One-shot sequence: At the Dawn of America (2025)
Series title: American Primeval
Year : 2025
Episode: Season 1, Episode 1
Director: Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon)
Country: United States (Netflix)
Screenwriter: Mark L. Smith (co-writer of The Revenant)
Director of Photography: Jacques Jouffret (ASC)
Stunt Coordinator: Alex Gayner (+ Jeff and JJ Dashnaw)
Special Effects Makeup: Howard Berger
Sound design: Wylie Stateman
Camera: RED (filmed almost entirely outdoors)
Lighting: 100% natural light - fire and moonlight only (historical period: no electricity)
Sequence duration: several minutes (apparent continuous shot)
Number of shots assembled: 8 (confirmed by Berg to IndieWire)
Filming time for the scene: 5 days, at dusk only, with a 1-hour window of light per day (golden hour).
Total production time: 130 days of filming, only 2 of which were indoors
Extras: 4,000 New Mexico residents (3,420 extras, 750 technicians, 20 actors)
Filming location: Native American reservation, New Mexico, at an altitude of 3,000 meters
Historical event reenactment: Mountain Meadows Massacre (1857), 120 settlers killed by Mormon militiamen disguised as Native Americans
Stated inspirations: Jeremiah Johnson (Pollack, 1972), The Revenant (Iñárritu, 2015)
New Mexico. Dusk. A wagon train of settlers—men, women, and children—is surrounded in a mountain pass. They've been there for three days. They were told Native Americans were attacking. But it's not Native Americans; it's Mormon militiamen in disguise. Sara Rowell (Betty Gilpin) protects her son. The first shot rings out. And the camera plunges into the massacre. Scalpings. Charging bulls. Arrows flying through the frame. Bodies falling from horses. Children screaming. The camera follows Sara and her son through the chaos; it never leaves them, it runs with them, stumbles with them, gets up with them. Around them, 120 people will die. And the camera, glued to their point of view, at the level of the dust and blood, doesn't cut. Berg said: "The Mountain Meadows Massacre was the most intense and visceral thing I've ever filmed."
Why this scene is iconic
Berg wanted the viewer to be unable to look away. The apparent continuous shot is the tool of this trap: by refusing to cut, he imprisons you in the massacre just as much as Sara and her son. You don't see the massacre from the outside; you experience it from the inside, at ground level, in the dust and blood. There is no reassuring wide shot, no aerial view to provide context, no cutaway to a distant character observing. You are right there in the pass with them.
Berg explained his intention: "We wanted it to look real, almost documentary-like." Stunt coordinator Jeff Dashnaw added, "Pete doesn't want the stunts to be noticeable. He wants raw, dirty deaths." The result is a massacre unlike anything Westerns have ever shown: no glamour, no heroic music, no clean death. The series is titled "Primeval," and the sequence is designed to take you back to that state: a pre-civilized state where violence is absolute, random, and devoid of moral compass.
How they filmed it
The apparent continuous shot is composed of 8 takes digitally stitched together. Berg confirmed this to IndieWire: "Even though the action looks like one long shot, it's actually made up of 8 takes stitched together digitally, which didn't make it any less difficult. Once the idea is launched, there are stunt performers, visual effects artists, camera operators, wranglers, and dozens of people who need to be involved to make something like this happen."
The most extreme constraint: light. The sequence was filmed over five consecutive days, only at dusk, within a one-hour window of light per day, the "golden hour." Stunt coordinator Alex Gayner described the process: "Under Pete's direction, we filmed for five days at sunset, within a one-hour window of light. We rehearsed, and rehearsed, and rehearsed. And then, in the perfect light, at the perfect moment, we went for it."
Jacques Jouffret described his own obsession: maintaining a constantly overcast sky to create a soft, diffused light, without harsh shadows. "During filming, everyone made fun of me because I spent all day looking at the sky." When the sun wasn't naturally veiled, the crew deployed enormous silk sails suspended by cranes to block direct sunlight. Jouffret categorically refused artificial lighting; the only light allowed in the entire film was fire and moonlight. "The challenge of this project is that it's a period film. The light? Moonlight. Fire. That's all you have."
