WWTBAM Bored

They've been showing a featurette in Regal Theaters the last couple of weeks about the upcoming 1927 movie, and it's fascinating. This isn't exactly the same featurette, but it covers the same ground. Essentially, they tried to film the movie as one continuous realtime shot featuring the two leads. They used a camera that they kept switching from a dolly to handheld in order to follow the actors, and no two scenes were shot in the same location. To maintain the illusion that it was one continuous shot, they couldn't shoot scenes in direct sunlight and had to wait for the sun to be obscured by a cloud, then shoot as much as they could before the sun came out again. The grandfather of Sam Mendes, the director, served in World War I, and Mendes was inspired by his grandfather's memoir.