How ‘Pieces of a Woman’ Director Kornél Mundruczó Shot That 23-Minute, Single-Take Birth Scene

Thirty minutes into Pieces of a Woman, a new drama that began streaming on Netflix on Thursday, the title appears on the screen. Immediately preceding that is a jaw-dropping, gorgeous, and, at times, excruciating 23-minute scene captured in a single take. It’s a grueling depiction of every soon-to-be parent’s very worst nightmare: A home birth gone terribly wrong. Stars Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf play out the anxiety, delight, and eventual agony in real-time as parents Martha and Sean, accompanied by Molly Parker, who plays the incompetent midwife, Eva, who will later face criminal charges for negligence.

Director Kornél Mundruczó (White God, Jupiter’s Moon) and screenwriter Kata Wéber—who are married, and have one child together—took inspiration from their own experience with a miscarriage, though, as Mundruczó told Decider in a phone interview, their circumstances were “far from the movie. We don’t want to compare our experience to the movie.”

Nevertheless, it was a deeply personal project for both Mundruczó and Wéber. Though they had both grieved the loss of their child, they had—up until Wéber wrote the Pieces of a Woman play that the film was based on—almost never discussed it. “That broke the silence,” Mundruczó recalled.

The play, directed by Mundruczó, was performed in Poland by the artistic ensemble of TR Warszawa in 2018 in two acts. The first depicted the delivery and loss of the baby; the second, the aftermath. From the moment that the Hungarian director decided to adapt the play into his first English-language film, he knew he wanted to recapture the feeling he created on stage with a single-take shot of the birth—but he knew it would be tricky.

“A long take can be a real trap,” Mundruczó said. “Sometimes I love it, but sometimes I feel very narcissistic and aggressive, if you are not using it for the right reason. That was my major question. Can you create enough candor, loving, and life, [as opposed to] a choreographer creating your own sculpture?”

The camera set-up was crucial. Cinematographer Benjamin Loeb used a Gimbal—a mechanical camera-support device that stabilizes movement when filming—rather than handheld. “We found the handheld camera can be too personal because you feel someone’s shoulder,” Mundruczó said. “But if you are too distant with a still camera, then it’s very cold and mechanical. The spiritual language of a Gimbal is the most helpful.”

The cast did not rehearse in a traditional sense, but did extensively discuss blocking.

“Imagine more like an action scene,” Mundruczó said. “We built it up and blocked it very carefully. There were really like 30 separate chapters inside that scene—this is the first phantom pain, this is the first joke, this is when we get the wrong mid-wife. Chapter by chapter, we talked through, but we don’t really go into the scene before shooting day. It needs to go to a very dangerous place. You cannot risk the spirit for a rehearsal—what can come on a shooting day.”

The scene was shot over the course of two days in a home in Montreal, and the preparation was meticulous. Mundruczó, Kirby, and Parker spoke with midwife consultant Elan McAllistar for the smaller details, especially the ones that may be different in America than they are in Eastern Europe: How often would the midwife check the heart rate of the baby? At what point would they call the ambulance?

They shot the delivery four times on the first day of production, and then two more times the next day. Mundruczó purposefully didn’t have strict blocking for Loeb, so that “every take is a bit different. Imagine a painter who is doing different series from the same models,” he said. In the end, it was the fourth take on Day 1 that ended up in the final cut. (“The energy on day one was impossible to beat,” Loeb said in an interview with Little White Lies.)

Though the detail of the scene may feel punishingly thorough, Mundruczó deliberately avoided anything too graphic, both in terms of gore and nudity. Rather than follow Martha into the bathroom as she draws a bath, for example, we stay with the midwife in the bedroom.

“It was important not to be voyeuristic, or to abstain,” Mundruczó said. “You have to find the balance—how you can be tender and shy, even, and also just keep the grace for a moment, which is very animalistic. Moments like the blood drop—I have to create very tiny moments when you can kind of sell this, but at the same time, you know, we really try not to go into a voyeuristic place. We try be closer to the human faces than the human body.”

At the scene’s climax, the baby is born. For a moment, it seems like everything will be OK. The baby is crying. Martha is crying. Sean is taking pictures. Then, in the film’s most haunting moment, the baby—choking—turns blue. That effect was CGI, but the rest of that moment was done with a real baby, just a few months old, said Mundruczó. “We had an amazing Montreal French mother gave the opportunity to shoot with her baby. She was really part of the shot. It was a real baby and you can watch it on [Kirby’s] face. That connection is the whole movie, and it would never happen [with a CGI baby]. It’s impossible.”

At this point, the shot finally ends by cutting to Sean running out to meet the ambulance. You do not see the moment of the baby’s death, because, said Mundruczó, “I really didn’t want to go there. Not just because of the voyeurism, but also because I would like to tell a story about grace, love, and strength, and not just about loss and tragedy.”

About one month before the Pieces of a Woman release, musician and actor FKA Twigs filed a lawsuit accusing LaBeouf of sexual battery, assault, and infliction of emotional distress. Mundruczó says he finds the allegations “serious,” but ultimately decided not to delay the film. “My heart was full of sorrow and sadness, to read all of the accounts,” he said. “I believe all humans should feel like they can come forward and tell the truth. I stand with them. And I am proud that the film center is the complexity of the beauty of a female in a journey, and we don’t want to lose focus on the beautiful performances and our deeply personal story.”

Watch Pieces of a Woman on Netflix