How Strike Back created TV’s most ambitious scene ever

By Brittany Frederick | Mar 23, 2019

From left: Warren Brown, Alin Sumarwata and Daniel MacPherson in a scene from Strike Back season 6. Photo Credit: Sophie Mutevalian/Courtesy of Cinemax. /

Strike Back season 6, episode 9 featured the most intense scene in TV history – and director Bill Eagles told Hidden Remote how it was done.

Strike Back has always set the bar high for TV drama, but Friday’s episode of the Cinemax series shattered it. “Episode 59” contained a scene that was more than four minutes long—without a single cutaway, but with everything else except the kitchen sink.

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the most recent Strike Back episode.

With their chase for rogue Russian agents taking them deep into ISIL territory, the members of Section 20 are outnumbered and possibly outgunned. Thomas “Mac” McAllister (Warren Brown), Gracie Novin (Alin Sumarwata) and Samuel Wyatt (Daniel MacPherson) only have each other if they want to get out of town alive.

Well, and the camera, which follows the trio in one continuous shot for almost four and a half minutes.

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It tracks every movement, every gun battle, every magazine change and every tension-filled heartbeat, making the audience the fourth member of Section 20.

Not only does it put viewers right in harm’s way, it’s also a thing of cinematic beauty. A firefight has never looked this good before. Everything moves smoothly and every detail can be seen and savored.

It’s the most ambitious one-shot on TV, and the kind of thing that could only be done on Strike Back.

Overseeing this brilliantly crazy idea was Strike Back director Bill Eagles, who spoke with Hidden Remote to reveal that those four minutes took days of preparation, hours of filming, and the hard work of countless crew members.

Watch the sequence by playing the video below, then keep reading after the video to learn how it came together.

Most TV one-shots follow one protagonist as they move through the scene. The Strike Back shot follows three—and adds another degree of difficulty because this is TV’s most high-octane show, where they’re literally fighting for their lives in a hail of bullets and a maze of alleys. In that sense, it’s fitting that this sequence tracking the entire team also required the talents of the whole team behind the camera.

“It needs to be written right,” Bill explained. “[Showrunner] Jack [Lothian] has the writing skill to create a shot which he knows is going to deliver the right beats between the three characters.

“Then we go find a location. And the location is full of narrow twists and turns, narrow alleyways and little passageways and so on. It’s fantastically helpful, because we don’t have to fill it with extras. We don’t have to have an army of bad guys. We can create tension by slipping them in and out of these weaving back alleys, a bit like a maze.”

Once the location is found, there are a number of decisions that have to be made. The sequence has to be blocked out, utilizing a military advisor to make sure that the movements are correct. It involves deciding where the threats are going to come from and when, and figuring out every one of the explosions and bullet holes.

Then there are the lighting changes as Mac, Wyatt and Novin move from outside to inside and back again. Every little detail might appear for just a moment on screen, but they all require work and precision timing.

“We have a day of rehearsal just with the stunt doubles, just to look at the general blocking with a military advisor,” Bill continued. “We get to figure out where the bad guys are going to come from, we’ve got to train actors, we’ve got to figure out where the explosions and bullet hits are going to be, so we’ve got to tell the art department to build a few fake walls.”

“On day four we started shooting,” he told us. “We began in the morning, I think the call was 8 a.m….and we didn’t have the first version of that sequence until I think 3 p.m. in the afternoon.”

But here’s the beauty of Strike Back: what TV fans are watching isn’t an overly planned, film by numbers routine. The choreography is developed around the natural military movements, not the other way around—and the actors are so well versed in such things that they make even this look effortless.

“There’s a sort of beautiful choreography that comes out—not of my direction, it comes out of their training,” Bill reflected. “There’s a certain amount of natural movement that comes from that special ops training. And that gives me the ability to stay with different characters at different times in the journey.”

While Strike Back has accomplished a lot of incredible things over its run, this one-shot in “Episode 59” has to be one of the show’s coolest moments. It breaks the fourth wall and puts the fans right where they’ve always wanted to be.

And when you watch these four minutes, you also can’t help but admire all of the work that the cast and crew poured into creating something that has never been seen on TV before.

Next. Strike Back season 7 to be final season. dark

Strike Back airs Fridays at 10 p.m. on Cinemax. For more on Strike Back and other Cinemax shows, follow the Cinemax category at Hidden Remote.