WORDS JAMES JENNINGSCo-director Cary Murnion talks
us through the incredible single
takes in his actioner Bushwick
Bushwick has some astonishing single takes of
full-on action scenes. Can you explain the planning
and processes involved in getting them done?
Yes, sure. I lived in Bushwick for about fi ve years.
I got to get to know the neighbours pretty well
and then started to work on the movie. Me and
Jon [Millot, co-director] spent years speaking out
the movie to each other. When we got the script,
we started to plan out a lot of the scenes. It was
written with a very specifi c city block in mind
— pretty much the whole movie takes place in
this fi ve block radius and when we started
production we actually got almost all locations
that we wrote. We aren’t jumping from one
neighbourhood to the other with these invisible
cuts — we are staying within that
neighbourhood. We really planned it out pretty
extensively because there are about 49 different
cuts in the movie. I would say there’s about 10 to
12 that are visible, but the rest I think are pretty
hard to see and so we wanted to kinda keep that
feeling of being immersed in these long takes. So
we follow the characters and try to make them
lead us — that’s how we planned all this out.
Capturing the single takes must’ve put a lot of
pressure on the cast and crew...
Yeah, but I think in a good way. It was almost
like a live play — like shooting a Broadway play
out in the streets. The actors really had to know
their lines. We did have a week and a half of
rehearsal before we actually fi lmed, and that
really helped everyone get on the same page with
both the technical side and also some of the
character beats and the hitting certain plot points
along the way. I really think that everybody in
the cast and crew really liked the idea of a long
take. Obviously editing is a strong part of
fi lmmaking and how that builds the story. But
the idea that the actor is going to say their lines
and they’re gonna play a scene out the way they
wanna play it and that is going to be what
everybody sees is very rare in fi lm. Usually the
editor or the director will cut it up a lot, and by
cutting it you can really adjust the tone and
change the performance. But from the
cinematographer to the camera operator to the
actors, I think they all appreciate the idea of
what they’re doing on that day is gonna be seen
in that pure form.Did you have any frustrating instances where you
got right to the end of a take and something went,
causing you to have to start again?
Yes, but it wasn’t anything to do with our
actors. It was more to do with some of the locals
that were in the street. There was one particular
scene where Britney [Snow] and Dave [Bautista]
are coming out of Dave’s apartment and they’re
being shot at — they had to bring this big
garbage dumpster across the street and they
make a big run down the sidewalk. That was
like a fi ve or six minutes scene. So they’re
running and they’re about to get to the end
and everything was worked out. We turn
around and there’s a bunch of locals right
down at the end of the street. And that made
Dave feel like, “Yeah, this is something that
shouldn’t happen.” We ended up digitally
erasing them and that was a lot of work to
do in post — erase some of the locals who
happened to be in the shots who were looking
out windows because they were curious aboutthe movie or they turned the corner. So that
was a lot of extra that we had to do, and we
knew that. We at least knew that the take
wasn’t destroyed and that we could go and clean
it up afterwards!BUSHWICK
★★★★
FROM 13 DECEMBER / RATED MA15+
DIRECTORS CARY MURNION, JONATHAN MILOTT /
CAST DAVE BAUTISTA, BRITTANY SNOWTHIS BLISTERING
URBAN-invasion thriller
imagines Brooklyn obliterated
by an ethnic-cleansing civil war:
Texan militias one side, street
gangs on the other, and Brittany
Snow’s student wedged in the
middle. Enter Dave Bautista’s
ex-Marine, who tucks her under his armpit and
boulders through the chaos like a tank. A breakout
at this year’s Sundance Midnight slot, Bushwick’s
been dubbed Escape From New York meets The
Purge, but the stylistic motor is Children Of Men:
director duo Murnion and Milott seize the action
on handheld, often in single takes. Propelled by
Aesop Rock’s funk score, this is a blazing siren of
an indie B movie, spiked with black laughs and
buzzing with panic. Sequel please. SIMON CROOK
EXTRAS: Behind-the-scenes, interviews.Stupe (Dave Bautista)
and Lucy (Brittany Snow)
corner an enemy. Below:
Bushwick co-directors
Cary Murnion and
Jonathan Milott.