The Art of The Oner: From 'Retro' and 'Veera Dheera Sooran' to 'The Family Man'

The “one-er” or the single-shot scene is now part of the common vocabulary and expectation of the film-goer and binge-watcher. This year, two shows, Adolescence on Netflix and The Studio on Apple TV, used the oner to mount their stories.  Tamil cinema, too, has been playing with this form for a while, from Vetrimaaran’s Viduthalai: Part 1, and this year with Karthik Subbaraj’s Retro and S. U. Arun Kumar’s Veera Dheera Sooran: Part 2’s 15-minute one-ers, the ambition, scale, and logistical maze of it have been in conversation.

Then, there is also Raj and DK’s The Family Man, whose signature stamp for both seasons includes the one-er, each trying to out-do the other.

The cinematographers of these films speak to The Hollywood Reporter India about the complications of mounting these scenes, the challenges they faced, and the tricks they used to keep the image uncut. The scenes are briefly described, in italics. The cinematographer’s note is edited for length and clarity.

Retro

Duration: 14 minutes, 47 seconds

Cinematographer: Shreyaas Krishna

After four years of courtship, in 1993, Paari (Suriya) and Rukmini (Pooja Hegde) are getting married in a marriage hall. Paari has renounced a life of crime. At the wedding, Paari’s adopted father (Joju George) comes with his entourage. On the ground floor, Paari and Rukmini are dancing. Paari goes to the terrace, where his father accuses him of sabotaging a high-stakes arms deal. Paari refuses to give him. Paari leaves the terrace, dances, and heads to the basement, where his father and his men are trying to kill Paari. A fight ensues, and while his father goes back up to the ground to kill Rukmini, Paari severs his hand. 

In the script, the dance on the ground floor, the drama on the terrace, and the fighting in the basement were all separate scenes. We had first shot the second half of Retro. Then, when thinking about staging these three scenes in the first half, Karthik suggested we shoot all three in one take, beginning and ending with the Laughing Buddha as an ironic gesture.

Karthik decided this a month and a half before we went to shoot. First, we had to scout the perfect hall. Initially, we thought, since the wedding is in Thoothukudi, we should have a beach wedding. 

But then, we zeroed in on a wedding hall which had three levels — one level for the dance, the terrace for the conversation, and the basement for the fight. Initially, we thought of carrying a lighter camera since there was so much movement, but we decided to shoot with the Alexa 35 and Angénieux Optimo 30-72 anamorphic zoom.  

We rehearsed and shot this scene on location over three days. The first day was the dance rehearsal, and the second day was the fight rehearsal. At the end of the first day, we attempted our first shot. In total, we did eight takes, with four complete ones. 

I did not carry thermocol lighting that moves with the camera for this shot. Instead, I used global lighting, since our cameras are anyway extremely sensitive to light. There was a false ceiling which we covered with red and yellow cloth, and that provided diffused lighting. 

There was one assistant on each of the three levels, and one assistant for the transitions between the levels. The camera changed hands six times. 

At any given point, roughly five people were behind the camera — the gimbal operator, the focus puller, the dance master and the stunt master, who were giving cues to extras, and an assistant director to give cues to the actors. When so many people give so much to a scene, the energy of that scene itself transforms.  

Karthik and I were sitting behind the monitor, which was in a different room. My worry was that the signal between the camera and our monitor should not go. For that, we used a 1000 feet cord that needed someone to manage it. With over a thousand people on set, this was my major concern even on the day of the shoot — that we should get a signal. 

In fact, in the final shot, we lost signal for a brief period, and Karthik and I were worried — because we could hear the scene but not see it. Eventually, it was that shot which came out best.

Veera Dheera Sooran: Part 2

Duration: 14 minutes, 46 seconds

Cinematographer: Theni Eswar

The scene follows Kaali (Vikram), who is double crossing Kannan (Suraj Venjaramoodu), the mercurial son of his former boss, by working with the police  Arunagiri (S. J. Suryah). When Kannan’s father’s men arrive with bombs and guns, Kannan escapes from Arunagiri’s capture. A shootout ensues. The camera, which initially tracks a conversation between Kannan, his associates, and Kaali — all tied up, Kaali trying to get information out of Kannan — then looks at the blasts as men shoot and bomb each other.

When they are untied, Kaali tries to find Arunagiri who is in a ditch, injured, and tries to get him to escape without Kannan seeing him, but in the process of escaping Arunagiri’s car is upturned. The camera then is on the bonnet of Kannan’s car as he gets a call from his father, when he realizes that Kaali was double-crossing them all along and working with Arunagiri. Kannan asks Kaali to disembark, at which point, the camera, too, disembarks. 

Arun narrated the film to me for about two and a half hours. The intensity of his storytelling inspired me, especially given the whole film is supposed to take place over one night. While the film is entirely shot on the shoulder, hand-held, mostly in a 50 mm lens, we used a gimbal for the 15-minute one-er.

At the narration stage itself, this scene was supposed to be shot in a single take. For that, we first spent three-four weeks scouting locations around Tamil Nadu. Finally, in Alanganallur, near Madurai, we found a sugar factory in a village and got permission to shoot there.

