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Clip description
Hired arsonist Billy (Joel Edgerton) sits on a hilltop watching his handiwork – a house burning in the distance. Carla (Claire van der Boom) and Greg (Anthony Hayes) pull up outside their burning home. Greg runs off to try to find his mother. He looks for her first in a waiting ambulance and then runs towards the fire, but is held back by firefighters. Carla watches, looking extremely troubled. By morning, the fire has burnt itself out.
Curator’s notes
Here we see the terrible result of Carla and Ray’s plotting. Due to a miscalculation, and unknown to Billy, Greg’s mother was at home when Billy set up the fire. Greg has been established as a gruff and not especially sympathetic character, but his panic and distress on realising his mother was in the burning house humanises him.
Nearly the entire scene at the burning house is filmed in a long, complex shot using Steadicam – a camera strapped to the operator employing a gyroscopic mechanism to eliminate camera shake. This allows the spatially complex scene to unfold exceptionally smoothly.
The two brief hilltop scenes not only provide a sense of symmetry but also a God’s eye viewpoint, both literally (God is usually understood to be on high) and metaphorically – giving a sense that Ray, Carla and Billy have been playing God with another person’s life.
