Building 'Silent House' - NYTimes.com The filmmaking team Chris Kentis and Laura Lau drew notice with their 2004 shark thriller "Open Water." While their latest release, "Silent House," takes place on dry land, its lead character still finds herself in too deep. A remake of the Uruguayan film "La Casa Muda," "Silent House" stars Elizabeth Olsen as Sarah, a young woman who spends the day helping fix up her family's old summer home. But the project, and the day, turn much darker than expected. The action and story unfold in 88 minutes and the film is meant to look like one continuous shot. Like other works that seem to be one long take, "Silent House" does have edits but they're not visible to the average viewer. To pull that off, Mr. Kentis and Ms. Lau needed to do some extensive planning. They talked about the process during a recent interview in New York. First there was Ms. Lau's script, which imagined a house before an actual location was chosen. When a house near the water in New Rochelle, N.Y., was found, Ms. Lau rewrote to match the setting. "Every moment was accounted for in the script, which was only 60 pages," she said. And then it was about constantly rehearsing. At the house, she and Mr. Kentis went through the whole movie. "Laura would play the part of Sarah," he said, "and I'd follow her with the camera and record." They used the recordings as a reference, much like a moving storyboard. We would work out all the choreography and the possibilities before we brought the crew on. All this advance work was necessary because they wouldn't be able to smooth over problems in the editing room. "There was no room for spontaneity," Mr. Kentis said. The filmmakers worked with the director of photography, Igor Martinovic, on ways to get the most out of their camera, a small Canon 5D that allowed for flexibility. "It's that camera's shallow depth of field and the lenses we used that helped us tell the story," Mr. Kentis said. You could use it to draw the audience's attention to something within the frame or you could use it to reflect a character's state of mind. In the scene below, Ms. Olsen's character wanders through the house with a lantern. The filmmakers actually enlisted the actress in the cinematography. Mr. Martinovic sometimes wore a piece of foil that Ms. Olsen would have to shine a light on to reflect the light back on her face. Along with the lanterns and flashlights used by the characters, the house was rigged with lights on the ceiling. "We made it into our own little soundstage," Mr. Kentis said. There was a dimmer board operator in a different room who ran all the lights in the house. Mr. Kentis and Ms. Lau had to watch and direct scenes from a monitor in another room. We're used to being right there working with the actor. So this was a different experience," said Mr. Kentis. "I don't think we had a choice, though," Ms. Lau added. There were so many elements that had to come together, we had to see that we were actually getting our movie. Because there was no way to fix it afterwards.