Directed by Romain Gavras
Year : 2022
Director: Romain Gavras (son of Costa-Gavras; music video director for Kanye West, MIA, Jay-Z, Justice)
Country: France
Director of Photography: Matias Boucard
Camera operator (dangerous sequences): Myron Mance (South African - Gavras: "He gets bored if there is no danger")
Editor: Benjamin Weill
VFX Supervisor: Thibaut Granier
Screenwriters: Romain Gavras, Ladj Ly, Elias Belkeddar
Music: Gener8ion (collaborative project by Gavras and Benoît Heitz / Surkin)
Camera: ARRI Alexa 65 (~80% of the film shot in IMAX)
Opening sequence duration: ~11-12 minutes
CGI: zero - "There is no CGI in the film, we do everything for real" (Gavras)
Method: composite plan, "smart" cuts without digital stitching, sleight of hand technique ("look to the right while it's happening on the left")
Filming schedule: one shot per day
First scene filmed: the last one on the schedule (the most complex)
Making-of: 37-minute video available (Gavras shared an excerpt on Twitter)
Stated influences: Gladiator (Ridley Scott), Ran (Kurosawa), Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
A police station in the Paris suburbs. A press conference. Abdel (Dali Benssalah), a decorated soldier, announces to the cameras that his 13-year-old brother, Idir, has been killed, presumably by police officers. The crowd roars behind the barriers. Liturgical music with choirs rises. And suddenly, a Molotov cocktail flies through the air. Chaos erupts instantly. The crowd surges past the barriers. The riot police are overwhelmed. And the camera plunges into the heart of the carnage. For eleven minutes, it doesn't cut. It follows Karim (Sami Slimane), the younger brother, who leads the assault on the police station. The crowd loots weapons, steals a police van, and loads a safe full of rifles. The camera leaves the police station, mounts a motorcycle, speeds through the streets, enters the stolen van, emerges again, flies over the Athena housing project from the air, and descends back to street level for the final shot: Karim and his men on the barricades, cheered by hundreds of residents, arms raised. The war has begun.
Why this scene is iconic
Gavras explained to New York Magazine why the film had to start that way: "Even when I'm watching a Netflix movie, if it's not interesting in the first five minutes, I'm going to leave." He's not exaggerating; the first eleven minutes of Athena are designed to grab you by the throat and not let go. CNN compared the shot to the opening of Touch of Evil, noting that it "could have put in a little more effort," and to the raid in True Detective , adding that it "looks like a walk in the park" by comparison. The Daily Beast called the sequence "one of the best opening shots in the history of cinema."
What distinguishes Athena from all the other false continuous shots in the collection is its narrative logic. Boucard explained that the choice of the long take wasn't an exercise in virtuosity; it stemmed from the very structure of the story. Gavras wanted to make a Greek tragedy. And one of the fundamental rules of Greek tragedy is the unity of time and place: everything happens in a single location, in real time. The long take is cinema's real time. Boucard: "That's exactly why we filmed it in a single location in real time. And what is real time in cinema? It's long takes. So it was all already in his mind, coming from his Greek heritage."
How they filmed it
Gavras said: "There's no CGI in the film, we did everything for real. The planning, oddly enough, was almost military and very precise in order to create chaos in front of the camera." This is the paradox of Athena: every second of every shot was rehearsed, timed, and choreographed with paramilitary precision so that the result on screen would resemble the total chaos of a riot.
The crew only filmed one shot per day. Boucard confirmed: "We did one shot per day, and each shot was as long as possible." A typical shoot would have involved ten or twenty shots in a single day. Athena filmed one shot, and then the crew spent the rest of the time preparing the next one.
The opening shot is an assembly of several takes, linked by "smart cuts"—no digital stitching, no CGI. Boucard described the method as that of a magician: "Like a magician, look to the right while it's happening on the left." He added that it was sometimes more difficult to make a smart cut than to shoot a true continuous shot: "We weren't using CGI, so when we had to come back the next day, we had to connect that take to the previous one. That was sometimes much more difficult."
