Roma sequence shot (2018) - Tuxpan Beach
Film title: Roma
Year : 2018
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Countries: Mexico / United States
Director of Photography: Alfonso Cuarón (Academy Award for Best Cinematography 2019)
Camera Operator A: Galo Olivares
Camera operator B: Alejandro Chávez
Gaffer: Javier Enriquez
VFX Supervisor: Dave Griffiths (MPC)
SAID: Ernesto Joven
Colorist: Steven J. Scott (Technicolor)
Camera: ARRI Alexa 65 (65mm wide-format sensor)
Lenses: ARRI Prime 65 (35mm and 50mm equivalents)
Format: Digital, Open Gate 6560 × 3100, 24 fps, 2.39:1
Stabilization: Technocrane on rails placed on a wooden pontoon
Method: Composite shot (stitching - digital assembly of several takes in post-production to create the illusion of a continuous shot)
Preparation: Approximately 6 months of total prep work on the film
Filming location: Tuxpan Beach, Veracruz State, Mexico
Film budget: $15 million
Total filming time: 110 days
Main sources: American Cinematographer (Cuarón interview, Feb. 2019), Variety, The Hollywood Reporter (Dave Griffiths interview, MPC)
Sofía forgot something in the car. She walks away with Pepe. Cleo stays on the beach with the three other children. She walks to the water's edge, motionless, her eyes fixed on Paco and Sofí as they splash in the waves. The camera is wide and steady. It barely moves.
A few seconds pass. Cleo scans the horizon. She loses sight of the two children. She calls out. No answer. So she moves forward, first with measured steps, then faster. The camera glides laterally with her, at the same speed, as if she were walking in step with her. The water reaches her calves, her thighs, her waist. Cleo can't swim. A first wave washes over her head. She reappears. A second one drowns her for a moment.
There's no music. Just the waves, the wind, her labored breathing. She finally grabs Paco. Then Sofí. And she heads back to shore, the two children in her arms, battling the tide. Sofía joins the group on the sand. They all collapse into an embrace. And the camera doesn't cut.
Why this scene is iconic
This is the emotional climax of Roma in the truest sense. Everything Cleo has endured over the course of two hours of the film converges in these few minutes : Fermín's abandonment, the loss of her stillborn child, social scorn, and loneliness. The rescue of the children is not a heroic act. It is an act of total, almost suicidal love from a woman who cannot swim but who enters the waves because it is her duty and because it is her family.
Cuarón made the radical choice to film the rescue in a single, seemingly wide, distant shot. No close-up of Cleo's tearful face. No underscoring music. No cuts to the children to create suspense. The viewer remains at a distance, the same distance a witness on the beach would have maintained. And it is precisely this refusal to manipulate the scene that makes it unbearable. You are trapped in the real time of anguish, counting the seconds as Cleo searches for the children in the surf.
The shot ends with Cleo's heartbreaking confession, in the same take, as she weeps: "Yo no la quería. Yo no quería que naciera" – "I didn't want her. I didn't want her to be born." This is the pivotal line of the entire film. And it arrives in the same camera movement, without a cut, without emphasis. The 2019 Oscar for Best Cinematography largely rewards this scene.
How they filmed it
The plan relies on a complex system and an acknowledged lie.
The camera. Cuarón shoots with an ARRI Alexa 65, a large-format sensor developed to rival 65mm film equipped with ARRI Prime 65 lenses. It was Lubezki who encouraged him to choose this format. "I was skeptical about widescreen, but the 65 had unbeatable dynamic range," Cuarón told American Cinematographer. The film is shot in color, in Open Gate (the entire sensor, without cropping), then desaturated in post-production. For the beach scene, this monstrous resolution allows the VFX team to retouch the image while ensuring sharpness.
The pontoon. To slide the camera along the beach and into the ocean, the team built a 200-foot (61-meter) wooden pontoon, half on the sand, half in the sea. But Tuxpan beach is uneven, and a perfectly horizontal pontoon was impossible to assemble. The solution: place a Technocrane (a precision telescopic crane with a counterbalanced arm) on the pontoon to compensate for all height variations in real time. Galo Olivares operated the camera, under the direction of Cuarón, who remained at a Flanders Scientific monitor, managing the angles, the actors, and the aperture.
The takes. Roma was filmed chronologically, meaning Aparicio arrived at the beach scene at the very end of filming, carrying the weight of the previous two months. Yalitza Aparicio can't swim in real life. Like Cleo. She has repeatedly stated that this scene was the one that terrified her the most in the entire film. Bad weather damaged the pier several times during filming. The clean take was finally achieved, but only after several attempts.
