‘The Rhythm Section’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Hi, I’m Reed Morano, and I’m the director of “The Rhythm Section.” In this sequence, our main character, Stephanie Patrick who’s played by Blake Lively, is out on her first job. And it sort of goes completely awry. And she ends up inadvertently in a car chase she didn’t plan for. The reason why I wanted to do the movie overall is the same reason why I wanted to shoot the car chase this way. And that was because it’s sort of like a POV driven story. The scariest place for me after watching dozens and dozens of cinema’s best car chases was from within the car. And any time I’ve watched one and we cut out of the car, I feel like the tension dropped for me. Something about being in the car and having this limited visibility and having the camera bring us to what we need to see at the front or the back or at the character makes you kind of feel like you’re in the seat next to her, which is the last place I think anyone in the audience would want to be. Because she’s not a superhero. She’s not an action hero. She’s not a real assassin. She’s just this regular woman. In order to see the necessary things, in order to make the audience feel what she’s feeling, we were going to have to coordinate really particularly between what Blake was doing in the car as Stephanie and what was happening outside in the front versus what was happening in the back or the side of the car. And Sean Bobbitt, my DP, was super excited about this as well. So what happened was was we had this old Merc, this old Mercedes. And this was the tiniest car ever. And Sean Bobbitt is a really big guy. But they took out all the seats on the passenger side and built like a slider, like a rail system, with a little seat that he would sit on. But he could slide back and forth. But he was also secured in other ways. But he had mobility to kind of be up front by the window. He could pan towards Stephanie. And he could also pan towards the back window. But he could also slide really far back when he needed to get another view. Part of the reason why the chase is so successful is not only because of all the coordinated efforts of all the stunt people were happening at the right time. It was also Blake carries the scene, and her energy is changing, you know, up and down and throughout like an emotional roller coaster. And she’s really making it fun and scary to be in a car with her.