The Man Crazy Enough to Shoot a Spy Thriller on His iPhone

Inheritance is a thriller with a twist—more than one, in fact, given that it’s a globe-trotting espionage saga that was shot on an iPhone 13.

That unique style gives this indie, which hits theaters Jan. 24, its intimacy and its propulsive immediacy, with the camera swinging and swaying in intense proximity to star Phoebe Dynevor (Bridgerton, Fair Play) as her protagonist Maya attempts to make heads or tails of her impromptu spy mission. Less a gimmick than a unique means of tapping into an adrenalized vein ideally suited for a race-against-time barnburner, the film’s formal approach proves, from New York start to South Korea finish, an enlivening success.

The story of a young woman who, in the aftermath of her mother’s death, is convinced to work for her estranged father (Rhys Ifans) on a real-estate deal, only to have everything go haywire when he’s kidnapped and held for ransom, Inheritance is the adventurous brainchild of Neil Burger, who—after two decades in studio filming, highlighted by the blockbuster Divergent—returns, with his latest, to his indie roots.

A tale of international intrigue that’s more than slightly indebted to Hitchcock, the film makes the most of its calling-card aesthetics, creating hyper-real energy that turns every step along Maya’s path into a pulse-pounding set piece of unexpected detours, encounters, and dangers.

A nifty and nail-biting take on a familiar genre, not to mention a showcase for the captivating Dynevor, Inheritance is a welcome early-2025 surprise and a testament to invigorating tried-and-true conventions with techno-invention. On the cusp of its theatrical release, we spoke with Burger about the many challenges posed by making a feature—on location, guerrilla-style—with an iPhone.

At what point did you decide that Inheritance should be shot on your phone?

The original idea came during COVID. I read an article in The New York Times, in April 2020, about a reporter making his way from Serbia to France across the land. It’s the EU, and all the borders are supposed to be open, and suddenly there’s guards everywhere, and you’re in the middle of the city center and there’s nobody on the street. I was like, I want to see that. The only way you could really see that…you can’t bring a big film crew there because then you’re altering it. And I also wanted to do it in a narrative way. I wanted to construct a story that took place in that milieu.

I came up with a story, and things changed, and it takes a long time to get a film going, and things eventually opened up. But I still liked the story when I was done with it, and was still interested in, what was the new normal? To have this story in the world—what was the world like? Again, if you really bring a film crew in, you don’t see the world. The world just turns and looks at you. So I thought the only way to do it would be to be under the radar. And the only way to do that would be with an iPhone.

That’s a very different way of doing things.

So no lights, no boom mikes, literally a cameraman walking with our actress, holding the phone, no stabilization, nothing that drew attention to it in the sense of, oh, they’re doing something professional. That was the genesis of it. The iPhone was not supposed to be a gimmick, and it wasn’t supposed to be a substitution for a motion picture camera. It was supposed to give us access so we could walk through a crowded Cairo market and nobody would look at us.

If you didn’t use a stabilization rig, how did you make sure you were getting fluid, composed footage?

I wanted it to be beautiful and professional-looking; I didn’t want it to look necessarily like it was shot with Alexa or something like that. I wanted it to have its own language, but I didn’t want it to look like it was news footage. I wanted it to have a beauty.

My cameraman [Jackson Hunt] is really good and could run with it and keep it fairly stable. Also, there are other movies that have been shot on an iPhone—Tangerine or Unsane—but in a way, they could just as well have been shot with a regular camera. As I said, this was to provide access, and in a way, this is the first movie that is an international thriller that has the scope of a big movie yet is shot with this very intimate device.

I think people’s minds will be blown by that.

The cameras are also better. We removed the digital stabilization, the software, from it, but the lenses actually have magnetic gyro-stabilization, and they’re pretty good. You have to be careful and smart, and he was really good. But we didn’t put any lenses on the outside. Nothing. Just some filtration. And it looks great. We’ve seen it blown up on 60-foot screens and it looks beautiful. People don’t really know. They know that there’s an interesting, strange film language going on, but they don’t necessarily say “iPhone.” After they read all this stuff that’s coming out, they will [laughs]. But for the moment, they don’t.

Similarly, how do you compensate for—or deal with—not having boom mikes or artificial lighting?

We’re professionals, and we’re very careful about that. For example, in a big movie, if you’re shooting in a house and it’s supposed to be dusk and it’s 10 a.m., you’ve got the big lights outside and you’ve jelled the windows in some sort of amber color so there’s a warm light coming through. We didn’t do any of that. We shot at dusk. We waited. We took a long lunch and then we would wander over there and shoot it at dusk.

We were running and gunning, but we weren’t rushed. We might do 30 takes of something, but we were doing it at the appropriate time. If we were shooting a scene set at 4 a.m. on the streets in Cairo, we didn’t go in and shoot at 10 a.m. and close off the street. We shot at 4 a.m. and the street was empty. It was great, actually.

