Man, do we miss The West Wing. Especially those now-infamous walk-and-talk scenes that traveled with the characters throughout the halls of the White House. Surprisingly, the longest and most ambitious of these scenes occurred in only the fourth episode of Season One — and boy, it’s a doozy when you’re paying attention. And look! We have video!
According to cinematographer Thomas Del Ruth, as quoted by an unknown author at ASC magazine — so take it with a grain of salt — this complicated scene involved over 500 extras and needed to be reshot dozens of times:
It started out on the dance floor, went into the lobby, through the top-floor kitchen area, down two flights of stairs into the bowels of the kitchen and through the cavernous kitchen, where food was being prepared for a banquet. We worked our way through that area, went down another flight of stairs to where the laundry facilities are, then proceeded into the catacombs, all the way through the base of the hotel and out into the parking lot, where we ended up in a motorcade. […] Each take required one magazine of film, and the actors had to pass off dialogue from one person to another. It required quite a bit of orchestration. It was about a five-page scene and took us half the night [to shoot]. Dave was walking backward at full speed for the entire shot; on take 13, he almost collapsed!
(via Reddit)
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