Looooooong take

Perhaps the most famous sequence in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990) is the long steadicam take that follows Henry on a date through the bowels of the Copacabana club and out to a specially prepared table. According to the commentary at the start of the video Scorsese wanted fluidity and felt that cuts would serve as too much of a barrier between Henry and his newfound life of luxury. The sheer amount of co-ordination/choreography with extras is astounding and apparently it only took 8 takes, though in the final one used  you can observe Ray Liotta accidentally bump into a table corner.

This tracking shot provides an excellent feel for the club in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) as the crane dips in and out of the corridors of the set and scans around the dance floor.

Although I couldn't find any specific clips, Enter the Void (2009) features numerous long takes of crane shots that track across the rooftops as Oscar's disembodied soul floats across Tokyo's neon skyline. These do become somewhat repetitive after a time but are none the less impressive.

 Most Fight/action sequences rely on quick editing to deliver their blows. This is not the case with Warrior King/The Protector/Tom-Yung-Goong (2005), as it is called respectively in the UK, US and its native Thailand, which features perhaps the most incredible fight ever recorded for film. With almost four minutes of continuous steadicam action as Tony Jaa fights his way up a staircase, destroying numerous props and stuntmen along the way, this is easily the most ambitious martial arts sequence conceived for cinema and the crew took over a month to prepare and choreograph it. The DVD extras reveal that it only took 5 takes to nail, and that they were only available to film two takes a day because of the set repair and prop replacement.

http://videosift.com/video/Tony-Jaa-staircase-scene-Longest-unedited-fight-sequence
This post details each
They shot the first take which had a number of problems with stuntmen cues, and even a stuntman bumping into the stedicam operator. After choreographing more dynamic action, an increase of extras and improving the set, the next take they did was 17 days after the first take.

The second take was better but when the stuntman was supposed to be thrown from the 3rd story, the safety mattress was not completely in place yet so Tony Jaa stopped the shot and saved the stuntman's life.

The third take was just about perfect but just before Tony Jaa was supposed to bust through the last doorway, the film ran out. The director finally decided that instead of simply cutting there, they would try again for perfection.

They thought the fourth take was perfect but after review there were some parts that weren't as good as the pervious takes. They decided on one more try.

On the fifth try, it was almost perfect. But there were 2 miscues. On the 2nd floor, Tony Jaa slams a door into the head of a stuntman and the small glass window on the door was supposed to break. It failed to do so, so they used CGI to fix this. The 2nd issue was the fight just before the sink gets thrown. The timing was off as planned but the end result looked natural so they decided this was the take to use in the final film.

The crew also needed a foreign steadicam operator as the mount was built for American/European operators who are generally of a larger build than Asian operators. However the foreign operator they hired could only do two flights of stairs at a time and gave up so they ended up using a Thai operator who spent a month physically preparing for the job!

Another amazing continuous fight scene comes in the form of the corridor battle in Oldboy (2003), which recalls the early side scrolling video games of the nineties. This sequence took seventeen takes over three days to perfect, with only the cgi knife being the only form of editing involved. Another excellent example of a formidable one-man army.

Taking the biscuit with a single 96 minute continuous steadicam sequence is Russian Ark (2002) which is simply a mind-blowing undertaking. Last year a fellow film-making friend of mine had made his own shoulder rig out of copper piping and was eager to test a short one-take sequence inspired by this film. It was entirely P.O.V and despite only featuring 5 character cues it was infuriatingly difficult to capture a minute long sequence that essentially involved going downstairs and out into the garden. After a full night we still hadn't nailed it so the idea of capturing a 96 minute shot with this many extras makes me feel somewhat ill. I like to imagine that at least once in the 94th minute of  a take an extra messed up their cue, nullifying the previous hour and a half of precision.