Last E3, Cory Barlog revealed a wildly ambitious plan for his update on God of War: the game would take place in a single, uninterrupted shot. This year, the director shared that, in the early days of production, some members of the development team were hesitant to take on the ambitious plan. So, to show the power of the film technique when done well, he screened the hospital scene from John Woo’s action movie masterpiece, Hard Boiled.
“There’s that great one shot [in Hard Boiled],” Barlog said, “where Tequila and, I can never remember the other guy’s name, are shooting there way into the hospital. They end up having a conversation as they’re moving through. They go by an elevator and then the other guy accidentally shoots a cop.
“Then, they get pulled into the elevator. The elevator [door] closes. As they’re riding up to the next floor, in this consistent single shot, this guy is going through a full range of emotions, having just killed a cop. ‘I’ve just made a giant mistake.’ They’re in the heat of this gun play, and they’re going through a lot. And you see in the background, the elevator numbers going up.”
For Barlog, the technique takes something otherwise extraordinary (an action movie gun fight) and make its intimate, locking the viewer in with the characters, not cutting past the moments in which they must reckon with their actions.