Timecode

Timecode (2000)

Four cameras. One take. No edits. Real time.

A production company begins casting for its next feature, and an up-and-coming actress named Rose tries to manipulate her filmmaker boyfriend, Alex, into giving her a screen test. Alex's wife, Emma, knows about the affair and is considering divorce, while Rose's girlfriend secretly spies on her and attempts to sabotage the relationship. The four storylines in the film were each shot in one take and are shown simultaneously, each taking up a quarter of the screen.

Date of release
2000-04-28
TMDB
5.6 / 10 (100)
Runtime
1h 37m
Genres
Drama, Romance
Director
Mike Figgis

Casting

Interesting facts

Timecode is a 2000 American experimental film written and directed by Mike Figgis and featuring a large ensemble cast, including Salma Hayek, Stellan Skarsgård, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Suzy Nakamura, Kyle MacLachlan, Saffron Burrows, Holly Hunter, Julian Sands, Xander Berkeley, Leslie Mann and Mía Maestro.

Production

The movie was shot with four hand-held digital cameras, in one take, on the sixteenth performance. Largely improvised, Figgis provided the actors with blank, four-staff music manuscript paper, with each octave representing a camera view at that particular moment in time, up to the 93 minutes of camera capacity.

Rehearsals were single-take performances, filmed over fifteen days. Filmed in the mornings, with the actors fully involved, the footage was reviewed and discussed in the afternoons. Four separate monitors replayed each camera point of view simultaneously. The first rehearsal recording was included as a bonus feature on the film's 2000 DVD release.

The film's action ends with closing activity in three quadrants and the following statement (no capitalization beyond film's title) in the fourth quadrant:

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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