s almost like a sixth sense.
By the second day of shooting we had the scene on its feet, so it was a matter of finessing things. Tension built up with every minute on each take as we hoped that no mistakes would happen. One great take got ruined because somebody accidentally turned the house lights on! Even so, I let the scene play out in case the actors discovered new things. (For the next take, Dagmar removed the bulbs from all the house lights.)
Then, on take number nine, we finally got one I wanted. Yet I felt we could get even something better.
We came in to the third day more relaxed, knowing that we already had a good take. My then-pregnant co-editor, Juliana Montañés, was on set that day, and I asked her to recount the actual post-sex conversations and emotions she and her boyfriend had been through, trying to make their baby. After six hours, we’d captured another take (number 16) that the actors were really happy with. They came up to me excited, thinking it was the perfect one. But it wasn’t: You could see them “acting.” So I just told them to have fun with it; we would do one more just to explore.
The trick worked. On the 17th take, magic happened. Everything was aligning. By the 18th minute, I thought I was going to have a heart attack: Seven minutes to go, and if something went wrong, we wouldn’t ever nail it again. The crew could sense this was the take. Our AC, Patricia Torres, looked at me when David and Natalia sat back in their chairs for the last time—she was almost in tears.
As the actors stood up to return to the bed, the whole crew was looking at each other and celebrating—like that moment during the World Cup final when the match isn’t quite over, but you know you’ve won. Only Dagmar and the actors were unaware of our collective madness—to them it was just another take. When the song finished and the actors fell back into bed, I didn’t even call “Cut;” I just jumped into bed with them, breaking the bed frame. Everybody hugged and cheered—and it was only our third day of shooting! We had what we needed, and with the bed broken, we decided to wrap early and go drink some beers.
The crew, led by DP Dagmar Weaver-Madsen (left), shooting one of the 17 takes it required to nail the scene
4. The Edit
People think the benefit of a single master shot is that it’s already edited. They are completely wrong. Post on a oner can take even longer than post on a normal scene.
First you have to choose the take, leaving all prior opinions outside the editing room and watching every single take at least a couple of times. I like to take notes of moments I enjoy, so I make myself a map of what really is in every take.
We returned to takes nine and 17, and discovered new things I wasn’t able to see on set. There were some things we liked in one and some in the other—so we decided to work on both. One of the great possibilities of editing is combining the best image or performance with the best sound. It doesn’t always sync, but often it does. We lined up in a timeline all the good sound takes for each line and listened to them alongside the image. Going too far with this kind of sound editing you can make a performance feel too “Frankensteined”, but do it well and it can improve a performance beyond imagination. Then we watched both takes a few more times on a big screen. Ultimately, we picked 17, because the initial sex scene was more powerful, and that was crucial for the scene’s development.
Editing doesn’t end there, though. The take was actually 27 minutes, and we used 23. When to start and end the scene was our obsession throughout the four months we were editing—I changed my mind every day. Then it became a matter of frames. I can still remember each of the frames within the two-second window we settled on. Probably this was paranoia, but I felt that the whole movie radically changed depending on the frame I cut on.
We also had discussions with Dagmar to figure out when, how much and how fast each zooming reframe needed to be. When we picture-locked the movie and went into post, we spend lot of time perfecting those zooms to make them feel organic, not digital. We had to introduce little imperfections to the zooms, mimicking an element of natural intuition during a very rational process.
Alex (Natalia Tena) and Sergi (David Verdaguer) begin 10.000 KM in blissful communion, only to be driven apart into a long-distance relationship
5. The Result
Creating a scene like this was almost like taking a drug—I wanted more and more. Yet when I watch it now, I feel the scene comes off a bit too “prepared,” with everything syncing too well. That self-consciousness is the price I have to pay with something like this, I’ve learned. So all I ask of you is to see 10.000 KM as if you had never read my article. I hope the opening scene is still able to lure you in, and make you forget that there aren’t any cuts at all. MM
10.000 KM opens in theaters July 10, 2015, courtesy of Broad Green Pictures. Images courtesy of Broad Green Pictures and Carlos Marques-Marcet.
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