Filming the trial
With a single set crowded with the entire cast at all times, cameras at a distance and long takes (sometimes up to twenty minutes), the actors and director reflect on the particular intensity of shooting God on Trial.

Transcript

Antony Sher (Akiba)
Because it was almost a single set and we were all in the set which is the hut, you know, where the prisoners stay, we were all in it all the time — both the principal actors and the supporting artists. Because of the intensity of what happened in those sequences of the trial of God on Trial, an intensity happened in the room just naturally that I've ever only known to happen on stage before.

Dominic Cooper (Moche)
The whole piece is a court scene so it is done as a piece of theater and the bunks are obviously surrounding the area. Then the cameras, the three cameras that we used, were kind of hidden. You weren't ever sure where those cameras were that move, and some would be steadicam. So you couldn't, I mean not that you do that often, but often takes are very short, or you know when you have to be really revved up in a film set. You know when it is you, and you have to go for it. On this, you had to give 100% the whole time, which made it exhausting but so exciting. I mean, because you were just there, it was to do, most importantly, the listening.

Andy de Emmony (Director)
We wanted the debate to sit in that room between them all. And somehow thinking it is a single camera, individual lines and reactions, would have killed it. And by sitting the cameras outside of that space and watching them inside it, I think gave it a life we couldn't have gotten any other way really.

Rupert Graves (Mordechai)
It was a very unusual way to make a film — there were just three cameras, four cameras I think sometimes. And we did great long takes and sometimes twenty-minute takes which you never, ever get. And one of the lovely things for the actors was that the cameras were sort of hidden. They were way out of our focus. There was one a long way away and two on either side. We didn't have much idea of where the cameras were. I mean you certainly knew what you were looking at and what frame you were on, so you didn't have any of that sort of worry about playing for the camera or worrying about positions or anything like that. You could just involve yourself. And because the subject matter is so absorbing, and because in a 20-minute take, you can completely imagine yourself in a situation and you can respond to what other people are saying, you are completely caught up in it.

Stephen Dillane (Schmidt)
It felt like sort of old-fashioned television in a way. It felt like a very intelligent, well thought out piece of writing. There is sort of an adrenaline element to it, and I think that it facilitates a kind of fluidity of exchange that you would get in the theater, and maybe you don't always get in cinema.

Stellan Skarsgård (Baumgarten)
There is a quality that you get when you shoot long takes for sometimes almost twenty minutes, which you also get it in the theater, but rarely get when you do films. That is when the material starts to breathe by itself. You get into a rhythm. Your endorphins start to work. You stop being nervous and everybody becomes together like an organism.