Screenwriting : Favourite single location films by Craig D Griffiths

How about Hitchcock's Lifeboat? I don't know as I have a favorite but what came to mind first was Misery.

Would 12 Angry Men count?

Good movies. Misery is good. I forgot most of that is one room. I remember seeing the original 12 Angry Men, surprised that it doesn't feel like a play, which it originally was. I was thinking like The Thing, but the South Pole couldn't really be called a single location. These single room suggests are great.

Panic Room, The Disappearance of Alice Creed. Female leads. Always love Jody Foster. Alice Creed has a nice twist and is well done, well written. :)

Ditto on Reservoir Dogs. A few other quick locations, but the majority is in that warehouse. I'm not sure if we can count Die Hard, or The Raid: Redemption, as they both mostly take place in a high rise building, but lots of different locations, within the location. Source Code was kind of along those same lines as well.

I would have said Talk Radio if it wasn't for the very long flashback scene which goes into multiple locations ove the span of the second act of the film.

Otherwise, Talk Radio is a great example of a single set location. Oliver Stone did a great job adapting Eric Bogosian's well-written play into film format, and Bogosian is brilliant in the lead role.

Buried was so good. Ex- Machina

Aray Brown Was going to say this as well. Vince Conside True. Even "Morgan" as well. "ARQ" more recently was single location and low budget, but well done. "Locke" with Tom Hardy was a single location, inside a car (although the car drove around) and was entirely a "talkie" based on a single actor and his phone conversations.

Heck, even Hitchcock's "Psycho" is single location for the meat and potatoes of the film.

I think I'd agree with Rear Window. We have a guy here that owns an independent theater and he has one of the last 35MM projectors around. He collects old films and I watched the full film Rear Window the other night. Digital filmmaking's got a long way to go.

I've forgot so many of these. Thanks. ROPE is amazing for those shots. One of the shots travels between three interconnected rooms jumping between people's conversations as they pass each other.

Craig - those are called "invisible cuts" and Hitch was a master at using them.

@Chad read the Locke script. Steven Knight is one of my favourite writers. The script has some great examples of how to write action as well as direct without be intrusive.

Has anyone seen 10 Cloverfield Lane? I haven't heard much about it.

Doug I have heard of, and seen that in his work. Rope just has these great 'oners'. Never flicks goes by a close up to hide the cut, like someone's back or a table.

Silent Running It takes place aboard the freighter Valley Forge. The interior of the de-commisionhed aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge was used in the majority of the sets.

This one is a bit of a grey area as the background is always in lotion but I really enjoyed " Locke ".

12 Angry Men

I love Secret Honor, in which Philip Baker Hall plays a mad-as-hell Richard Nixon, and is the only actor in the film.

Wait Until Dark is another great one, as are Bug; Das Boot; Moon; the great Spanish film, The Exterminating Angel; and the great German film, Petra von Kant.

Craig - "Oners" aren't often seen in contemporary filmmaking (shame) but it is a very powerful technique in the hands of a talented director. Please let us know the results of your study. I have my own hypothesis but I'm curious in knowing what you conclude.

Isn't Birdman a single location

Vince: bar scene with theater critic; outdoor scenes; hospital scene finale.

BIRDMAN has all kinds of locations, and appears to be done in a single take, but that's due to all kinds of CGI tricks.

I look at ROPE in my HITCH: EXPERIMENTS IN TERROR book, and it has ten minute long moving camera takes with no CGI (hadn't been invented yet). These takes are connected through what I call "Hitchcock wipes" where a character passes through the frame at the end of one take and then passes through the frame at the beginning of the next take, giving them a place to cut one ten minute take to another. The amazing thing about these takes is that they move from "shot" to "shot" witch each shot's angle, motion, and composition designed to tell the story using the language of cinema. That makes it much better than BIRDMAN which just precedes the protagonist with a neutral angle (which does nothing to tell the story).

But this was about single location stories, right?

ROPE and LIFEBOAT are two interesting Hitchcock experiments.

PETRIFIED FOREST (1936) has people trapped in a diner by an escaped convict played by Humphrey Bogart. SAHARA (1943) has Bogart heading up a tank crew in WW2 surrounded by Nazis. KEY LARGO (1948) has Bogart as one of the hostages in a resort taken over by an escaped convict and his gang... while a hurricane rages outside. Even CASABLANCA mostly takes place at Rick's. Old school Hollywood loved to save money with central locations!

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (original) is a great example of a siege movie made on a budget. (If I were typing this at my regular Starbucks the star of that film might be sitting at the next table).

WAIT UNTIL DARK and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD both have people trapped.

A couple recent films that I've used as examples when I've done a class on this are THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED (2 rooms, 3 actors, a ton of suspense and twists), and the stunt contained movie BRAKE (it's DIE HARD in the trunk of a car - and wall to wall action).

I have this theory called "dog juice" that every movie must have the same amount of entertainment value regardless of budget. So when you take out movie stars, you need to add something. When you take out the entertainment value of changing locations, you have to add something. A movie like BRAKE is so fast paces that you never notice it doesn't star Tom Cruise. I timed it out and there's often something happening every minute (every page).

Usually plays adapted into films are good to watch. My two favorites are Robert Altman films of Streamers and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

"Death and the Maiden". Adapted from a play, starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley.

"The Sunset Limited" Cormac McCarthy play adapted to screen takes place in a studio apartment with just two actors.

I enjoy "Dial M For Murder". Such a fun film to watch.

Mr Bill

Yeah, I remember seeing DAS BOOT at the old cinema village theater in NYC. Great movie experience. The cinematography made you part of the submarine crew and rooting for German bad guys!

Dan: Wolfgang Petersen loves "boat" films. He also directed The Perfect Storm and the Poseidon Adventure remake, Poseidon. Also gotta love the mostly-contained Spanish film franchise REC, and the mostly-contained The Descent, and The Descent Part 2.

DAS BOOT I love this film. Doug here is a YouTube vid on some good long takes https://youtu.be/17UQz7ANv-o

What I want to examine is how people move through the highs and lows (changes in relationship power) in conflicts when you can't cut away. When even a B story is in the same location. Even when we argue with a loved one we can go for a walk. Stuck in an elevator for example removes that option.

I LOVE Rope - and how Hitchcock built the sets so it could all come apart so the camera could move around the set. I think the edits are as long as the film stock could be - so a reel long.

I like it when a film suddenly changes to being all told in one set or location - like in Dusk Til Dawn - or Reservoir Dogs - everything gets real then! There's a lot of that in The Hateful Eight.

I love REC - that's another film where the camera angles are great even though it's supposed to be a news camera. There's a scene where the policeman tells the cameraman to turn off the camera - but he leaves it on and just lowers it at his side - and the framing is perfect. I wonder how many times they did that before they got that amazing framing? The remake missed moments like that.

I'm so embarrassed! I only saw three answers - and I've just seen all the ones above - what you all said!

Jodie - in Hitch's day, moving one of those studio cameras was much like shoving a locomotive around, and they were very noisy. They were encased in a huge "blimp". It took several people to shove them around including crew who stayed out of frame in front of the path to pull furniture out of the way as the beast glided by. Today we have some pretty incredible three axis follow cam rigs that can do much the same (even better) movements. It's a shame that so many contemporary filmmakers fail to understand the fluidity of storytelling. A good actor can move through multiple emotional levels in relationship to other characters and a fluid camera movement can catch that little nuance that elevates the shot from okay to great..