“I don’t know how it happened, but it happened, and it happened at the perfect point in the movie.”
If you’re going to do a single-take movie, then you had better be prepared.
Some movies present themselves as one continuous single take – the recent WWI-epic 1917 immediately comes to mind – but huge productions like those can often hide the edits with special effects and clever camera moves.
New Irish thriller Nightride doesn’t splash out on any of that, instead relying on weeks and weeks of preparation and training, with the movie filmed in one long take with no cuts away whatsoever.
It tells the story of Belfast-based criminal Budge (Moe Dunford – Black 47, Rosie, Michael Inside) who has one last, complicated drug deal to do before he has enough money to buy himself out of trouble and attempt to go legit.
However, a series of unfortunate events take things to a brand new level of trouble for Budge, as well as for his friends and accomplices.
If you’ve ever seen Tom Hardy’s single-location movie Locke, then you’ve got something of an idea of how the movie plays out, with Dunford mostly acting against phone calls that he’s making throughout the night, forced to scramble at the last minute to stop his last deal from completely falling apart.
In the run-up to the movie’s release, JOE chatted to Moe Dunford about his role and the complications of making a movie like this, and you can watch that interview in full right here:
During the movie, there is a scene when Budge is driving through the streets of Belfast, and suddenly we see flashing blue lights flare up behind him. He’s being pulled over by the PSNI.
But this isn’t a scripted moment, this is actually happening to the film crew, and as the police officer comes to Dunford’s window asking for ID, his face is blurred out.
We asked Dunford how that went down during the shoot itself, and he told us the following:
“We didn’t know he was going to pull us over. It would never happen on your average day, but then it hasn’t been the average two years. So you embrace it.
“You can train for a month on Zoom, in a very collaborative process. You train for anything that could go wrong. But then, that’s all well and good in theory, but practically, when you’re doing it.
“Sometimes the lucky accidents make the movie, because they give a burst of energy. Doing that movie was adrenaline-filled, I kind of lived off the adrenaline and it was hard to come down for a few weeks afterwards. But I think that policeman, he sort of makes the film in a way, he played along with me.”
“I don’t know how it happened, but it happened, and it happened at the perfect point in the movie.”
Nightride will be available to watch on Netflix from Friday, 4 March.
Clip via Brainstorm Media
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