A young woman is thrust headlong into an international conspiracy in Director Neil Burger’s thriller, Inheritance. Burger’s film tells the story of Maya, who must travel the globe, master new skills and unravel the mysteries of his past after discovering that her her father Sam was once a spy

On February 2, after the DGA membership screening in New York, Burger discussed the making of the film in a Q&A moderated by Director Sarah Pirozek (#Like). During the conversation, he revealed why and how they shot this film entirely on an iPhone.

“There's been other movies have been shot on iPhones, but perhaps not like an international thriller that goes around the world, so we'll take that credit. The reason we shot it on an iPhone was not merely as a gimmick or a substitution for a motion picture camera but because it gave us access. We could be in that crowded Cairo market and, for the most part, no one paid any attention to us. We shot it on an iPhone 13. We used the app Filmic Pro which we thought was best to make it look great when we blew it up. The lenses didn't seem to kind of work as well with Filmic Pro so the whole film is shot on just one lens because the other the quality of the other two wasn't good enough. We just embraced it. We were shooting very quickly because we didn't want to be noticed, there was sort of a different shooting style. It wasn't like, ‘here's a wide shot and then over the shoulder and then a close up of you’ and things like that. There's no there's no classic coverage. There's, for the most part deliberately, no match cutting. We did that so we could be quick on our feet.”

Burger’s other directorial credits include the feature films The Marsh King’s Daughter, Voyagers, The Upside, Divergent, Limitless and The Lucky Ones; the pilot for the series Billions and episodes of The Agency. Burger has been a DGA member since 1993 and serves on the Eastern Independent Directors Committee.