Why would a director refuse to cut for minutes at a time?

Most movie shots last a few seconds. A long take is a shot with a duration much longer than the conventional editing pace of the film, or of films in general. Directors choose it on purpose, because shot length changes how a scene feels: longer shots can make a scene seem more relaxed and slower-paced, while shorter shots make it seem urgent and faster-paced.

Early on, length was a technical limit. A camera magazine could only hold so much film. Hitchcock wanted Rope (1948) to look like one continuous take, but his magazines held no more than 1000 feet of 35 mm film, so each take lasts up to 10 minutes. To hide the cuts, many takes end by moving toward a featureless surface, such as the back of a character's jacket, and the next one starts from the same spot. The entire film has only 11 shots.

Long takes are also hard. Any error would force the filmmaker to restart from scratch, which is why very long shots are only occasionally used. For a long shot in True Detective, director Cary Joji Fukunaga said the shoot required the involvement of every single department, like a live theatre show.

The payoff is that nothing is hidden by an edit. The camera can follow people through a room and let the background action play out in the same frame as the foreground. Orson Welles's Touch of Evil opens with a long tracking crane shot, and Robert Altman's The Player later opened with an eight-minute shot, in which a character even mentions Welles's.