Andor: The use of the long take in the Star Wars universe
Andor (Disney+): When Star Wars discovers the long take
No lightsabers. No Jedi. No music telling you when to be scared. Andor took the opposite approach to forty years of Star Wars, and it paid off. At the heart of this approach: a camera that stays put. That doesn't cut. That sticks to the characters instead of filming them from afar like figurines in a $200 million toy.
It's no coincidence that the series swept the Emmys for cinematography. Andor doesn't just tell a story of resistance, she films it as a story of resistance. And that comes through in the long take, or at least in its spirit.
Why the long take?
Tony Gilroy never wanted to make a classic Star Wars film. He wanted a spy thriller, period. His influences: Melville's Army of Shadows , Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers , the paranoid films of the 1970s, The Conversation , The French Connection . None of these films shoots its characters with a crane hovering 50 meters above the action.
The result: Andor turns its back on the saga's usual grammar. No spectacular wide shots to remind you you're watching a blockbuster. The camera remains low, close, almost intrusive. It follows Cassian Andor down a corridor instead of filming him from the ceiling. It stays on Mon Mothma as she lies to an entire senate, without any cuts to relieve the tension.
This is where the long take comes into play, not as a technical feat like in 1917, but as a political tool. A shot that lasts, that never lets go of the character, is a shot that forces you to stay with them in their discomfort. There's no escape through editing.
The choice goes even further than the camera. Andor is the first Star Wars series on Disney+ to abandon Volume, the 360° LED platform used on The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett to generate digital sets in real time. Here, they film in real locations, on constructed sets. A camera filming a real location doesn't behave the same way as a camera filming a screen: it can sneak around, get close, linger in a corner of a room that no one intended to show. The long take needs real material to exist. Andor provides it.
Pro tip : if you want that feeling of a single, continuous shot, beware of green screens and virtual sets. A real wall, a real corridor, a real depth of field give the camera an excuse to move naturally; an LED screen, never.
Immersive analysis: staying in the scene
Take Kino Loy's speech in the episode "One Way Out." Andy Serkis carries all the emotion of the Narkina 5 mutiny in a tirade filmed in long takes, the camera glued to his face. The final edit intersperses reactions from the other prisoners, so no, it's not a single shot from beginning to end, but the intention is clear: to let the action breathe, not to chop up the emotion into short, frenetic close-ups like any standard action series would.
The pinnacle of this approach is the Ghorman massacre in season 2 (episode 8). Thirty-five minutes of screen time filmed almost entirely in Ghorman Square, in broad daylight—a risky choice, because there's nowhere to hide a continuity error in bright sunlight. The camera circles the characters, follows the crowd, loses and finds Cassian, Bix, and Syril in the chaos, without ever resorting to the classic aerial shot that encapsulates a riot in a postcard image.
We're not above the event. We're in it, at shoulder level, in the dust and the panic. That's the difference between watching a riot and experiencing it.
And then there's the other extreme: Aldhani's heist in the episode "The Eye." There, the pace is deliberately slow, almost contemplative, with deliberate tracking shots and crane movements that allow the viewer to feel the cold, the fear, the anticipation before the gunshot. Then everything shifts to handheld camera work as soon as the robbery goes wrong. The camera's language changes with the tension itself; it's never merely decorative.
Pro tip : Adapt your visual grammar to the story itself. A still camera for the build-up, a shaky camera for the chaos—the viewer senses the shift even before understanding it.
Technique and choreography
Three directors of photography worked on the series: Damián García (season 1, finale in Ferrix), then Christophe Nuyens, Mark Patten, and Adriano Goldman on season 2. They all shared the same obsession: the camera at eye level, almost all the time. No heroic wide-angle shots, no low-angle shots that glorify a character. The unwritten rule: only show what you would truly see if you were there.
This discipline is built episode by episode. In the first episode of season 1, the team deliberately opted for a static camera, numerous tracking shots and dolly shots, and smooth, deliberate movements. Then, as the narrative tension mounts, the camera becomes more liberated: by episode 3, almost all shots are handheld. The camera work complements the story, calm at the beginning, becoming more frenetic as danger approaches. And most importantly, the pace of the movement remains consistent across dolly, Steadicam, and handheld cameras, ensuring that once the momentum builds, it doesn't stop until the end of the episode.
For the Ghorman massacre, Mark Patten deployed over a hundred lenses spread across several shooting units, with 50 to 300 extras depending on the take. The challenge wasn't to capture a single shot, but to never lose track of the location, to know at all times where each character was in the crowd, so that the camera could move from one point to another without any break in continuity. Patten describes an almost circular movement, a camera that follows a character and then seems to rise out of them the moment they perceive danger.
