In 2021, One Shot blasted into action fans’ hearts, making full use of Scott Adkins’ varied skill set. It’s a high-octane tactical action movie with a fun gimmick: The whole movie is designed to look like one continuous take.
The newly released sequel, One More Shot, now available everywhere you rent or purchase movies digitally,is a more confident, polished effort than the original, adding a compelling and familiar action-movie setting (an airport), more action legends (Tom Berenger and Michael Jai White), and a string of exciting fight sequences that make the most of the location, the conceit, and the talent.
One More Shot also reunites director James Nunn with Adkins and fight choreographer Tim Man, who’ve each worked with Nunn four times. But this movie is Nunn and Adkins’ most accomplished collaboration yet. Polygon spoke with Nunn about the difficulties of shooting an action movie in one take, following in the wake of Sam Mendes’ Oscar winner 1917, hiding the cuts, what he learned from the first movie, and his hopes for the future of the series.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Polygon: As someone who’s filmed more conventional action movies, like Eliminators , what do you think is different for the audience when a movie is portrayed as one continuous take?
James Nunn: Well, it’s funny, because it started as an exercise in How can I push something? How can I be different? How can I be unique? How can I use Scott’s raw, amazing ability to the best? And how can I use my technical knowhow? So it actually started as more of an experiment in just proving to people, I’m really good technically, he’s really good physically and on camera — merge them skills, make a movie. That was where the initial pitch came from. But as time went on, and as we started filming it, honestly, I’ve kind of fallen in love with doing it this way. You realize that you’re pushing this immersion on your audience.
All movies have a ticking clock. That’s the
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