The lighting was complicated because characters keep shifting positions, and then, there is also the lightning effect that we had to create. To get the night ambience right as well as to light up the infinity — the horizon of the landscape, to get the depth — was challenging. We used 40-50 street lamps, 12 kw, 16 kw, and 18 kw par lights to achieve the night mood, and I spent around 8-10 hours just lighting up the place. We had to start shooting at 6 p.m. so we started setting up on set around 12 p.m.. Then, we shoot from evening 6 to morning 6. We rehearsed for four days, and had one day to shoot. 

The camera had to move around 1.5 kilometers in that one shot — from inside the room, coming out, Kaali searching through the tunnel for Arunagiri, and then putting him into the car, and then the car overturning, and then rigging the camera onto a jeep, which moves and then when the characters get out of the jeep, disembarking the camera as well.

Behind the camera there was the camera operator, focus puller, director, fight master, and me, and we were all running with the camera. I was also moving around, from behind the camera, organizing the fire, and going back to the camera when it goes into the tunnel, getting the junior artists to stand in place, and giving them cues of when to run, giving instructions on the walkie talkie for lightning and fires.

After a take, to set up the shot again it takes 4-5 hours — to replace all the broken bricks, shattered glass, blasted vehicles, all the costumes, the blood and make-up had to be changed. You can imagine, there were 130+ commands the director was giving on a walkie talkie — turn the camera, fire here, react there, make sure that door blasts, etc. Even if one of those commands goes wrong, we have to start again. Which is why we rehearsed for four days. We took two takes. In the first take, there was a bit of a mismatch, and the director got really upset, he was almost crying — that even after doing so much legwork we couldn’t do this successfully. That was also the last date we had permission to shoot there. But we got it on the second attempt. 

Family Man (Season 2)

Duration: 4 minutes; 8 minutes, 5 seconds; 5 minutes, 45 seconds. 

Cinematographer: Cameron Eric Bryson 

There are three scenes in the second season—the opening scene of episode one in an LTTE camp; in episode six, when the building Srikant Tiwari (Manoj Bajpayee) has kept Rajalakshmi (Samantha Ruth) bound is under attack and she escapes; and the climactic gunfight, which involves Srikant in a car chasing Rajalakshmi, who is trying to take off of the flight from a highway. 

All three scenes were stitched to look like one-takes. For the last two scenes, there were probably five-six shots that were stitched in each. We decided to stitch them because we were less interested in “Look what we can do” than “Look how the audience experiences this moment”. All of them were single-shots at the script stage itself.

Raj and DK love the one-shot and will always incorporate it in Family Man at some level, and out-do the last season’s one-er, because it is something people are anticipating. For the shootout in the building, it was about creating a sense of chaos, and the one-er helps you feel like you are in this world that feels alive. Everything hits harder when it looks like a one-er. The story is calm until that point. The one-er is to make you feel like you have lost control, with lots of confetti and gunshots, water coming out of a pipe and smoke, running up and down through the space, at the end of which you have this sad moment. It plays with and impacts your emotions in a way that cutting might not. 

The purpose is to give a sense of space, the camera is constantly moving around, and the focus keeps changing. The focus pullers in India are amazing, because they are used to working on the fly. We try to not shoot with an extreme shallow depth of field — to minimize problems. Shooting in daylight was challenging, especially if you are stitching scenes together. The biggest technical challenge is shooting over multiple days—trying to shoot in the same time of day, recreating the lights from one part of the scene in the other. If you notice, a lot of the shots in the climax, for example, are favouring one direction. We are rarely looking at the frontlit side. The good thing about being backlit is you cannot tell if the sun is at the setting point or rising point.

We had around two-three days of rehearsals and two-three days to shoot these scenes. We also used VFX, though very sparingly, to conceal small things. For example, in the climax, the camera gets into and out of the car, but that would not be possible to do with a door, so we did not have a door in the car — we added it in VFX. We are filming that scene on an actual runway. It is supposed to be a highway, so we added lines on it in VFX so it looked like one. We usually hit around three-four takes per shot. Re-setting some portions, like the plane sequence, could take hours.

Part of this climactic chase sequence was actually shot at night, and we were figuring out how to make it work because the camera moves between the car and the plane. Originally, though, we did not have the camera close-up on Rajalakshmi in the plane. That was a last-minute thing, because we realized we had to see her at this point, otherwise we won’t see her at all, since the plane blasts. So we figured out that movement of the camera at the last minute. Much of it was handheld, though I am sitting on a crane being moved from one space to another, getting in and out of the car, chasing the plane down the runway with a camera car with a crane arm. Behind the camera, there is me, the action director, my focus puller, a grip to make sure I don’t fall if we are moving up and down the stairs, and a sound person.

There is also someone pulling the aperture behind the monitor, because to light everything to be perfectly exposed would be impractical. We have someone changing the aperture on the fly, as we move from indoors to outdoors, close it when we go outside to darken it, and open it to brighten it when we move inside, so we don’t have to match the mid-day sun when shooting indoors.