By Jackson Casey

Organization and preparedness are two character traits that are necessary in most jobs, businesses or lines of work. Strangely though, the positions where organization, diligence and research are almost guaranteed to be present are those positions where people least expect to find them. Everyone believes that secretaries and C.E.O.s are organized and do their homework, but rarely do people expect, or learn, that filmmakers are some of the most well informed and on-the-ball professionals in America.

After the legal and financial matters of a given production have been settled, it is up to a movie’s director to begin putting the pieces of the yet unmade film together. Literally, the director has to visualize and create on paper what the completed film will look like before principal photography can begin. To better understand what scenes are going to be shot in what locations and on which actors and objects the camera will focus, directors generally employ the use of storyboards; drawings that map out the scenes and camera set-ups necessary for the whole film that act as working blueprints throughout the principal photography.

Director Alfred Hitchcock was well known for his meticulous pre-production work on his films. Relishing the opportunity to plan the whole movie to the tiniest detail, Hitchcock would leap (as much as his portly frame would allow) into this aspect of the movie. Once finished with this, he was then forced to suffer through the ordeal of actually shooting the material he had storyboarded. Less than enamored with this element of filmmaking, to put it kindly, Hitchcock’s movies often suffered from below average production values because of his complete lack of interest in the challenge of physically shooting script material.

With single scenes often taking days, if not weeks to film, and scripts never shot sequentially (to save large amounts of money), the margin for error when making a motion picture is incredibly small; from the first look at a given script through the movie’s ultimate theatrical release, there are a seemingly infinite number of places where the material could become derailed. So in those rare films where you are able to view a truly great scene, complete with an unconscious sense of rising tension, a smooth rhythm, well chosen camera angles and well placed cuts, this is a very obvious sign of the superb and precise work that the film’s director put into the project.

Of the aforementioned elements, creating a sense of rising tension is the hardest thing for most filmmakers to accomplish. Granted, it is a fairly easy task to have a sense of impending doom when you are shooting inside of a dark house or when dealing with a knife-wielding maniac who is off-screen at the moment, biding his time until popping out unexpectedly from behind a door (see any of the Scream movies). However, putting together a roughly 17 minute outdoor, daytime scene that is chalked full of escalating anticipation and adrenaline rushing excitement is another, far more difficult entity to produce. This is precisely what director William Friedkin and editor Mace Agee have crafted in Rules of Engagement, in the sequence focusing on the attack of the U.S. embassy in Yemen.

As a whole, Rules of Engagement isn’t of the same caliber of movies as Schindler’s List or The Piano, but is nonetheless, quite entertaining and professionally made. If nothing else, Rules of Engagement is a very enjoyable film to watch, complete with one of the most perfectly created scenes in recent memory.

The driving force behind this scene was the hardened veteran, Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist). Rules of Engagement producer Richard Zanuck commented on Friedkin’s control of the project by stating, "I had no idea [Friedkin] was as fast as he is, and I think that’s because he’s so well organized. It’s a tight ship he runs; he is a meticulous director, a perfectionist." And this shows, especially in the sequence taking place in Yemen City.

The scene begins with a master shot of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean. Below deck, Colonel Terry Childers (Samuel L. Jackson) is ordered to take a platoon of marines to the U.S. embassy in Yemen City, "Just to show our presence." Childers and his troops board two supply helicopters on deck, take off and head towards the embassy.

A cut and we get our first visual of Yemen City and the embassy in question. As the camera pans across the buildings in Yemen City, we can hear the noise of a chanting crowd that is steadily growing louder. Cutting to the exterior of the embassy, a four story, white stucco building, it is obvious that there is a large and somewhat hostile group of people protesting the United States’ presence in the Middle East.

Inside the embassy, we get the first feeling of palpable terror as the only people we can see on camera are hastily packing boxes, running, or cowering in the corners, horrified about what may happen to them.

The mood set, Friedkin begins to juxtapose shots of the two helicopters approaching Yemen City with shots of the protesters becoming increasingly more violent.

Interspersed with these two drastically different elements–the calm surrounding the marines on the helicopters and the utter chaos on the ground–are the hand-held camera shots of the people inside the embassy, sweating and worrying about their fate.

Outside the embassy, the dam has broken. A quick hand-held shot of the Yemeni protesters throwing rocks at the embassy is followed by a rapid swish-pan of the crowd. A dolly shot of the angry mob follows this swish-pan, moving quickly from left to right. Finally, we are presented with a point-of-view (POV) shot from the embassy’s security camera, gunfire and rocks hurdling directly towards us.

On-board the helicopters, Childers is starting to see the first signs that the situation at the embassy may be more dire than expected. As the helicopters fly over the city, rooftop snipers take aim and fire at them.