I assume the appeal of the project, not just for you but for the entire cast, was this immense production-related challenge.

Totally. I was super-enthusiastic about it. I would probably say that everybody else went, “OK” [laughs.] They knew the challenges of it. But then they got on board, including the actors, who were like, we’re going to walk onto an airplane and we’re going to steal a dialogue scene on an airplane in flight? They have their reputations to worry about if there’s some sort of problem. But we talked it through, we rehearsed it on the ground, and we were very clear. We had contingencies about, if we couldn’t get it, what we would do. What we would say if somebody had a problem. We really thought through every different contingency on all sorts of different things, to the point where people were satisfied.

It was still crazy and exhilarating and thrilling and nerve-wracking in certain ways. I saw Phoebe last night, and I was telling her—we shot in every single airport and on every single airplane that we went on, and after the film was done and we were editing for a while, months later, it was the first time I was getting on a plane again. I was at Newark Airport, and I had this knot in my stomach, and I was like, am I not feeling well? What’s going on? And it was just PTSD stress from remembering being in that situation.

You found a way to make flying even more stressful for yourself.

I was excited to do it, but it was always fraught in the sense of, what if somebody stops us? Not so much because we were going to get in trouble, but that we were going to miss the shot. The movie has a loose, caught-live feel. But it’s a thriller and it’s very tightly scripted, and it needed whatever puzzle piece of the scene was going to happen there, and we couldn’t afford to lose it. That was nerve-wracking for me.

Were there any instances of civilians messing up shots, and were there ways you safeguarded against that?

People didn’t quite know what we were doing, and we wouldn’t base where we were shooting. We would be some blocks away and then we would walk over to that street and, as we arrived, it was like, let’s go. We would begin and we would do it for a while, and if we started to attract attention, we might leave for a while and then come back half an hour later when the interest had left.

But we did have things happen. We were shooting at a restaurant in Cairo at night. We got there, and one of the ways we were able to get it was by saying, look, we’ve got a very small footprint, we’re going to take over three tables, you can leave your restaurant open. They were like, great.

We arrived to shoot, and there are two uniformed soldiers with rifles at the door. We’re like, hey, we’re going in to shoot. They didn’t even look at us. They wouldn’t budge. We’re like, what’s going on? It turned out that the army owned the underlying land of the restaurant, and the restaurant—who we were paying—thought that this was so small that they could get away with not telling the military. Well, the military found out, and they were like, nobody’s shooting here. So the fixers and the production service companies came in and we settled it and shot. But it was like, OK, we’re in a particular country here and things can go wrong!

You shoot the motorcycle chase sequence quite ingeniously, with a variety of up-close-and-personal vantage points on Phoebe and the action. How complicated was that to pull off in public, without blocking off streets or using additional rigs?

Conceptually, it was what I wanted to do. The movie is not shot in a conventional way with a wide shot to an over-the-shoulder shot to a close-up. We didn’t do it that way. We wanted this caught-live feel to it. This you-are-there quality. So I didn’t want to do close-ups of the motorcycle wheel and then a close-up of his hand on the throttle; I wanted to be on her face the whole time. It’s about 80 percent there.

That was the concept from the beginning. We tested it even here in New Jersey—we went out to Raceway Park and rigged the motorcycles. We knew what kind of motorcycle we were going to use, and figured out how we did it, and tested what lens would be the best one to use. We ended up using the iPhone, but we did look at GoPros just in case. And we shot it on open roads in Delhi, which is crazy. But safe! We had a small little perimeter of people. We had an American stunt man and a really great Indian stunt man and the best motorcycle driver in India.

The thing is, the traffic never quite gets going fast enough in India. Because it’s so dense, you never get up to big speeds. But it still has this wild quality to it. We mapped it out. We knew where she got the motorcycle and where she needed to end up, and we created those routes and knew where the cars were chasing. It’s all very mapped out.

How long did it take to scout the film’s many international locations?

We went twice around the world scouting. We went from New York to Cairo to Delhi to Seoul to New York. Afterwards, there were still some loose ends, so we did it again. Then we were ready, and we did it.

For example, once when we were in Cairo on the first scout, we were on our way to Khan Al-Khalili market, which is the big marketplace where Maya goes. There’s a very big six-lane road that borders it. It’s not quite a highway, but it might as well be. Between each direction of traffic, there’s a tall iron fence, because in Cairo, there’s plenty of sidewalks. Everybody walks in the street anyway. This fence is so people won’t cross the street to get to the market; they have to use these underpasses. Except in one place, there’s a bar that’s missing from the fence. There’s a gap.

As we came up to it, when we were scouting, we had to slow down because everybody was crossing the street there, whether they were old ladies and children or guys with sacks of grain on their back. And they’re all squeezing through that one little gap. I was like, that’s got to be in the movie. Phoebe has to cross the street like that. And we did. So there was some sort of discovery like that.