In the middle of "Atonement," a 5 1/2-minute shot unfolds as Robbie, a British WWII soldier (James McAvoy), comes upon France's Dunkirk beach, where the final point in the British retreat from the Germans is portrayed as a grim circus of defeat and chaos.
In the Ian McEwan novel from which the movie was adapted, the scene is described in a few pages. McEwan writes: "It was a rout and this was its terminus." On film, though, it took a lot more doing.
The scene was composed with 1,000 extras, a number of horses and vehicles on the beach, and (digitally added) ships off the coast. It all cost a sizable chunk of the film's estimated $30 million production budget and had to be shot in one day.
That's how long the hundreds of extras were available for, and that small time frame is what initially drove Wright and his director of photography, Seamus McGarvey, to stage the single long shot, rather than squeeze in a dozen separate setups.
"It was conceived out of necessity," said Wright in a recent interview. "We had one day with the extras and then the small issue of the tide coming in and washing away the entire set."
While the tide was out and the light was right, Wright and his crew managed three and a half takes - the fourth finally exhausting Steadicam operator Peter Robertson. (They used the third take.)
During production on other scenes, Robertson's course was mapped out, meandering through the shambled beach - sometimes on foot, sometimes riding on a motorized cart.
"When we were making it, I didn't see it in the context of the classic tracking shot, or the history of great tracking shots," said Wright, whose "Pride & Prejudice" included a long shot, as did his British TV film "Charles II." "It felt much, much smaller than that."
But of course, the shot has been received in that context.
