"The Rules of the Game" is known for its early and elaborate use of deep focus cinematography. Renoir said he and his cinematographer Jean Bachelet "ordered some special lenses, very fast lenses, but ones that still gave us considerable depth, so that we could keep our backgrounds in focus almost all the time." This depth of field in his shots allowed Renoir to shoot in large rooms and long corridors in the chateau sequences, and characters were able to move freely between the background and the foreground. Approximately half of the shots in the film have camera movements. In many shots the camera moves, stops in place, changes direction and circles around the subjects. Film critic David Thomson said "one has the impression of a camera that is always moving to cover as much as possible. One does not notice cuts, one delights in a continuity which is often on the verge of chaos and finally leads to tragedy in the intrusion of subplot into plot, of the theatrical into the real and of disaster into balances."