Tom Hardy's 'Locke' was filmed in one take.

The 36-year-old actor stars as construction foreman Ivan Locke in the 2013 crime drama and director Steven Knight confessed they shot the complete film on every take and consequently they were left with 16 movies to edit before coming to the final product.

Talking to collider.com, Knight said: ''All the actors apart from Tom were in a hotel conference room near to the motorway. We had a phone line open. It was a real phone line into the car. Tom was on the back of a low-loader truck. The vehicle had the wheels taken off so that it was at the right level. I was in front of him with visual contact and audio contact with him and also with the conference room, and the plan always was, and this is what we did, is to shoot the whole thing beginning to end every time.

''I would only say 'Action' once, and then the vehicle would set off. I would cue the first call, then the second, then the third. Effectively, we shot the whole film twice a night. That would be the end. In the end, we had 16 movies, all pretty ragged, but they were 16 movies, and then we'd cut together the film that we wanted to make.''

The film came together ''alarmingly quickly'' after Hardy accepted the role and flowed from there.

Knight added: ''I met Tom [Hardy] and put the idea to him and he loved it. Then I wrote the script after that. He loved the script and then we shot it. It all came together alarmingly quickly really.''