The visual philosophy was based on the contrast of focal lengths : wide shots alternating with close-ups using a highly compressed telephoto lens. Jouffret: "We cut these wide shots with a long, highly compressed telephoto shot, so we go from one extreme to the other, from super-wide to super-tight, and that corresponds well to the extremes in which our characters live."
Filming took place on a Native American reservation in New Mexico, at an altitude of approximately 3,000 meters. Berg: "We didn't film on studio sets or backlots. We were in the New Mexico mountains for 13 months, in snow, rain, thunder, and lightning. We had rattlesnakes practically every day on set." A total of 130 days of filming were shot, with only two days spent indoors. 4,000 New Mexico residents were employed.
Berg himself performed a stunt during the massacre: he pulled a stuntman from his horse and hit him twice with the butt of a rifle before being "killed" in turn in the shot.
Berg's style—handheld camera, no fixed marks for the actors, perpetual motion, improvisation—clashed with the demands of the long take, which requires rigorous choreography. Jouffret described how collaboration between the camera crew and the stunt team resolved this paradox: "The sooner you can bring the camera operator and the stunt team together, the faster you solve each other's problems. 'You have a lull here? I can help you, I'll frame over there and come back this way, so you'll have time to reposition that horse.'"
What to observe when reviewing it
Sara's point of view (the entire shot): The camera stays with Sara and her son. You see the massacre through their eyes, not those of an omniscient observer. The dead fall at the periphery of their field of vision. Arrows come from directions you didn't see coming. It's a subjective immersion, not a battle panorama.
The sky (the entire scene): Jouffret wanted a permanently overcast sky. Look: the light is soft, flat, without harsh shadows. It is this light that desaturates the natural colors into a range of grays, browns, and dirty whites, and that makes the red of the blood stand out with amplified graphic violence.
Dane DeHaan's scalp (~middle of the shot): Jacob Pratt's character is scalped live. Howard Berger (FX makeup) described the process as a mix of practical prosthetics and digital effects. The blood "was very important" and it is real (practical) on DeHaan's face.
Did you know that?
Mark L. Smith, the screenwriter, is the co-writer of The Revenant, and the connection is direct. Same era (mid-19th century), same brutality, same exclusive use of natural light, same refusal to glamorize violence. Jouffret even stated that the series' aesthetic has "echoes of The Revenant," but where Lubezki used natural light as poetry, Jouffret uses it as oppression. "It's not the kind of western where everyone looks clean. It's not that place. It was a hard life. Life expectancy was very short. It was extremely violent."
This sequence is the third single-take massacre/battle in the collection, following the Arikara ambush in The Revenant (2015) and the Battle of Bexhill in Children of Men (2006). All three share the same DNA: natural light, handheld camera, military choreography to create chaos, and the subjective point of view of a survivor. But American Primeval adds a unique constraint: one hour of daylight per day. The Revenant had a limited window; American Primeval reduced it even further. Every second of the massacre was fought against the twilight.
Sources
Peter Berg - IndieWire Filmmaker Toolkit, "How Jeremiah Johnson and an Ice Ax Inspired Peter Berg's Epic Netflix Western" (January 2025)
Peter Berg - Netflix Tudum, "Staging the Mountain Meadows Massacre" (January 2025)
Peter Berg - TVLine, "Making Netflix's Western Drama Was Like Completing an Ironman" (December 2024)
Jacques Jouffret - The Hollywood Reporter, "American Primeval DP on the Pilot's Violent Massacre" (August 2025)
Jacques Jouffret - Meet Me at Crafty / Substack, "American Primeval Cinematography: Jacques Jouffret Interview" (May 2025)
Jacques Jouffret - RED.com, "Behind the Look: American Primeval" (June 2025)
Jacques Jouffret - The Ankler, "Behind Peter Berg's Brutal, Dirty Western" (May 2025)
Alex Gayner, Jeff Dashnaw, Howard Berger - Netflix Tudum, making-of (January 2025)
Time Out - "American Primeval: Filming Locations" (January 2025)
Wikipedia - American Primeval
Read also
The Haunting of Hill House S1E6 (2018) https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/the-haunting-of-hill-house - Previous entry in the collection, a completely different genre: family drama rather than massacre
Atomic Blonde (2017) https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/atomic-blonde - Next entry in the collection, another choreographed, false continuous shot serving physical violence