Back on the ground, there is utter pandemonium. It is Hell! Quick hand held shots of two men throwing molotov cocktails at nearby cars are followed by jiggling images of the crowd stabbing and mauling a Yemeni security guard. The chanting, which has remained at a near constant drone through the scene so far, continues to proliferate and grows even louder as the marines land at the embassy.

Using a variety of hand held shots, Friedkin captures the marines exiting the helicopters and entering the embassy compound. Childers orders the compound doors shut behind him and runs into the embassy.

As the marines begin to take control of the building, the sniper fire continues. They file into their pre-assigned positions on the roof, effectively giving the snipers targets to shoot at.

In a well-filmed POV shot from the perspective of one of the snipers, we see the first marine go down; injured but not killed. The sound of bullets ricocheting off of the walls of the building and background explosions is added to the chanting of the crowd, creating a horrible aural mix of destruction and anger.

Finding the ambassador inside the embassy, Childers is given permission to begin evacuating the building. On the roof, more marines have become the victims of sniper fire. As Childers ushers the ambassador and his family to the relative safety of the helicopters, bullets continue to ricochet off the white stucco and explosions from home made bombs begin to pepper the building. A third marine is shot.

Arriving at the helicopters, Childers instructs the ambassador to stay still for a minute. Re-entering the embassy, Childers runs to the roof and begins to pull down the American flag atop the building. As he is doing this, snipers take aim at the flag and fill the flag with numerous bullet holes.

Childers returns to the helicopters and ambassador, and with a very tight shot of his face, Friedkin shows him handing the flag to the ambassador. As Childers runs back to the embassy, the helicopters lift off. The background noise is still dominated by the

chanting.

Atop the roof, Childers crawls passed the injured marines (see picture above), with swish-pans of the crowd interspersed with shots of him ascertaining the situation. At that moment, Childers dives for cover. Shot in the neck, a nearby marine falls on top of Childers. Blood on his uniform and hands, Childers peeks over the lip of the roof, looking down at the protesters. Shaken and decidedly pissed off, Childers grabs a phone off of a radio man, and instructs his marine captain, Captain Lee, to order the marines to open fire on the protesters.

Lee is quite reticent about following Childers’ orders.

"What is it about this order you don’t understand, Captain Lee?" Childers demanded.

"Sir, are you ordering me to fire into the crowd?" Lee questioned.

"Yes, God dammit," Childers responded. "Waste the motherfuckers!"

And with that heated statement, the marines open fire on the crowd from their vantage point atop the embassy. The marines stop firing and, for a brief minute, there is complete silence as Childers, Lee and the other marines looking down at the wounded and dead in the crowd.

Friedkin’s decision to include this 20-30 seconds of silence astonished me; it was something that could have easily been cut to shorten this film’s running time and was not, by any means, necessary to the plot. This moment of silence effectively allowed the audience to grasp the magnitude of what had just occurred. The striking contrast between the hectic sounds of the skirmish and the silence of the peace that immediately followed merely amplified the importance of the battlefield events that had taken place. And while this idea is an excellent ending to the sequence, this decision is one that just isn’t often made in studio productions.

In the big bucks, action sector of Hollywood, a sector that includes producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Silver, directors Michael Bay, Simon West and, after his work on MI:2, John Woo, among others, there is a formula for shooting and cutting action scenes.

Once the action has started, usually with a large explosion or burst of gunfire, it isn’t long before the adrenalized rush of guitar or synthesized music begins to accompany the on-screen proceedings, punctuating the scene and making each shot fired that much larger and more important. At the end of the sequence, the hero a) saves the girl, or b) watches breathlessly as the villain hightails it away from the proceedings, a maneuver that will set up a final battle later in the film.

By completely ignoring this formulaic method of shooting and editing, deliberately not including any of composer Mark Isham’s score during this sequence, and lengthening this scene to well over fifteen minutes (action sequences over five minutes are unusual), Friedkin created one of the most different and stylistically enthralling scenes in the last 10 years.

Vital to the success of this sequence was an underlying sense of chaos and terror surrounding the evacuation; where is the tension in an action scene where the good guys are completely in control of the situation? When that crucial moment arrives during the confrontation at the embassy, Childers’ split-second decision to fire upon the crowd is made without much debate--his soldiers are being killed right and left and after one KIA Marine falls on top of him, the order is given.

Friedkin used three techniques while shooting the Yemen City footage that supplied much of the overall atmosphere of this scene: a variety of jiggling, documentary like hand-held shots, POV shots from the perspective of the Yemeni snipers and rioters and an overarching audio track of the chanting protesters that played through the entirety of the scene, giving the events an almost surreal bond.

Exceptionally well shot, cut and conceived by Friedkin, this sequence in Rules of Engagement is cinema’s best scene to date this year.