From Touch of Evil to Goodfellas to There Will Be Blood. The first minutes of a film and what they have to do.
The first three to ten minutes of a film are, by general critical consensus among working filmmakers, the most-important runtime the director has. The opening establishes the film's tonal register, its visual language, its pace, and the audience's specific level of attention. A great opening produces a film that audiences are willing to follow patiently into difficult material. A weak opening produces a film whose audience is already reaching for their phone by the twenty-minute mark.
This essay walks through what opening sequences are doing and which directors do them best.
Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958) opens with a three-minute, 20-second crane-and-dolly long take across the Mexican-American border. A bomb is planted in a car. A couple gets in the car. The car drives across the border. The bomb goes off. The opening is, in three minutes, the entire premise of the film.
The sequence is, by general consensus, the foundational text of the modern opening-shot tradition. What it established is that the opening can carry significant narrative weight rather than functioning purely as setup. The audience, in three minutes, has been given the central tension of the film delivered as a continuous physical sequence. The technique has been imitated extensively (Robert Altman's The Player opening, Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights opening, the opening of Birdman) and remains the canonical example of opening-as-content.
The opening sequence of Goodfellas (1990) takes a different approach. Three men in a car. A noise from the trunk. They stop, open the trunk, find a man who is not quite dead and finish him. Henry Hill voiceover: 'As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.' Freeze-frame on Hill's face. Title card.
What the sequence does is establish, in roughly two minutes, the film's tonal contract with the audience. The voiceover is going to be unreliable. The violence is going to be matter-of-fact. The protagonist is openly identifying with criminal life rather than apologising for it. The freeze-frame is the audience's first cue that the film will use formal devices to interrupt naturalistic continuity. Almost every Scorsese film since opens with some variation on this contract-establishing approach.
There Will Be Blood (2007) opens with fifteen minutes of near-silent footage. Daniel Plainview alone in a silver mine. A broken leg. The drag across the desert. The registration of his claim. Jonny Greenwood's atonal-string score running underneath. No dialogue.
The sequence is one of the most-uncompromising opening choices in mainstream American cinema. Paul Thomas Anderson is, in fifteen minutes, training the audience to watch the rest of the film at the slower pace and higher visual-attention level the film will require. Audiences who can sit through the opening will sit through anything the film delivers later. Audiences who cannot, the film has effectively pre-filtered out.
Saving Private Ryan (1998) opens with the twenty-seven-minute Omaha Beach landing sequence. The audience is dropped into the landing with almost no setup. There is no character introduction within the sequence. The handheld camera, the desaturated colour grade, the visceral sound design — all establish the film's specific approach to depicting wartime combat.
What the opening accomplishes is that the rest of the film can be read against it. The audience knows, by the time Captain Miller's mission is given to him, exactly what the cost of that mission will be at the operational level. The film does not, structurally, need to justify the mission's stakes because the opening has already done it. Spielberg's opening choice gives him the rest of the runtime to focus on the moral content rather than on the violence.
For more on cinematic-craft essays, see our history of the long take and film editing techniques essays.