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The futuristic thriller "Children of Men" (now playing) has three breathtaking sequences filmed in single, unbroken tracking shots. But the one near the end of the film — lasting some nine minutes — is a near miracle of technical inventiveness and, well, just plain luck.

Star Clive Owen races through a bombed-out landscape of tenements and cratered streets that resembles wartime Bosnia. The camera follows as he dodges gunfire and explosions, running over rubble, inside buildings and through crowded corridors and stairways in search of a young woman.

Universal Studios (ENLARGE)
Theo (Clive Owen) ducks a bomb blast in the thriller "Children of Men." A long tracking shot near the end of the movie took 14 days to set up and film.
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Amid all that chaos, the camera never cuts away.

So how'd they do that? Director Alfonso Cuarón explains.

The location was a cluster of buildings in Bexhill-on-Sea in England's East Sussex district, which the film crew secured as a filming location for 14 days. Most of those days were spent rigging the area with explosive special effects, rehearsing the countless extras fighting in the streets, and mapping out the complex route Owen (and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki) would follow.

"Day 12 arrives, and we haven't even rolled camera yet," Cuarón says. "Everyone gets nervous — particularly the accountants."

Finally, on the 13th day, he attempted to shoot the sequence for the first time. "And it's a fiasco," he recalls. Accidents and blunders ruined the shot. Every time he had to start over, Cuarón's crew needed several hours to move the tanks back into place, re-rig explosives in the street and walls, and equip ill-fated extras (the ones caught in the movie crossfire) with fresh blood packs. (More about the blood later.)

Not only was Cuarón facing the loss of his film location, he was also shooting in the middle of a bleak English winter — when daylight can last as little as six hours.

The director was, um, a little anxious on Day 14, his last chance to shoot the scene as planned.

On his first attempt, things were going great ... until six minutes into the shot, when the cameraman stumbled.

"We only have one more chance," Cuarón remembers. And by the time everyone was ready to try again, the sun was already lowering into the west.

"We start to shoot, and everything is going great," the director says. Ducking gunfire, Owen hides inside a derelict schoolbus. But a female extra also inside the bus gets "hit" by a bullet — and her exploding blood pack spatters the camera lens red.

"I yell cut," Cuarón says. "But thank God there is an explosion and nobody hears me."

Owen keeps running, the camera pursues, and seven minutes later, the actor and cinematographer are jumping around, exhilarated at completing the shot.

"Everyone is going, 'Whooo!' " Cuarón says. "Such exhilaration. Clive is so wired after running and ducking.

"But I said, 'Yes, guys, but the [bleeping] shot is ruined — the blood hit the lens.'

"And the two of them turn at me with this mad face and say, 'Are you crazy? That was the miracle!' "

In fact, Owen and Lubezki had to remind Cuarón of the aesthetic philosophy he himself brought to shooting "Children of Men": He wanted it to feel as though every scene on-screen is unfolding in the moment, that anything — good, bad or bloody — could happen in an instant.

"That is what you're craving for," he admits, "the accidents. Truthfulness comes from what you don't create. You choreograph a lot of stuff to look improvised. But the beautiful moments are the ones you would never imagine."

Keen-eyed moviegoers can be forgiven for thinking there's an invisible cut somewhere in those nine minutes. After all, at the end of the scene, the blood on the lens has vanished.

Well, not really. "The blood was great, but after a while it started to feel like it was on your face," Cuarón says. "It started to feel distracting." So he hired a computer-effects artist to digitally erase the blood from the final image, a very painstaking job.

"It was the biggest nightmare on planet Earth," he says, "and apparently she hated us every single second."