Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti Nailed First Takes, Halving 'The Debut' Shoot

Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti delivered takes so complete on the first attempt that director Jesse Eisenberg cut "The Debut" shoot short — two scheduled days of filming compressed into one.

Speaking to the audience at the Middleburg Film Festival, where "The Debut" opened the festival, Eisenberg described the phenomenon as rare enough to be hard to explain.

"Oh, my God. Paul and Julianne, I feel like I have trouble describing this to people who don't make movies every day, because it's so unusual," the Oscar-nominated "A Real Pain" filmmaker said. "Normally, when you're making a movie, especially the people who are the leads, they take five or six takes."

Giamatti was absent from the panel, out sick. Eisenberg delivered his praise seated next to Moore.

What did the actors actually do?

Eisenberg broke down the mechanics. Leads, he said, usually need five or six passes at a scene before they settle — comfortable with props, secure in lines, aware of where the light will fall.

"You very rarely, if never, ever find two actors who on their first takes are perfect with their performance, with props, with lines," he said.

The production schedule showed the effect. "The Debut" had allotted eight days for musical numbers involving the large ensemble. The first two days of that block — big ensemble musical work — were shot in a single day.

"With every moment, what you're seeing in this movie is the first and second take of the two lead performers," Eisenberg said.

What does this change for the budget?

Eisenberg has already answered part of that question. In a previous interview with IndieWire, he was blunt about the film's economics: "This is a small budget movie. [Nobody got paid oodles of money]."

The trade-off was speed. "When you have actors like this, they're great. When they were good, we would go to the next scene," he said.

At Middleburg he repeated the logic. The decision to shoot one or two takes of each scene in the movie-musical hybrid rested entirely on the actors' precision.

"It's all because they were perfect. And it's like you see the first take and you're like, 'We can do it again, but we would waste film? It's perfect.' So it was all that," Eisenberg said.

The caveat

Eisenberg's account is a director praising his leads at a festival appearance for his own opening-night film. No one from the production side — a producer, an editor, a line manager — has publicly confirmed the shooting ratio. "Perfect" is also the director's word, not a verifiable measure; what a first take contains on set and what survives into the final cut can differ.

What is concrete: the schedule, the eight-day musical block, the two days shot in one, and the small budget. Moore and Giamatti's first-take reputations now precede the film itself.

Eisenberg, newly credited as a songwriter on the humorous musical hybrid, will see whether that economy holds when "The Debut" reaches wider audiences.