How we filmed Pieces of a Woman’s one-shot birth scene

Pieces of a Woman opens with a breath­tak­ing 22-minute long take in which Vanes­sa Kirby’s char­ac­ter gives birth in real time. It’s an aston­ish­ing set-piece that stands out not just for its tech­ni­cal inge­nu­ity, but for how it immers­es us in this emo­tion­al­ly-charged situation.

Direc­tor Kornél Mundruczó and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Ben­jamin Loeb trap us in the high-stakes, painful expe­ri­ence of child­birth by refus­ing to cut. ​“Any cut is an alter­na­tive for an audi­ence to step out,” Loeb explains. ​“By not doing that, you’re stuck in what­ev­er feel­ing you have and there’s no way out. My per­son­al opin­ion would be that you’re cut­ting in a scene because your cur­rent shot doesn’t hold enough ten­sion or pur­pose or intent for it to work as a whole.”

By show­ing the whole birth, we wit­ness the small ways hus­band and wife Sean (Shia LeBeouf) and Martha (Kir­by) help each oth­er to cope – some­thing that becomes a major theme in the film. Martha is thrown off when the mid­wife she had request­ed for her home birth is replaced at the last minute by stand-in, Eva (Mol­ly Park­er). Sean calms Martha down by mak­ing goofy jokes, repeat­ed­ly reas­sur­ing her and, dur­ing the most painful moments of the birth, phys­i­cal­ly com­fort­ing her.

Mundruczó’s deci­sion to shoot the scene in a sin­gle take stems from the play of the same name, which he staged in Poland back in 2018 and was inspired by his and wife Kata Wéber’s (who wrote the screen­play) expe­ri­ence of los­ing a child. “[Mundruczó] showed me his the­atre piece, which he hadn’t shown the actors,” Loeb recalls. ​“See­ing what he was attract­ed to in the stage play, you imme­di­ate­ly knew this had to last for 20 to 30 min­utes. This film also feels like a stage play in the sense of not cut­ting and just throw­ing the audi­ence into a scene.”

Loeb describes devis­ing the aes­thet­ic of Pieces of a Woman as a process of ​“deep fear” for Mundruczó, as it was a per­son­al project ​“so heavy hand­ed in terms of mate­r­i­al that he didn’t want it to feel heavy hand­ed in its [cin­e­mat­ic] lan­guage. We talked about remov­ing the foot­steps of the cam­era, so the cam­era didn’t feel like it had a human behind it.” Loeb achieved this smooth move­ment by using a gim­bal, a hand­held sta­bi­liz­er that uses dig­i­tal sen­sors to detect and cor­rect unwant­ed cam­era shake. This enabled him to move freely around the space, allow­ing for ​“the cam­era to be curi­ous and inter­est­ed in these characters.”

For Mundruczó and Loeb, com­mit­ting to the sin­gle take was a leap of faith, since they didn’t have enough time to shoot back­up cov­er­age of the scene. In the end, they didn’t even need the three days they’d sched­uled. ​“We did four takes on day one, two on day two, and then we called it. It wouldn’t get bet­ter. It was take four [on day one] that end­ed up in the film. The ener­gy on day one was impos­si­ble to beat, so even though we got a take that was tech­ni­cal­ly per­fect [on day two], it was too per­fect for its own good.”

“The hard­est part,” says Loeb, ​“was that Kornél want­ed every loca­tion to be able to be viewed in 360 degrees. He almost want­ed it to be approached like a doc­u­men­tary where any­thing could hap­pen and the actors could go where they want­ed.” That proved a chal­lenge for light­ing. ​“If there was a lit­tle tiny cor­ner where I could hide a lamp I would, but every­thing else was prac­ti­cals wired to a dim­mer board.” There’s no CGI in the fin­ished scene, save for the removal of a lamp on the ceil­ing, and the dig­i­tal smooth­ing of a dent in Kirby’s pros­thet­ic baby bump, which had been dam­aged dur­ing the course of a long day of shooting.

The cam­era spends almost equal time on the faces of Martha, Sean and Eva, bal­anc­ing their three per­spec­tives on the birth. In moments when he wasn’t sure which char­ac­ter to focus on, Loeb recalls Mundruczó instruct­ing him to default to Sean’s face. As an out­sider to the birth, he acts almost like an audi­ence sur­ro­gate. ​“He’s just there and expe­ri­enc­ing this in the way that I was dur­ing my child’s birth and the way that Kornél was. You’re a weird non-enti­ty, so deeply in awe and curios­i­ty. You’re kind of in the way but you’re try­ing to help.”

Of course, the scene is also a show­case for Kir­by, and at the heights of Martha’s pain we stay locked on her. ​“Every time [Martha] had a con­trac­tion, the cam­era would almost fall into her face and be more in tune with her, as if the two, in that moment, become one. The face express­es every­thing you need to see. You don’t need to see the phys­i­cal loca­tion of pain in order to feel pain. What the audi­ence doesn’t see becomes more vis­cer­al because you imag­ine every­thing you don’t see.”

Dur­ing the scene’s trag­ic end­ing, Mundruczó final­ly cuts, leav­ing Martha to show Sean rush­ing down­stairs in pan­ic to meet an ambu­lance on the street. ​“We shot two end­ings,” Loeb reveals. ​“Our main end­ing stayed with Martha, but watch­ing it back it felt no audi­ence mem­ber would want to stay with Martha in that moment. It felt wrong to put the audi­ence in that space. We want­ed to do an alter­nate end­ing where we fol­lowed [Sean] out. In the end, we used a lit­tle bit of both so it felt like you were still with both characters.”

Just as the mem­o­ry of the birth haunts Martha and Sean, the scene over­shad­ows the rest of Pieces of a Woman. Mundruczó and Loeb play with the ​“con­trac­tion of time”: the birth pro­gress­es quick­ly, and the pace of the camera’s move­ment speeds up grad­u­al­ly along with it, as if we’re expe­ri­enc­ing the birth as Martha and Sean remem­ber it rather than as it real­ly happened.

In Loeb’s words, ​“the feel­ing of time works dif­fer­ent­ly when you’re in a sce­nario as tense as a birth. You can sit in a room for 17 hours and the next day you only remem­ber five min­utes, or it felt like five min­utes. That was the inten­tion, to make sure the feel­ing of time became more and more errat­ic as you got clos­er to the birth.”

Pieces of a Woman is avail­able on Net­flix from 7 January.