When a production is restricted to a single location, the instinct is to chop the narrative into pieces. You shoot coverage. You break the scene down line by line to protect the actor and give the editor options. In Locke, Steven Knight had a single location: the cabin of a moving BMW X5. He did not chop the narrative into pieces. He forced his actor to endure it in real-time.
The Motorway Stage
Knight abandoned traditional scene-by-scene coverage entirely. Instead, the crew pulled the BMW on a low-loader trailer down the M6 motorway, and shot the film like a stage play. They ran through the entire 85-minute script continuously from start to finish.
They mounted three RED Epic cameras inside the vehicle and only paused the action when the cameras literally ran out of memory space. They did not shoot the movie over a month. They executed this grueling, relentless process over just eight nights.
Emotional Continuity
This is not a gimmick. It is a psychological strategy. When you shoot a film in fragments, an actor must manufacture their emotional state for each new setup. But in Locke, Tom Hardy did not have to manufacture exhaustion or panic; he experienced it. By forcing the actor to run the script continuously, Knight engineered a level of emotional continuity that is biologically impossible to achieve in a standard shooting schedule. The tension in Locke works precisely because the constraints of the production locked both the character and the actor in the exact same prison.
Insights regarding the 8-night continuous shooting schedule, the use of three mounted RED cameras, and the low-loader trailer mechanics were synthesized from various production retrospectives.