working, but I'm used to that. I'm used to Pat. It's slightly more documentary in its way. It's an unusual mix I suppose really, in that he knows very much what he wants but it's not actually all prescriptively written down before hand. So then it does open us up for seeing things like that. That was a shot that we just literally saw on that day and went "wouldn't that be great". There was always the scene of him doing the recording outside the house like that, but on that day it was a case of "let's see if this works". In fairness to Tadhg and to Pat in the edit suite it was brave to hold on to those long shots. One of the things that we talked about beforehand was about making interesting things happen within the frame. About not moving the camera unless there was a reason to move it. If we could make a frame that we could hold for a long time and that things would change within it, like a person walking up from a wide shot into a close-up it, then that lets you just look at it. Which is so different to so much modern film or television where everything is so intensely edited that you don't have a second to look at something. We have more coverage than there is in the final film, and there were times when I was like "they're holding on to that shot for a very long time" and I knew myself...and I'd be one of the few people who would...that there was other angles there. But they felt that when they tried to do a more conventional cut/cut thing, they felt that it didn't hold up or it didn't work for the film. When there are shots like the one through the door or when he walks in at the opening....when he's walking along the landscape...if you were lucky enough to have a frame that you can hold then it's an interesting thing from an audience perspective to just sit and just look at the frame for minutes. I never actually timed them. I remember talking to Eugene McCrystal who graded the film, and who would have worked on Room, and he said that there was about a quarter of the cuts that would have been in a normal film. So it is definitely different.
There's also some very long takes in the session scene in the middle of the film.
The session scene was quite deliberate. We knew the film was going to be solid. And we felt that the session was really important to give a bit of life and a bit of energy into it. In any story you need to have curves up and down. So we
44 CinÉireann / December 2017