Ditch the 35mm. Nix post-production edit. Lose the linear, 86 the word “cut,” and go digital, very digital for 93 minutes straight per take. Congratulations, you just broke as many filmmaking traditions as possible in one project. How very, very Mike Figgis of you.

Director/writer/producer/composer Figgis, already noted for projects such as Leaving Las Vegas, Internal Affairs and One Night Stand, has done the unthinkable, at least to those of us who didn’t think of it first. In Time Code, he not only shoots in one long, uncut 93 minutes of digital video, he does it with four different actors and locations. Onscreen, the four stories appear together, in quadrants, all telling aspects of the same story from different places, but at the same synchronized times.

Why, it’s downright dizzying! So, let’s look at one piece at a time.

In this black comedy thriller, the four stories unfold in real time, sometimes intertwining. Figgis got the idea when filming a split

screen portion of Miss Julie and his imagination got out of control. “I thought the split screen was really cool, so I started thinking about the idea of shooting three screens and then four,” says Figgis, who, as a composer credited with at least seven films, is accustomed to thinking in multiple melody lines. “You see, parallel action and synchronicity have always been obsessions of mine. I began diagramming out how it might work using flow charts. Eventually, I came up with a system of writing the structure of the script on music paper, using bar lines to indicate minutes, which is what we ended up using.”

There was no script, only the music paper, maps and charts. Each morning, the 28 actors synchronized digital watches and at the end of each day, they would have completed an entire feature film. The cameras started rolling and continued to capacity, capturing anything and everything that happened, planned or otherwise, as the actors improvised from plot point to plot point and mark to mark according to schedule.

One actor compared it to a roller coaster ride, once you’re on, you don’t stop until it’s over. The next day, they’d get up and do it all over again.

But each day, the actors experimented with different styles, behaviors and actions, and even with each other. Mia Maestro, who plays digital video director Ana Pauls, says: “Every time someone you were interacting with changed their character, you ended up changing yours to meld in or conflict better. We were trying out new things all the time and it was a really beautiful and completely different way of working.”

 “The key was finding a way to not make it ever feel rehearsed,” says Leslie Mann, playing troubled actress Cherine, “especially six or seven times down the road. It needed to always feel spontaneous, but that’s an actor’s job, to make the familiar seem unfamiliar.”

digital cameras made specifically for film making, mostly because it could shoot for 93 minutes. The cameras give equal quality to film, but had one unanticipated drawback -- filming was exhausting. Shouldering a camera for such a long time, moving their bodies to capture the desired angles, was so taxing that Figgis reconfigured the cameras so they could sit near the cameramen’s chests.

Just as the actors, the cameramen became creators, as Figgis encouraged them to take chances, strive to break convention and become artists. They had a tough job – to lug around the camera and to be brilliant and luminary while each moment having to keep up with improvising actors often making unpredictable moves.

For the soundtrack, Figgis chose some of his own classical string compositions as well as some contemporary rock and pop. He says: “Music is the one thing that binds all four images together.”

In the end, they had amassed 15 take of each story, or 60 93-minute takes. On choosing which takes to use for the final composition: “There were many possibilities, and each one would have been a different but equally plausible film. It made me think that the potential for greater interactivity, for multiple outcomes, is enormous.”

Ack! What’s he conjuring up next? Whatever it is, it will likely be... unthinkable.

Time Code opens April 28, 2000. Mike Figgis’s upcoming Web site will be at www.redmullet.com. Join Denise Harrison at our new users group website to exchange ideas, tips, sorrows and successes. Scriptwriters World Wide Users Group.