Athena: Inside the Cinematography of Romain Gavras’ One-Take Epic

Athena landed on Netflix in September 2022 with an opening take that people are still pulling apart nearly four years later. Roughly eleven minutes, built to play as a single uninterrupted shot. A police press conference outside Paris collapses into an assault on a housing estate, and the camera stays inside it the whole way.

We had been talking to that crew long before the film came out. Matias Boucard AFC, Myron Mance and Lara Perrotte Boucard were among the early contributors to FilmmakersWorld, back when this was an Instagram community trading frames, rigs and set stories. When Athena came out, they came on our channel and walked through it live, with set material that had not been published anywhere.

That livestream is why this page exists. We cut it into two parts for our YouTube channel, and both are below. Around them, the context: what they shot on, and what happened before the first day of principal photography.

Part one: on set

In the first half of the conversation, Matias, Myron and Lara go through the shoot itself. Worth watching before the breakdown below.

Technical Choices

Matias Boucard shot Athena mainly on an ARRI ALEXA 65, with an ALEXA Mini LF as the second camera. Lenses were Tribe7 Blackwing, both binaries and bespoke, alongside an Angénieux Optimo 30-80mm zoom and a 30mm Leitz Thalia, all supplied by RVZ in Paris. Lighting came from ARRI SkyPanels through ARRI Rental Group. SmallHD monitors covered the frame from multiple positions, and the aerial work ran on FreeFly MoviPro systems provided by Full Motion, with Benjamin Lavayssière piloting.

The ALEXA 65 is a large, heavy camera, and it had to stay in motion for takes running eight to ten minutes, on Steadicam and on gimbal. Matias Boucard has said he wanted the right lens for every take without paying for it in weight, which is how a set of light primes ends up on a film that looks this maximalist.

What a 65mm sensor does inside a crowd

Matias Boucard worked around a 30mm on the ALEXA 65, roughly the equivalent of a 14mm in Super 35, which changes the relationship between what sits close to the camera and what sits behind it. On screen the effect is that a single character stays readable against a background of buildings and bodies, without cutting away to find them.

That is worth keeping in mind while watching what Lara Perrotte Boucard was doing during that opening sequence.

They shot the film twice

Before principal photography, Boucard and Gavras made a version of the entire film with almost nobody on it. It started on Boucard’s iPhone, then ran five weeks with Boucard, his camera assistant, Gavras, the actors and around ten of the young performers, and produced a rough hour-and-a-half cut. Boucard has said they shot the movie twice, and that this first pass was there to find the problems before the real one. The opening sequence itself then got three or four days of rehearsal.

On a film built from long takes there is no editing room to fix a rhythm problem. The rhythm had to exist before the shoot did.

Part two: the questions

The second half goes department by department, into the gimbal work, and into the questions our community sent in during the live.

The crew, four years on

What that livestream did not tell us at the time is that we were watching a team form.

Lara Perrotte Boucard pulled focus on Athena. She has since shot Gener8ion’s Storm for Gavras, and works as second unit cinematographer on Sacrifice. Her own conversation with us is here. Myron Mance ran the gimbal on Athena and now signs the aerial cinematography on the same film. Aymeric Colas operated the ALEXA 65 on Steadicam during the opening sequence and is still A Camera and Steadicam.

Sacrifice, Romain Gavras’ first English-language feature, is set to arrive on Netflix on October 16, 2026. Boucard shot it in Bulgaria and Greece. Our full profile on his work is here, and the behind-the-scenes is coming, as it has for everything this group has made since 2022.

Credits of Athena:

Directed by: Romain Gavras
Written by: Romain Gavras, Ladj Ly, Elias Belkeddar
Produced by Iconoclast: Charles-Marie Anthonioz, Mourad Belkeddar, Jean Duhamel, Nicolas Lhermitte Produced by Ladj Ly and Romain Gavras
Director of Photography: Matias Boucard
Original Music: Gener8ion Editor: Benjamin Weill
Production Designer: Arnaud Roth
Costume Designer: Noémie Veissier
Starring: Dali Benssalah (Abdel), Sami Slimane (Karim), Anthony Bajon (Jérôme), Ouassini Embarek (Moktar), Alexis Manenti (Sébastien)

Filmmaking Crew: Lara Perrotte – Focus Puller
Myron Mance – Gimbal Operator
Aymeric Colas – Steadicam Operator
Seb Grasso – Grip
Benjamin Lavayssiere – Drone Pilot
Conseil Travelling Cascade
Arno Roth – Set Designer and many others.

All the chaos was organized by @aminharfouch @viddalocca25 the amazing AD team, they had to synchronize also with a police truck on fire made by @morganedemetrau

FilmmakersWorld has followed this crew since 2022, from the Athena livestream to Gener8ion’s Storm, whose behind-the-scenes reached 5.3 million views across our channels. Next: Sacrifice.

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Updated in August 2026