Taglines: Four cameras. One take. No edits. Real time.
Timecode movie storyline. L.A., real time. From her limo, the wealthy Lauren eavesdrops on her lover Rose’s tryst with movie producer Alex Green. The assignation takes place in his company’s screening room between meetings. Alex’s wife walks from therapy to his office, tells him she’s leaving him, weeps in a bookstore restroom, and walks home with a cocaine-sniffing actress friend for what may lead to sex.
Alex is drinking, wants to quit work and move to Tuscany, laughs at pretentious movie pitches, and puts off Rose when she asks for an audition. A film director sees Rose and decides she’s perfect for his next picture; she takes a screen test. She’s ecstatic and calls Lauren: jealousy takes over.
Timecode is a 2000 American experimental film written and directed by Mike Figgis and featuring a large ensemble cast, including Salma Hayek, Stellan Skarsgård, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Suzy Nakamura, Kyle MacLachlan, Saffron Burrows, Holly Hunter, Julian Sands, Xander Berkeley, Leslie Mann and Mía Maestro.
The film is constructed from four continuous 93-minute takes that were filmed simultaneously by four cameramen; the screen is divided into quarters, and the four shots are shown simultaneously.[2] The film depicts several groups of people in Los Angeles as they interact and conflict while preparing for the shooting of a movie in a production office. The dialogue was largely improvised, and the sound mix of the film is designed so that the most significant of the four sequences on screen dominates the soundtrack at any given moment.
An allusion to this film can be heard during another of Mike Figgis’s films, Hotel. In the first moment the screen is split into four quadrants. The sound of milk being steamed in one quadrant combines with the sound of an actor tapping beats onto a paperback novel in another quadrant to create a very subtle imitation of the sounds and music heard during the first few minutes in Timecode.
The movie was shot with four hand-held digital cameras, in one take, on the sixteenth performance. Largely improvised, Figgis provided the actors with blank, four-staff music manuscript paper, with each octave representing a camera view at that particular moment in time, up to the 93 minutes of camera capacity. The actors themselves personally kept track of the activities occurring in other camera points of view that were relative to their performance.
Rehearsals were single-take performances, filmed over fifteen days. Filmed in the mornings, with the actors fully involved, the footage was reviewed and discussed in the afternoons. Four separate monitors replayed each camera point of view simultaneously.
Timecode (2000)
Directed by: Mike Figgis
Starring: Saffron Burrows, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Stellan Skarsgård, Salma Hayek, Viveka Davis, Richard Edson, Aimee Graham, Glenne Headly, Holly Hunter, Danny Huston
Screenplay by: Mike Figgis
Production Design by: Charlotte Malmlöf
Cinematography by: Patrick Alexander Stewart
Film Editing by: Mike Figgis
Costume Design by: Donna Casey-Aira
Set Decoration by: Jennifer M. Gentile
Music by: Mike Figgis, Anthony Marinelli
MPAA Rating: R for drug use, sexuality, language and a scene of violence.
Distributed by: Sony ScreenGems
Release Date: April 28, 2000
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