There’s an argument to be made that One Battle After Another is the most action-packed movie on Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography. There’s no shortage of thrilling moments in the Leonardo DiCaprio-led flick, with perhaps the best of them all being a car chase involving his character, Bob Ferguson, standout newcomer Chase Infiniti’s Willa Ferguson, and Tim, a white supremacist played by John Hoogenakker. I was hooked by the chase, which made me surprised to learn from several One Battle After Another crew members about how this sequence “went through a lot of different versions.”
What One Battle After Another’s Editor Told Me About The Car Chase
During my recent interviews with editor Andy Jurgesnsen and cinematographer Michael Bauman, I was interested to learn what working on the car chase was like for them given how significantly different their respective duties were. For Jurgesnsen, that meant cutting together the sequence alongside Paul Thomas Anderson during postproduction. He mainly focused on how integral sound was for the chase, telling me:
It went through a lot of different versions. Again, it was longer, you’re slowly cutting it down. I think the sound department really helped tremendously because I had to choose the right shots, the ups and the downs of everything was the sound, there’s no really no dialogue. So the sound and the cars, each of the different cars had to have their own character just in their sound. We still wanted there to be peaks and valleys in just that sequence. Because if it was just like 100% the entire time, it just would not be as effective.
Thanks to a change of heart and ultimate self-sacrifice from Avanti, the bounty hunter who was tasked by Lockjaw to deliver her to a far-right militia, Willa was able to escape from the horrific fate that awaited her there. However, not long after she started driving away, she found herself being tailed by Tim, who was intent on killing her after he’d already dispatched Lockjaw, her biological father (or so he believed). Fortunately, Bob, her actual father, had managed to procure a car for himself and inadvertently ended up driving behind Tim. Andy Jurgesnsen continued in his recollection of how the final version came together in One Battle After Another:
So we had to shape it so it went up, and then there’s a point in which she loses Tim, so we went down with the sound and it gets quiet for a little bit. You just hear the road noise, and then she sees him in the rearview mirror, then we ramp it up again with the music and the sound. And then it just starts going louder and louder and louder and louder, and more intense and more intense, until she gets out and then eventually the crash.
So as tense as it was to watch the car chase, particularly with the peaks and valleys of that long desert road, Jurgesnsen clearly laid out how sound also added to the unsettling vibe. And as he mentioned, it ended with Tim crashing his car into the back of Willa’s, as she learned he was following him, so she parked her car into a blind summit and hid on the side of the road, waiting to hold him at gunpoint. As for the actual shooting of the chase scene…
What One Battle After Another’s Cinematographer Told Me About The Car Chase
During my conversation with Michael Bauman, I asked him if there were any specific notes that Paul Thomas Anderson gave him with his approach to filming the car chase, specifically noting the choice of using the “shaky camera.” The One Battle After Another behind-the-scenes talent answered:
Well, you’re hitting on something that the shaky camera thing was all about. The biggest note from [Paul] always was, ‘This can’t look perfect. It has to have that dynamic energy.’ And I think that sequence works really well because the camera has a lot of shake to it. You’ve got these wide-angle lenses very close to the road, which really accelerate the sense of speed.
I agree with that, and that sense of speed made it all the more jolting when Tim crashed his car. Bauman also commended how sound was utilized during this sequence, while also drawing attention to how the sun was shining on the actors as the cameras were rolling:
The other thing that was really cool was just the sound design in that sequence with all the different car engines so you could tell whose car was going by the sound of the engine. But [Paul] really wanted it to be loose and raw. So we let the sun hit the actors right in the face. Sometimes there’d be a camera shadow, he would just cut around the camera shadow as they’re turning and the sun’s hitting them. The biggest thing was just that raw energy was so critical throughout the entire film, but especially in that sequence.
Whatever alternate versions of One Battle After Another’s car chase scene there were, I think most who’ve seen it can probably agree that the version we got was pretty great. It also leaded into arguably the movie’s happiest moment, when Bob and Willa finally reunited and drove away together from the car wreck and Tim’s body. After all they’d been through within the span of just a few days, these characters deserved a heartwarming ending.
One Battle After Another can be streamed with an HBO Max subscription or purchased/rented on home media. The movie won four Golden Globes earlier this month, along with being nominated in five other categories, and we’ll find out later this week if it’s among the nominees for the 98th Academy Awards, which air on the 2026 TV schedule on March 15.
