When director Neil Burger (Divergent, The Illusionist) started making headlines for his latest movie, Inheritance, the focus fell on the fact that the filmmaker used an iPhone to capture his globe-trotting story. Now that the upcoming 2025 movie has made it into theaters, you can see for yourself how the results turned out. I, for one, thought the handheld flexibility of the tiny but effective iPhone 13 camera immersed the audience deeper into the intrigue that swirls around Maya (Phoebe Dynevor of Bridgerton fame), the daughter of a spy who is trying to rescue her father (Rhys Ifans) now that he has been kidnapped. For Dynevor, though, the experience led to some unusual complications after the fact.
As you will see when you watch Inheritance, which opened in theaters on January 24, the movie employs guerilla-style filmmaking that has Neil Burger and his cast quite literally filming in any location that happen to be occupying. When Maya has to travel between cities, Burger captures Phoebe Dynevor having a conversation in her airplane seat. Scenes take place in hotels, restaurants, and even on a motorbike chase through the crowded streets of Delhi, and made the congestion work for the character.
But as you might know, if you read a lot of entertainment coverage, movies aren’t shot this way. Too often, there’s a lot of waiting around as director, cinematographers, set designers, makeup artists and more do what they can to perfect a shot. When I had the opportunity to speak with Fair Play star Phoebe Dynevor if transitioning back to traditional filming after Inheritance was challenging, she told CinemaBlend:
Yeah, it was quite difficult. My first film after Inheritance was weird because Inheritance was so, you know, you wake up and you go, go, go. You shoot all day – every moment that we could find – in hotels and airports. We’d be on those long haul planes shooting on them. So there wasn’t really a break. And then going back to a normal set, most of the time you’re just sitting around waiting for setups for most of the day. So it’s a very, very different experience, in that regard.
I think that Dynevor’s next film after Inheritance is Famous, a thriller she’s making with Zac Efron for A24, but we’ll have to wait a bit until we learn more about that movie.
One of my biggest questions with regard to filming on the iPhone simply came from keeping the images in focus. Too many times, when I’m using a phone to video something, and I pan or scan the way that Neil Burger does in Inheritance, light will change the focus of the lens, and images might blur… something that never happens in this film. I asked the director about it, and he told me:
Well, the operator and cameraman and director of photography, Jackson Hunt, is incredibly talented. He’s literally focusing (the image) on screen while he is operating the phone. … We had pretty elaborate image capture software that had a lot of interesting things that it could do. But he wasn’t using any kind of stabilization on it, or anything like that. He was just handholding (the iPhone) like you or I would handhold a camera.
Might this be the future? People have often said that as phones become more advanced, it democratizes the filmmaking process, meaning virtually anyone can make a movie like Inheritance – so long as they can afford all of the travel that’s necessary. I’m with Phoebe Dynevor, in this instance. If tech like this makes setups faster, thereby speeding up the storytelling process, then I’m sure there are plenty of craftspeople who’d back that technology, so more movies can open in theaters.
Look for Inheritance, playing at a movie near you.