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In episode four of True Detective, there was a 6-minute long, single take, tracking shot sequence.

What is the longest, scripted, single take (no cuts) sequence in movies / television?

I am not considering live (sketch comedy, reality television, improv, talk shows, etc.) or presentation-style (documentaries, how-to shows, etc.) takes.

Answers are not restricted to any particular recording media (film, digital, etc.), just the length of the single take and that the content be of intent. For example, the True Detective sequence was a 6-minute long action sequence with no cuts made as the camera followed the complex, scripted sequence with no cheats or trickery involved.

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    Not really a tracking shot, but the extended take in Old Boy was around four minutes long. Definitely not a record, but it deserves mention since it was a fighting scene.
    – jessecurry
    Commented Feb 12, 2014 at 20:47
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    All the movies in the Before {Sunrise, Sunset, Midnight}-trilogy have long takes, and I believe at least one clocks in at around 13 minutes (source)
    – John Kemeny
    Commented Feb 12, 2014 at 23:32
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    My favorite is Robert Altman's the Player. Not a record, but very well done.
    – MattBianco
    Commented Feb 13, 2014 at 9:00
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    Hitchcock's "Rope" was filmed without a visible cut - but I guess you are looking for "real" single takes
    – user1426
    Commented Feb 13, 2014 at 21:43
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    @MeatTrademark - not needed for me; unlike some , I review new answers constsntly.
    – JoshDM
    Commented Feb 14, 2014 at 13:25

8 Answers 8

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I guess the key here is using the word film in your title.

With film you are limited to the length in a canister and no amount of creativity can change that. With digital video this constraint goes out the window. So for film, it looks like Snake Eyes wins at just over 13 minutes. For digital video, Agadam looks to be a clear winner, endorsed by the Guinness Book of World Records at 2 hr 3 min 30 sec, beating out 7333 Seconds of Johanna by 27 seconds.

EDIT If @NapoleonWilson is correct, and DePalma used cuts, then The Player – Opening Shot: 8 minutes, 5 seconds might be the winner, and I hope it is, because it talks about other opening shots during the shot.

All these directors owe a debt of gratitude to Hitchcock for trying it in the first place. Rope was a very difficult and singular goal to strive for and he did a remarkable job given the technological and financial hurdles he had to overcome.

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    Yet the scene in Snake Eyes was composed of smaller ~5 min takes with hidden cuts and thus similar to Rope, as explained in this answer. It wasn't an actual 13 min take and is thus unlikely to win anything in the context of this question.
    – Napoleon Wilson
    Commented Feb 14, 2014 at 12:25
  • I was not restricting to film as in the media used, just the context of the product.
    – JoshDM
    Commented Feb 14, 2014 at 13:19
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    Well then, you got a two-for-one answer! :)
    – Meat Trademark
    Commented Feb 15, 2014 at 2:45
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    @MeatTrademark: The two-strip camera trick would probably be impractical, but many filmmakers have built or commissioned all sorts of custom camera equipment; a magazine which could handle oversized rolls of film would seem a lot less difficult than many other things which filmmakers have actually built. Ten minutes isn't terribly long, and it's not hard to imagine a filmmaker (before the age of digital) wanting a continuous take of a long scene which included unpredictably-moving elements that would be very hard to match between takes.
    – supercat
    Commented Feb 4, 2015 at 23:12
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    Indeed, as Snake Eyes suggests, it's really easy to hide cuts these days, and probably much cheaper than trying to film an incredibly long shot in one go, so unless someone is specifically trying to break the record, there's no pressing reason to do these kinds of shots "for real".
    – John Sensebe
    Commented Mar 11, 2016 at 14:41
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There have been movies where the entire movie is a single take.

The best I can find based on quick research are Russian Ark at 96 minutes, and Timecode at 97 minutes. Timecode is actually a quad-split screen film (four different videos running in four different quadrants of the screen), each of which is a single take shot, running for the entire movie. I included Russian Ark if you wanted something that has a more direct narrative and doesn't change focus to a different story in a different part of the frame by upping the audio track for that frame.

Update: Had I bothered to look a little further down in my Google search, there is evidently a new king for longest single take film. It's a Swedish film called 7333 Seconds of Johanna. The film is 2 hours, 3 minutes, and 3 seconds long, and was filmed with Guinness World Record officials present the entire time.

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    If you had looked a little more, you would have found Agadam - an Indian Tamil Horror film, running time of 2 hours, 3 minutes and 30 seconds, beating Johanna by 27 seconds and registered in Guinness Book of World Records as well.
    – HindK
    Commented Jul 4, 2014 at 10:10
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2015 saw the release of Victoria, in which the entire 2 hours and 18 minutes of action takes place in one uncut take.

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    The opening scene of Snake Eyes wasn't a single take, though, as explained in this answer.
    – Napoleon Wilson
    Commented Feb 14, 2014 at 12:31
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I don't know "The longest shot" in all of the movies but I remember this movie Children Of Men directed by Alfonso Cuarón which has few long shots,

The length of the long takes: Long take in the car when Julian is shot - 3:58, Long take of the birth - 3:11, Long take of the siege - 6:18.

And Quentin Tarantino has a way of filming long shots.

His films will often include one long, unbroken take where a character is followed around somewhere.

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  • The ones in Children of Men where edited digitally.
    – Martin Schröder
    Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 22:52
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It's not longer than the movies listed above, but the TV show Mad About You had a single take, commercial-free, 20-minute long episode called the "The Conversation". I haven't seen it since it was aired, though, so I don't remember if the camera was fixed or not.

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    Camera did not need to be fixed, as long as it was a continuous take.
    – JoshDM
    Commented Feb 5, 2015 at 23:15
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There was an episode on the Third Watch TV show, that, as far as i can tell, was made entirely on a single shot. That is, about 43 minutes.

In fact, I usually never watched the show, but I started wathcing that one episode, and the fact that the first minutes had a single shot caught my eye, I kept looking it, and the whole episode was one single shot! Single camera, tracking among all the characters.

The episode was "A call for help"

Or at least it had VERY good editing, because you never notice if they change something.

update:

I've found out that it indeed was made on long shots, in ten minute loops without cuts. I guess each loop was sepparated by commercials on TV.

more info here: http://thirdwatch.wikia.com/wiki/A_Call_For_Help

nonetheless, it was a nice episode, you don't usually see more than a couple minutes of single takes/shots in either TV or Movies.

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There's a horror movie called Silent House, I think there's two or three cuts in it but they are all pretty cleverly hidden, besides that the movie is a continuous shot, probably about 30-40 minutes at a time.

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