“Victoria,” the One-Shot Wonder

Studio 360 | Oct 15, 2015

Sebastian Schipper has worked in film for almost three decades, appearing in some of Germany’s most well-known foreign releases, including Run Lola Run, as well as writing and directing his own material. But Victoria, his fourth feature film, is unlike anything you’ve seen. It’s a heist movie filmed in one shot, in one take, with no cuts — the camera moves non-stop in an elaborately choreographed routine through the buildings and back alleys of Berlin. Adding to that feat, the film’s script, only 12 pages long, manages to bring out the kind of nuances you don’t normally see in action flicks.

Hear Kurt's extended conversation with Sebastian Schipper below.

Kurt Andersen: I was afraid I would give a spoiler by saying it's about a heist, but you've already said so. So why did you make a movie about a heist?

Sebastian Schipper: It seemed like a good idea. Honestly, if I'm going to shoot a film in one take, why not also take the best of two worlds I love about cinema. For me, in independent movies, the characters get some space. We get to know them. They're not just two-dimensional, but they can be full, real characters.

But on the other hand, I really like genre stuff. I want to be entertained. I want stuff to happen. So it is about a heist, but it's also about these people. So this film is [a] one-take heist, but that doesn't describe the heart of this film. Because it's about friendship and falling in love and being young.

I read somewhere that you have fantasized about robbing a bank.

I worked on a script forever. I was sitting at my desk with my computer, and I was going into my fifth year, and it felt like, man, this is your life now. Your mind does anything to get away from the writing. And I thought, “I could rob a bank with two friends.” But then I thought, “You're a filmmaker. Just make a film about it.”

Just the tension you must have felt [while shooting the film] is unimaginable to me.

Let's face it, that night there was a film god on watch, going, "Ah, let's help those kids out. I was young once."

You said that if you were a musician, this is the first album where "we didn't copy our favorite band." Why is that so?

When you start out, you copy your idols. And in film, because it's such an expensive enterprise, [with] all this anxiety that the money's gonna get lost, you copy. And I think that's a lot of what we see. It's a film like The Godfather a little bit, or it's a film like Bourne Identity a little bit, it's a film like 2001 a little bit, and what that means is: it's not as good. And one of the ideas for Victoria was to get away from the reference.