There’s a lot of talk around "Creed" at moment, from how the film has revitalized the "Rocky" franchise to whispers of an Oscar campaign for Sylvester Stallone‘s performance. That aside, the film isn’t just a crowd-pleasing success, but also a great piece of showmanship from director Ryan Coogler, who, in his first major studio effort, drops in a single take fight sequence that had many talking about it afterward. In a new "Anatomy Of A Scene" featurette for The New York Times, he details the work that went into putting that scene together.
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"…we decided three weeks out from production and it was a team effort," the director reveals about when they settled on the ambitious approach to the fight. "I worked with a great stunt coordinator named Clayton Barber and a great cinematographer, Maryse Alberti, and a great Steadicam operator, Ben Semanoff. It was a conversation between all of us. I had a crew that was as crazy as me and an actor as crazy as me. So as opposed to getting scared at this idea, everybody got excited. We shot it the third day of photography. We had one camera on set and didn’t shoot anything to cut away to. We just dove off the cliff and said, hey, we’re going to do this. We did 13 takes of it."
It’s impressive, especially when you realize how much rehearsal was required of Michael B. Jordan, who squares off against a real boxer in the ring, as well Coogler’s comments about the sound design, which add another level of immersiveness to how it all plays out.
Watch the featurette below — "Creed" is in cinemas now.