For the Battle of Ferrix at the end of season 1, Damián García did the opposite of what was usually done: instead of filming the confrontation in a wide aerial shot like any war film, he stayed at ground level, handheld camera, shaky image, smoke blurring the frame. The goal: confusion and terror, not spectacular clarity.
Pro tip : For a chaotic group scene, don't try to show everything. Choose a fixed point of view (one character, one camera height) and let the rest be suggested through blur and sound. It's often more terrifying than a wide shot that explains everything.
Andor facing the rest of the saga
To understand what makes Andor different, you have to look at what the rest of Star Wars usually does. The original trilogy (1977-1983) relied on classic Hollywood editing: shot/reverse shot, wide shots for geography, close-ups for emotion, and sharp cuts to keep pace with the action. The prequel trilogy (1999-2005) added digital cameras and green screen sets, with even more dynamic editing, multiplying camera angles to inject energy into scenes that were sometimes static during dialogue.
The Disney+ series that preceded Andor (The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi) popularized the Volume: a 360° set covered in LED screens that display the scenery in real time around the actors. Practical and fast, but often producing a smooth image, where the camera behaves more like a video game than a physical location. Andor abandons this tool. This choice is more expensive and time-consuming, and it's precisely this that allows the camera to behave like in a real thriller: with walls that obstruct views, corridors too narrow to back away from, and figures disappearing behind real columns.
It is precisely this physical constraint that makes the long take possible, or at least its essence. You can't pretend to stick to a character in a flat, digital setting. You need a real space to inhabit.
Case studies
Aldhani's heist (S1E6, "The Eye"): Slow, deliberate camera work during the waiting period, then a handheld shot at the moment of the gunshot. The tension builds with the pacing of the editing, not just with the music. Key takeaway : the camera can convey anxiety before the characters even show it.
The Ghorman Massacre (S2E8) Thirty-five minutes shot on location, in broad daylight, with multiple cameras but a fluid and continuous flow. No escape to the reassuring aerial shot. Key takeaway : staying at ground level transforms a riot into an experience rather than a spectacle.
The Battle of Ferrix (S1E12, "Rix Road"): Handheld camera, smoke, deliberate disorientation. Key takeaway : Visual confusion can be a deliberate directorial choice, not a filming accident.
Filming anecdotes
Filming Kino Loy's speech required several takes before the team achieved the desired intensity. Andy Serkis himself mentioned a take where the energy finally "took hold," though the production did not disclose the exact number of takes used in the final cut.
For the Ghorman massacre, the crew used overcranking on certain axes to slightly slow down the image during editing, while maintaining the organic feel of the crowd movements. Ghorman Square was built as a real set at Pinewood Studios, a choice that allowed cameras to move freely among the extras rather than compositing the scene with visual effects afterward.
Another telling detail: in season 1, the team deliberately calibrated the speed of camera movements during pre-production, testing dolly shots before filming, so that the transition to handheld camera work in the more intense episodes would never disrupt the overall visual consistency. This kind of pre-visualization work is rarely visible on screen, which is precisely why it works.
FAQ
Does Andor use true long takes, like 1917 or Birdman? Not in the strict sense. The series doesn't claim to shoot entire scenes in a single continuous shot. Rather, it adopts the philosophy of the long take: staying with the character, refusing the easy cut.
Why is this approach rare in Star Wars? Because the saga has always prioritized spectacle and the clarity of the action over sensory immersion. Andor makes the opposite choice: preferring the discomfort of reality to the comfort of conventional editing.
Who are the cinematographers behind this style? Damián García on season 1, then Christophe Nuyens, Mark Patten and Adriano Goldman on season 2, all recruited for their sensitivity to realistic cinema rather than space blockbusters.
Do you need a big budget to film like Andor? No. The key lies in certain choices: real locations rather than green screen, eye-level camera work, and editing that allows shots to linger. These are directorial decisions, not technical feats beyond our reach.
Conclusion
Andor doesn't use pure long takes like Birdman or 1917.But she borrows their philosophy: staying with the character, refusing the easy way out, filming at eye level rather than at the level of mythology. In a world built on spectacle since 1977, this is almost an act of rebellion in itself.
Perhaps that's the real audacity of Andor: proving that Star Wars can be filmed like a 70s political thriller, and that it works better than any lightsaber.
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