The MadS director says shooting a bloody horror film in one take is quite easy

MadSa nail-biting new horror-thriller on Shudder, sweeps through a French city in one chaotic, continuous take. When all the blood is flowing and the credits roll, many reactions may come to mind: “This is definitely fake” or “Wow, where did they put the camera for this sequence?” or “How did the crew pull this off?”

The one thing viewers probably won’t think is, “Eh, this looks like it was easy to pull this off.” But director David Moreau says that in a way this was because the challenge of making a 90-minute film without interruptions brought the entire cast and crew to exactly the same level, all focused on the same goal: just keeping the action going.

“I didn’t find it that difficult, because of the rhythm it brings to the set,” Moreau tells Polygon. “The way we were all together – to achieve something like this, even though some crew members have made fifty films, others three, some actors have never made feature films (it didn’t matter), we were all on the same team.

“So I think every movie should be made like that now. I didn’t find it difficult. I mean, it was intense.”

MadS takes place in real time over the course of an hour and a half. It begins with 18-year-old party boy Romain (Milton Riche) taking a new recreational drug at his dealer’s house, then hopping into his father’s sleek convertible and returning to his wealthy neighborhood for a booze-and-drug fueled party. Along the way, he encounters a desperate, terrified woman (Sasha Rudakova) who needs help. Soon there will be blood everywhere.

Savvy horror fans will immediately recognize what kind of story this is, and know where the story is going – but that familiarity with the genre heightens the tension, as it becomes clear just how much danger Romain and everyone around him face. The single-shot trick is certainly a gimmick, but an impressive one, making the film feel breathless and ferocious as the camera races from place to place.

Many films stylized as one shot are actually composed of long takes, by Alfred Hitchcock Rope (which was pushing the limits of how much film the cameras of the time could hold) to Sam Mendes’ harrowing journey from World War I 1917. But Moreau swears MadS is truly an authentic one-take film, or ‘oner’, as film and TV professionals would put it.

“I wanted this film to be as truthful and honest as possible,” he says. “So when I came up with the idea to make one, that was it has be one take. So we filmed for five days and did five takes. The first day was a disaster. The second day was a disaster. And the last three days were basically the movie from beginning to end. The film you saw is the last shot we shot on Friday. I have the GoPro tapes (from the cameras) that we put on some crew members that can actually prove that we made it in one take. Making films is not a competition; I just wanted this to be real and true. So we had to do it in one take.”

When asked what the “disaster” looked like, Moreau says the problems were just technical issues: the loss of focus and the loss of power to the camera when the connection to the battery failed. The third take of the film was almost destroyed by a huge storm, but passed just in time for the filming to take place, which was a sensation that left Moreau buzzing with excitement. “I would do it again tomorrow,” he says. “It was great. It was like a football team achieving something. We were really, really connected. It was a really great human experience, really great and very powerful.”

Moreau says he shot MadS on one Red Raptor VV camerabuilt into a custom box system – “there’s only one in the world” – that gave it some of the mobility and flexibility of a handheld camera, without the usual associated vibration. He wanted the look of the film to be stable, but not rigid – ‘not in the hand, but not static.’ The setup he commissioned has some vertical bounce, but no horizontal movement. “Which means you still have emotion, you still have movement, it’s stable, but not too much. And that was for us, so we don’t throw up after 25 minutes.”

The most difficult scene to film, says Moreau, was actually a scene near the beginning, where Romain tires himself out to get an injured hitchhiker to safety, and the camera moves back and forth between them.

“It had to be very choreographed,” Moreau says. “There was a choreography between the camera and the actors, who had to move in the car, movement without a green screen. We really had to do it. You can’t cut, so you have to find a way to choreograph a camera in a car. It was quite tough. This is why we had this big American car – of course it was because it looked cool, because Romain is a rich kid so he takes a car from his dad – but it was also because it was big and we could get around .

As for all that behind-the-scenes GoPro footage—proof that Moreau and his team shot the entire film in one take—he’d like to see it released to the public in some form. “We are working on that,” he says. “It’s a great idea, it’s just a bunch of footage. But yes, we plan to. We’re actually working on it because it’s interesting to see how we did it. It is always interesting for film lovers to see these different ways of photographing.”

Some reviews of MadS have turned it into a political metaphor, or a social commentary. Others see it purely as an adrenaline-soaked exercise in style. When asked which direction he would rather see viewers go, Moreau pauses.

“I mean, the message is… I have an eight-year-old,” he says. “And when I was young, I didn’t listen to the news every day (saying) that the world is going to end, that the world is going to end. Today’s children live with that, and this is very difficult for them. So I don’t know if (MadS is) political, but there is this (sense of) how can you try to look ahead with dark sounds in your ears every day? So I’m sure this has a connection, even though I didn’t want it to be political. I want to embrace (positivity) and tell the kids today that I really agree with them that I hope we still have dreams ahead of us. But nowadays it is difficult to find them. I mean, it’s harder than it was 20 years ago.”

MadS is now available from Shudder.