When 2021 rolls around, brace yourself for one of the most intense movie scenes in years. Pieces Of A Woman, from Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó, stars Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf in the hard-hitting story of a complicated home birth and its tumultuous fallout. And for the birth itself, Mundruczó, writer Kata Wéber and cinematographer Benjamin Loeb cooked up something extraordinary and unforgettable – a 22-minute sequence shot in one fluid take, designed to linger long in the memory.
“That filmic time feels like the hours you spend on a birth,” Mundruczó tells Empire of the sequence. “It’s like a mini-universe. Every minute has its own meaning. We went through it layer by layer, chunk by chunk, going: what is this one page? What is the mini-story in here? It’s like three acts in miniature.” As well as bravura filmmaking, the shot features incredible work from Kirby and LaBeouf, and Molly Parker as the couple’s midwife, capturing the raw emotion of the troubled birth. “I’m not a huge fan of rehearsing scenes on a movie set, because many times this is against the live performance,” says Mundruczó. “If I may say, it’s a bit like stunt work. Lots of planning, but also uncertainty.”
Read more about the extraordinary making of Pieces Of A Woman’s standout sequence in the WandaVision issue of Empire, on sale Thursday 26 November and available to order online here. Pieces Of A Woman is coming to Netflix on 7 January.