MadS, a nervy new horror-thriller on Shudder, zips all over a French city in one chaotic continuous take. When all the blood is spilled and the credits roll, a lot of responses might come to mind: “Surely this is faked,” or “Whoa, where did they have the camera for this sequence?” or “How did the crew pull this off?”
The one thing viewers aren’t likely to think is “Eh, this looks like it was easy to pull off.” But director David Moreau says it was, in a way, because the challenge of wrangling a 90-minute movie with no cuts put the entire cast and crew on exactly the same level, all focused on the same goal: just keeping the action going.
“I didn’t think it was that difficult, because of the rhythm it brings to you on the set,” Moreau tells Polygon. “The way we were all together — in order to achieve something like that, even if some of the crew members did 50 movies, others like three, some of the actors never did any feature films, [it didn’t matter], we were all on the same team.
“So I think every movie should be made like that now. I didn’t find it tough. I mean, it was intense.”
MadS takes place in real time over the course of an hour and a half. It opens with 18-year-old party boy Romain (Milton Riche) taking a new recreational drug at his dealer’s house, then leaping into his father’s sleek convertible and heading back to his wealthy neighborhood for a booze-and-drug-fueled party. Along the way, he runs into a desperate, terrified woman (Sasha Rudakova) who needs help. Before long, there’s blood everywhere.
Savvy horror fans will pick up on what kind of story this is right away, and will know where the story’s going — but that genre familiarity heightens the tension, as it becomes obvious how much danger Romain and everyone around him is facing. The single-shot trick is a gimmick, certainly, but it’s an impressive one, making the film feel breathless and ferocious as the camera races from one place to another.
Many movies stylized as a single shot are actually assembled from long takes, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (which came up against the limits of how much film the cameras of the era could hold at the time) to Sam Mendes’ harrowing World War I journey 1917. But Moreau swears MadS really is an authentic one-take movie, or “oner,” as film and TV pros would put it.
“I needed this movie to be as truthful and as honest as possible,” he says. “So when I had this idea of making a oner — it has to be one take. So we shot five days and we had five takes. The first day was a disaster. The second day was a disaster. And the three last days were actually the movie from the beginning to the end. The movie you saw is the last take we did on Friday. I have the GoPro tapes [from the cameras] we put on some of the crew members that actually can prove that we made it in one take. Moviemaking is not like a contest — it’s just, I wanted this to be real and true. So we had to do it in only one take.”
Asked what the “disaster” takes were like, Moreau says the problems were just technical glitches — losing focus, losing power to the camera when its connection to the battery failed. The third take of the film was nearly spoiled by a tremendous storm, but it passed just in time for the shoot to take place, which was a thrill that left Moreau buzzing with excitement. “I would do it again tomorrow,” he says. “It was great. It was like a soccer team achieving something. We were really, really connected. It was really a marvelous human experience, really marvelous and really strong.”
Moreau says he shot MadS on a Red Raptor VV camera, built into a custom box system — “there’s just one in the world” — that allowed him a little of the mobility and flexibility of a handheld camera without the usual accompanying shakiness. He wanted the look of the film to be stable, but not rigid — “not handheld, but not static.” The rig he commissioned allows the camera some vertical bounce, but not horizontal movement, “which means that you still have emotion, you still have movement, it’s steady, but not too much. And that was for us, so we don’t throw up after 25 minutes.”
The most difficult scene to shoot, Moreau says, was actually a sequence at the beginning, where Romain tires to drive an injured hitchhiker to safety, and the camera pans back and forth between them.
“It had to be very choreographed,” Moreau says. “There was a choreography between the camera and the actors, who needed to move inside the car, movement with no green screen. We had to do it for real. You cannot cut, so you need to find a way to choreograph a camera inside a car. It was pretty tough. This is why we had this big American car — it was of course because it looked cool, because Romain is a rich kid, so he takes a car from his father — but it was also because it was big and we could move around.”
As far as all that behind-the-scenes GoPro footage goes — the proof that Moreau and his team got the whole movie down in a single take — he’d like to see it released to the public in some form. “We are working on that,” he says. “It’s a great idea, it’s just a ton of footage. But yes, we are planning on doing it. We are actually working on it, because it’s interesting to see how we did it. For movie lovers, it’s always interesting [to see] those different ways of shooting.”
Some reviews of MadS have made it out to be a political metaphor, or a social commentary. Others see it purely as an adrenaline-soaked exercise in style. Asked which way he’d rather see viewers go, Moreau pauses.
“I mean, the message is… I have an 8-year-old kid,” he says. “And when I was young, I was not listening to the news every day [saying] that the world is going to end, the world is going to end. The kids nowadays, they live with that, and this is really tough for them. So I don’t know if [MadS is] political, but there is this [sense of] how can you try to look forward with dark noises every day in your ears? So I’m sure this has a connection, even if I didn’t want it to be political. I want to embrace [positivity] and to say to the kids today that I’m really with them on the fact that I hope we still have dreams in front of us. But it’s tough to find them nowadays. I mean, it’s tougher than it was 20 years ago.”
MadS is out now on Shudder.
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