‘Athena’ Making-Of Video Reveals How Director Romain Gavras Pulled Off Audacious 12-Minute Opening Shot

Netflix has shared an in-depth making-of video for its recent French language action-drama Athena. And fans of the phenomenal film — stitched together from a series of astonishingly choreographed sequences — would be pleased to learn that the 37-minute video pulls the curtain on nearly every major set-piece. Director Romain Gavras shared a shorter snippet of the full video on Twitter, focusing on the film’s incredible, unbroken, 12-minute opening shot.

An apocalyptic tragedy about fractured familial ties set amid a fraught socio-political landscape, all told through the microcosm of a French banlieue, the 90-minute feature premiered in competition at the recent Venice International Film Festival before debuting on Netflix on September 23. Athena opens with a bravura single-take sequence that begins with a police press conference about the murder of a local child, follows the action out onto the streets, and concludes with an unforgettable tableau as violent protests against the cops erupt on all sides.

The behind-the-scenes video reveals the many tricks that Gavras and his crew pulled off to create the hyper-immersive sequence. Rehearsals, of course, were a key ingredient in staging the shot, which involved hundreds, if not thousands of moving parts. In his own words:

“On a traditional shoot, a scene can be energized by the editing, by making cuts. But since we had the ambition of making a tense film, where we are held in complete suspense from beginning to end, we don’t need dull moments. Especially for this scene, where we start in a police station, go into a van, and we arrive at the council estate two miles away.”

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The video shows daredevil camerapersons tracking the movements of star Sami Slimane, as he walks through cramped hallways, in and out of fiery rooms, and down a flight of stairs. Slimane then enters a waiting van, as the camera crew jumps in along with him, only to deftly hand over the rig to another crew that is following them on a motorbike outside.

Gavras revealed that while a more traditional production would attempt to shoot multiple sequences through the day, on Athena, they could only focus on one. We see a cameraperson bang his arm on protruding metal and literally brush it off because a single slip-up would mean re-shooting the entire sequence from scratch. In a different scene, another cameraperson is pulled several feet up into the air on a crane, as he shoots a mob sequence from a bird’s-eye-view. “He gets bored if there’s no danger,” Gavras says about the cameraman in question, the South African Myron Mance.

Gavras said that around 80% of the film was shot on IMAX, which introduced an added level of difficulty to what they were trying to achieve — IMAX cameras are larger and more cumbersome than regular digital cameras, some of which are actually quite tiny these days.

Athena is written by Gavras, Ladj Ly, and Elias Belkeddar. The film stars Slimane, Dali Benssalah, Anthony Bejon, Ouassini Embarek and Alexis Manenti. You can watch Gavras’ video snippet here, and full making-of video down below. The film is streaming on Netflix. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.