The secret. And here's the point the film's marketing has long glossed over: it's NOT a true continuous shot. Dave Griffiths, VFX supervisor at MPC (Moving Picture Company), confirmed this to The Hollywood Reporter: "We ended up lengthening the shot by adding a new middle section taken from other shots, which heightened the drama and the sense of danger." Specifically, several shots of Cleo saving the children were combined. Some shots of the children were digitally repositioned. Part of the sky was replaced to ensure continuity. Cuarón even requested that the wave height be increased in post-production to make the water appear deeper and more menacing. The shot ends by returning to the original take, just before the confession.
This is exactly the technique Emmanuel Lubezki had used on Birdmanfour years earlier, with Alejandro González Iñárritu: stitching, the invisible assembly of several takes to create the illusion of a single shot. Except here, on Tuxpan beach, there were no building corridors to hide the cuts. Just water, sand, and a constantly changing sky. All the magic rests on the work of the composers at MPC and colorist Steven J. Scott, who spent nearly 1,000 hours on the film's color grading, a significant portion of which was on this scene. The light changed throughout the day in Tuxpan, and it was necessary to create luminance analysis curves to automatically compensate for the variations between the assembled takes.
What to observe when reviewing it
The side-mounted camera. From the moment Cleo enters the water, the camera never moves back and forth; it glides only laterally, at the same speed as Cleo. This is a rule Cuarón maintains throughout the film: no dolly in, no dolly out (camera dolly moving forward or backward). The camera observes without getting closer.
The height of the waves. In the middle of the shot, just before Cleo grabs the children, compare the size of the waves to those at the beginning: they are noticeably higher. This is the digital manipulation used to heighten the sense of danger. The stitching is invisible, but the waves themselves betray the seam.
The return to the beach. When Cleo and the children walk back to the sand and Sofía joins them, notice the light on their faces and the shadows of the clouds on the ground. This is where we return to the original take, according to Dave Griffiths: "At the end of the shot, we return to the original take." The cut is concealed within the collective movement toward the beach.
Did you know that?
Roma marks a rare departure in the Cuarón/Lubezki partnership. The two Mexicans have worked together since their youth, on almost all of Cuarón's films except Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. For Roma, Lubezki was slated to be the Director of Photography. But deadlines dragged, and Lubezki had other commitments. It was Lubezki who told Cuarón, "Stop fooling around. You should do it." So Cuarón shot Roma alone, keeping a LUT (Look-Up Table) system inherited from Birdman and The Revenant, and therefore from Lubezki. This is why Roma's black and white has that "Lubezki-esque" softness that you don't find in classic black and white: Cuarón shot in color on Alexa 65, then desaturated it in post-production, with his friend's distinctive chromatic style. On the site, theLubezki arc is one of the most extensive: Children of Men (2006, two articles, the car and Bexhill), Gravity (2013), Birdman (2014), The Revenant (2015, two articles, the Arikara attack and the bear). Roma is technically outside the Lubezki arc, but ideologically, it is its direct heir.
Within the plan-sequences.com, Roma primarily falls into the ethical/moral category : the shot that refuses to manipulate, that keeps the viewer at a distance, that respects the real-time nature of suffering. It belongs to the same family as Haneke, Nemes (Son of Saul), or Angelopoulos. The long take is not a feat of virtuosity, it's a moral stance. Where Children of Men used the long take for immersion( you are in the car, in the chaos), Roma uses it for respectful distance. Cuarón delivers his most restrained film here, the least virtuosic on the surface, and that is precisely what makes the beach scene so devastating.
Finally, a symbolic detail: Cuarón revealed that water structures the entire film. The opening shot shows Cleo washing the floor with a hose; the final, dramatic scene of suffering depicts her battling the ocean. "The water lapping against the tiles in the opening shot of Roma is the same sea water that strikes Cleo."
Sources
Mark Dillon - American Cinematographer (ASC Magazine), "Roma: Memories of Mexico", interview with Alfonso Cuarón and the technical team (February 2019)
Carolyn Giardina - The Hollywood Reporter, "How 'Roma's' Visual Effects Team Created That Intense Ocean Sequence", interview by Dave Griffiths (MPC), December 2018
Variety - "How Alfonso Cuarón Filmed that 'Roma' Beach Scene in One Shot", Artisans series, February 2019
AFC - French Association of Cinematographers, "About Roma, directed and photographed by Alfonso Cuarón", Camerimage Bydgoszcz 2018
Ciara Wardlow - Film School Rejects, "The Cinematography of Roma" (February 2019)
Senses of Cinema - "The Fluids of Roma: Necropolitics and Class in Cuarón's Cinematic Memoir", March 2019
Wikipedia - Roma (2018 film); details on Aparicio and the chronological filming
Also read:
Gravity (2013) https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/gravity- Cuarón and Lubezki before Roma: the 15-minute opening shot, green screen and robotic arm
The Revenant - The Arikara Attack https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/the-revenant-attaque-arikara - Lubezki's last major project before Cuarón took over the legacy on Roma