The most dramatic transition in the shot is the shift from the motorcycle to the van. The making-of (37 minutes, published by Gavras) demonstrates the technique: a gimbal switch, the camera physically moving from the hands of an operator sitting on the handlebars of a moving motorcycle to an operator inside Karim's stolen police van, without any visible cut. The transition takes place at full speed, while the motorcycle is running.
Myron Mance, the South African camera operator, filmed the most dangerous sequences. Gavras said of him, "He gets bored if there's no danger." In the making-of, he's seen being lifted several meters into the air by a crane to film a crowd shot from above. Another cameraman is also seen hitting his arm against a metal beam and continuing without flinching because a single mistake meant restarting the entire sequence.
The ARRI Alexa 65 camera, the digital equivalent of IMAX, was used for about 80% of the film. It's a massive camera, much heavier and bulkier than compact digital cameras. Boucard described the challenge: the Alexa 65 added an extra layer of difficulty to every camera movement. Shooting in a single take with a gimbal on a moving motorcycle with a camera the size of a refrigerator is the kind of choice only a music video director turned filmmaker can make.
The first scene of the film (the opening) was the last one shot; because of its complexity, the team needed the rest of the filming to prepare.
What to observe when reviewing it
The motorcycle-to-van transition (around the 3rd-4th minute): The camera is on the handlebars of a motorcycle, in the middle of a chase. Then, without any visible cut, it's inside the stolen police van, in close-up on Karim's face. The gimbal switching, the physical transfer of the camera from one operator to another while in motion, happens at this moment. You won't see it. That's the key point.
The final ascent (around the 10th-11th minute): The camera takes off. It rises above the city of Athena, revealing the scale of the riot: hundreds of people, barricades, fires, and vans. Then it descends back to street level for the final shot. This upward-downward movement is executed by Myron Mance, suspended from a crane.
The Molotov cocktail (~1 minute) The turning point. The press conference is calm. Then the Molotov cocktail is thrown. And the camera doesn't cut for eleven minutes. Everything that follows—the looting, the chase, the riot—stems from this single act.
Did you know that?
Romain Gavras is the son of Costa-Gavras, the director of Z (1969), Missing (1982), and The Confession (1970), the filmmaker who invented the political thriller. The son inherited his father's political views, but filmed them with the language of Kanye West and M.I.A. music videos. Boucard summarized: "He wanted to bring his whole music video universe into this film." The stated influences are Kurosawa's Gladiator and Ran, films of siege and battle, not political thrillers. Athena is a war film shot like a music video, written like a Greek tragedy, set in a French city.
This opening shot is the second French long take in this collection, after The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan (2023). But where Bourboulon filmed a sword duel in the forest with 1960s Panavision C-Series cameras, Gavras films an urban riot with an Alexa 65 the size of a refrigerator. Two Frances, two eras, two techniques, but the same ambition: to prove that French cinema can rival Hollywood in the realm of the action-packed long take.
Sources
Matias Boucard - BTL News, "Athena Cinematographer Matias Boucard on the Film's Dazzling Opening Shot" (January 2023)
Matias Boucard - Miles Stephenson interview, "The Alexa 65, Romain Gavras, and Athena" (January 2023)
Romain Gavras - Collider, "'Athena' Making-Of Video Reveals How Director Pulled Off Audacious 12-Minute Opening Shot" (October 2022)
Romain Gavras - CNN interview (September 2022)
Romain Gavras - New York Magazine (September 2022)
The Hollywood Reporter - review of Venice, starring David Rooney (September 2022)
The Globe and Mail - review, Barry Hertz (September 2022)
The Daily Beast - "Netflix's Athena Has One of the Best Opening Sequences in Movie History" (September 2022)
IMDB - Athena, reviews and trivia (the first scene was the last one filmed)
Official making-of - 37-minute video (published by Gavras on Twitter, October 2022)
Also read:
19-2 S2E1 (2015) Long Shot https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/19-2-plan-sequence - The other major urban action shot in the collection: same zero CGI, same controlled chaos, a shootout in a shopping mall filmed in a single take
True vs. False Long Takes - The Complete Guide https://www.plan-sequences.com/blog-plan-sequences/vrais-vs-faux-plans-sequences-guide-complet - Athena uses neither CGI nor digital stitching: how to classify a composite shot without special effects in the taxonomy of the true long take
