One of the reviews I have to finish before heading to Cannes is the one for Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig‘s Frances Ha, which begins hitting theaters next weekend, May 17.
Today a clip from the film has arrived online featuring Gerwig as the title character and her best friend Sophie played by Mickey Sumner. The two used to live together, but have grown apart as of late and even more so since Sophie started dating Patch.
This clip, however, holds more information that just its content as Gerwig, who co-wrote the film with Baumbach, tells the New York Times it took 42 takes to get the scene right and each scene in the film took an average of 35 takes, which is incredibly high for an independent feature. Here is how she described this particular scene in The Times:
In the film Frances Ha, Scene 63 is 28 seconds long. We did 42 takes in total, two hours of shooting in a bathroom with no breaks or pauses other than for direction and blocking. In 50 days of shooting, we averaged around 35 takes per scene. Most independent films shoot in 25 days with, at most, 10 takes per scene.
A take, in this case, refers to the entirety of the above printed text, acted from beginning to end. Meaning that Mickey Sumner, playing Sophie, and I, playing Frances, said those words and performed those actions 42 times in a row. The scene had to play “in one,” a take in its entirety, with no edits. The take is the scene. Noah Baumbach, the director and my co-writer, was going to have to pick only one of those 42 takes for the final film.
Gerwig then goes on to describe each and every take, why it worked, why it didn’t. She also tells us Baumbach decided to use Take 29, which she described saying, “It all works. The characters are there, not the actors struggling. After we finish it, Mickey cries, which is not quite the scripted reaction, but it she resets easily.”
Watch the end result below and click here to get Gerwig’s full report.
