“There is a single shot near the end of this film where Felicity Jones nearly steals the whole thing in one fell swoop. Over three hours in and I could hardly believe the build up had led to such a simplistically monstrous scene, and so much of it clicked miraculously into place for me right then.” —⁠Lucy
The film’s final confrontation was the most difficult to shoot, says Corbet, because VistaVision wasn’t meant for Steadicam operation, as the celluloid magazine is loaded horizontally and not vertically. “It starts to tip the Steadicam as film gathers on that side of the rig. So we actually had to create a counterbalance system to put it on a Steadicam, which was only successful sometimes,” Corbet laughs.
But the director says it was necessary due to the physical stunt at the heart of the scene. Having arrived at Van Buren’s mansion, interrupting yet another lavish dinner party to confront Harrison for assaulting her husband, Erzsébet’s walker is thrown aside and she’s dragged across the floor by Harry Junior (Joe Alwyn) in a shocking show of brute force.
“With [Harry] there’s this sense of entitlement,” Pearce says. “His father is more skilled at being engaging, warm, charming, winning the room, whereas poor Joe is not equipped to handle anyone that well. Him standing up for [his father] at the end brings up all sorts of questions of what our traumatic past might be together as father and son—but like all the emotional parts of the film, it’s open to interpretation.”
“We rehearsed that scene with the Steadicam and the actors for about seven hours,” Corbet recalls. “Most of the film is static imagery, because it’s necessary due to the horizontal magazine. That one we had to lift the camera and move with Felicity and there’s an inherent tension because the camera is doing something it doesn’t want to do, and for the audience the camera is doing something it hasn’t done for the entirety of a long movie.”
