Daredevil: Born Again’s One-Take Fight Scene Is All About the ‘Train Tracks of Fate’

Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead explain the ‘scary’ prospect of creating a oner for the king of Marvel oners.Full spoilers follow for Episode 1 of Daredevil: Born Again.

The Netflix Daredevil show became known for its “oners” – that is, long, continuous camera takes that seemingly have no edits. It all started with the now iconic hallway fight in Season 1, and each season that followed had some new one-take action scene. Now that continues with Daredevil: Born Again, which features an extended battle in Episode 1 between Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock and “Dex” Poindexter/Bullseye (Wilson Bethel) as the camera follows them through Josie’s Bar, up several flights of stairs to the building’s rooftop, back down to Karen (Deborah Ann Woll) as she holds the dying Foggy (Elden Henson), and back up to the fight. All while they’re kicking the crap out of each other. It’s a lot.

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who directed the episode, said it was “scary” to follow the famous Daredevil single takes that had come before, let alone try to top them.

Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock and “Dex” Poindexter/Bullseye (Wilson Bethel) face off.“So we were talking about like, how do we reach the bar that [the Netflix oners] set for acting, for drama, for tragedy in that original show,” Moorhead tells IGN. “It’s like, ‘Yeah, we’re filmmakers, we like oners, we’ve done them.’ But it’s intimidating to even watch [the original show] to figure out how they did it.”

He adds that they never even had the chance to talk to Cox about how the prison oner from Season 3 was shot. “There’s pressure to get it right,” says Moorhead. So part of their philosophy in achieving the shot in Born Again involved a cinematic philosophy that they call the “train tracks of fate.”

Watch one minute of the fight scene in the clip below:

“Thank God we had the steadying hand of Phil Silvera, our action director, second unit director, who choreographed the whole thing,” explains Benson. “And we decided on this really rigid camera language for it, because what we’ve noticed [is] that the most popular kind of oner is you put a camera on the person’s shoulder and you just chase them around, which is exciting to all filmmakers, basically. But we decided in this one what we wanted to do was, if this is a show about a man who believes that he has lost his chance at redemption, lost the blessings of his faith, then our camera has this omniscience as well. It’s like it’s watching.”

Hence the “train tracks of fate,” as the team essentially treated the camera’s point of view as if it already knew what was going to happen before it happens.

If this is a man who believes that he has lost his chance at redemption, lost the blessings of his faith, then our camera has this omniscience as well. It’s like it’s watching.

“So we decided to nail our camera down,” continues Benson. “And tell our camera that it already knows how this goes. It knows that Foggy dies. It knows that [Matt] crosses a line and tries to kill someone on a roof. And the camera is this dispassionate entity that is just slowly moving on what we call the train tracks of fate, moving with the action, but not following it in a frenetic way. And you just get this sense, this tightness in your stomach, of doom. You just know it’s going to go terribly wrong. It’s exciting, but there’s this other thing too. There’s this other layer of like, ‘Something’s terribly wrong here.’”

Charlie Cox points out that placing the scene at the start of the series makes perfect sense for Daredevil’s story this season.

“Because if it’s the end of the season, then there’s an argument to have it be more green-grass, frenetic, following the action kind of on a whim, as it were, to tell the story that no one knows what’s going to happen,” says the actor. “But because it happens so early on in our show, and just by the placement of it, you are telling the story of a doom. You are telling the story of, there’s a premonition here, there’s a foregone conclusion to this. And if you look inside yourself, you know what it is.”

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