A Hell of an Introduction

How director Romain Gavras and his cast and crew created the year's wildest movie opening.

-  Bilge Ebiri

The most stunning scene of any movie this year was conceived partly as an attempt to beat your attention span. Athena, Romain Gavras's riveting tale of a massive modern-day uprising at a French housing project, opens with one of the most impressive single shots ever put to film: an intense, unbroken 11-minute sequence that begins with a press conference outside a police station, plunges into the madness that erupts when a group of young people raids the station, and eventually ends over a mile away against the castlelike ramparts of a housing estate that has been taken over and fortified for an epic, inevitable clash with the cops.

The director wanted this opener to accomplish a number of important tasks: introduce his central characters, establish the grammar of the picture, and set up the location of the (fictional) Athena housing project where most of the movie takes place. But he also wanted to make sure he held the average streaming viewer's attention. "It's my first time doing a film for a platform and for Netflix in particular," Gavras says. "And when we were writing with Ladj Ly"-who also produced-"we were thinking we needed to start really strong because even when I watch a Netflix film, if it's not interesting in the first five minutes, I'm going to go away." By contrast, he says, "when you do a cinema film, you can ease people in because they're not going to leave after minute ten or 15."