Name: The Director Who Revolutionized The POV Shot
Uploaded: 2026-01-13T16:56:27.000Z
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Okay, so in the iconic chase scene in Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break, there's a blink and you'll miss it.

Adverbs of degree

Moment of camera work that is just so fascinating to me there.

This half second moment of pause before the camera pans to the right to follow Keanu.

What kind of information does that communicate to the viewer?

In this earlier shot, you can see that the camera is clearly objective and impersonal.

This shot, on the other hand, of Patrick Swayze could conceivably be a POV of Keanu, who is coming up from behind him.

But this shot has to be objective because no character is following here.

And yet this is a moment of subjectivity, as if the camera itself had to think for a second before turning right.

Bigelow uses the formal language of POV to activate a sense of immediacy in the viewer.

The same principle is at work in a handheld whip pan like this.

It's designed to mimic the turn of a head.

To achieve these fast paced, to enable an incredible cameraman like J.

Michael Miro to run at the same speed as the actors through cramped, complicated environments, you need a rig that is small and light.

That's easier said than done with a 35 millimeter camera.

So Bigelow and her team created something they called the Pogo cam, essentially a 35 millimeter camera attached to a stick with a gyro stabilizer on the bottom.

Bigelow is a pioneer and virtuoso of action cinematography.

You can see the direct influence of this chase scene on movies like Inception, the Jason Bourne movies, and

Casino Royale, to cite just a few examples.

And all these films had better technology and smaller cameras.

My intent was to put the audience in as close to, you know, an experiential situation as possible.

In other words, I wanted it all to be shot with as much sort of movement as possible so that you're actually feeling the velocity that those people are feeling.

So we had to technically figure out how to do it and how, you know, how to put the cameraman in the same situation as the actors are in giving you as realistic a sense as possible.

The funny thing about that quote is that Bigelow is actually talking about the astonishing skydiving scene later in the movie.

But the sentiment applies to all her action set pieces.

The chase is designed to make us feel the velocity of the sprinting characters.

The handheld camera does that, but so does the environment and the lens.

As a general rule, a wide angle lens makes a moving image move faster.

And that is accentuated when you're running in tight spaces like alleys, narrow streets and living rooms.

And constructing the chase like a maze allows Bigelow to throw all kinds of food, fun and dangerous obstacles at the characters.

In fact, an inspiration for this chase was the classic Disneyland ride, Mr.

Toad's Wild Ride, in which you're in a car careening recklessly through the streets of London, taking sharp turns left and right, dodging pedestrians, cars and other obstacles.

This is what Bigelow means by putting the audience in an experiential situation.

Bigelow clearly had a fascination with the experiential power of POV shots, especially moving POV shots to bring you into the action.

Like you're sitting in that car in Mr. Toad's wild ride.

Later in the movie, in the final bank heist, Bigelow uses this tool again and puts us behind the eyes of Keanu's character Johnny Utah, as he storms into the bank with the ex president.

But Bigelow took her experimentation with POV much further in her next film, the criminally underappreciated Strange Days, A cyberpunk sci fi movie that features a technology called squid Superconducting quantum interference device.

Squid, which allows you to experience other people's memories.

Bigelow films these scenes entirely in POV and the film starts with an incredible 3 minute long take POV shot of a group of criminals robbing a Chinese restaurant.

For this sequence, even the 16 pound pogo cam wasn't light enough for months.

In pre production, Bigelow worked with camera technicians and her ex husband and frequent collaborator James Cameron to develop a camera that weighed just eight pounds.

Now, eight pounds might sound a little funny today in the world of GoPros and action cameras that weigh the tiniest fraction of that these days, you can get a POV of, well, anything.

YouTube is filled with first person parkour chase scenes on city rooftops and POVs of dogs running on the beach.

In 2015, Russian director Ilya Naishuler made an entire movie in POV called Hardcore Henry and then a POV music video for the Weeknd, both of which owe a debt to the pioneering work of Kathryn Bigelow.

But even though the tech has gotten better, the point break Chase.

All the action in that movie still holds up 33 years later.

It's just as exciting now as it was in 1991.

And that will be true 33 years from now, too.

Who knows, Maybe all the entertainment of the future will be experienced as pov.

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