By the conditions of the OP, hundreds if not thousands. The opening scene alone, with the kid picking up the package in Moscow, featured a street scence with dozens of people. The real crowd scene was the media crush and party after he gets back. I can’t remember clearly but I’m thinking that betwen the press crush and the party guests over 200 extras were involved.
John Boorman’s surprisingly entertaining Hell In The Pacific only featured Lee Marvin and Toshirô Mifune.
Never Cry Wolf - movie about Farley Mowat’s haphazard exploits in Northern Canada only had a few charators I believe.
I love “two guys in a room” movies. Regarding the OP, in my mind, “major motion picture” means A-List actors. So, with that in mind…
Closet Land is an actual movie with characters, plot, theme, etc. It’s a fictional story, as opposed to a one-man narrative. And it’s not a cheesy B-Movie; it’s A-Listers on an actual set doing actual fiction.
Madeleine Stowe and Alan Rickman comprise the cast of two. There are no extras. (There are, however, some cartoon characters. But don’t for a second think that makes this movie kid-friendly.)
Sticking with the torture motif, I think Death And The Maiden, IIRC, only has three people ever show up on screen, and they are A-Listers as well. (Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley, and I forget the third.)
Another three person movie is Tape, with Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and I forget who the third guy is. Nobody ever leaves the hotel room. There are no extras.
Unfortunately, I cannot seem to connect to imdb at the moment to provide links or refresh my memory as to the actors.
Robert Sean Leonard.
Robot Arm, regarding Sleuth:
Yep, just Caine and Olivier. The other four cast members listed are to disguise the spoiler(s).No extras, either.
This thread caused a major comedy of errors at my house when I went to ask my husband if there were really only 7 characters in Alien (excluding the cat & …ug). We ended up in a discussion that ended up somehow with “Ememy Mine” and I came back to my office to discover that the cats had been into my drink - I don’t think they drank much but there was a very spirited game of ice cube hockey going on when I got back.
I must say my life has been more, um, interesting since I joined the SDMB.
isn’t it said that a very potent curse is “may your life be interesti g” (deliberately misspelled because I don’t want to take any chances)
Gerry only had Casey Affleck and Matt Damon in it.
The Taylor-Burton-Segal-Dennis foursome go to a roadside bar, where they are the only customers, and Taylor puts a song on the jukebox and dances provocatively. A woman is behind the bar, apparently the host’s wife, but she has no lines.
Also worth mentioning the Blair Witch Project , which IMDB tells me had a total of ten in the cast.
Other solo films:
• Julie Harris played Charlotte Brontë in Delbert Mann’s Brontë (US/Ireland, 1983).
• Monica Buferd played Joan of Arc in St. Joan (UK, 1977).
• The Belgian film Romeo-Juliet (1990) had the characters of Shakespeare’s tragedy played entirely by cats, except John Hurt, who plays Mercutio and a bag lady (no, I’m not making this up). Since the OP defined a cast as “people who appear on the screen,” we’ll overlook that the dialogue is voiced-over by heavyweights like Vanessa Redgrave, Maggie Smith, and Ben Kingsley.
Dereck Jarman’s Blue Has 79 minutes of nothing but a blue screen. No cartoon charcters, no Belgian cats, just a blue screen :eek:
My VCR can do that.
I couldn’t see that movie.
I’d just taken a Viagra.
MicroCosmos, Winged Migration, and The March of the Penguins all had a human cast of zero unless you count voice-over narrators.
I think “Sleuth” is clearly the winner here.
Well The Spongebob Squarepants movie only has “one” real person in the cast David Hasselhoff, if I recall correctly.
There are dozens of real, human pirates on a ship (well, real human actors dressed as pirates) in the beginning.
Only 4 main characters in ‘Closer’. The imigration guy at the airport is also listed in the credits but he only has one line. The doctor’s receptionist has one line also but is not listed in the closing credits.
Yep, I didn’t recall correctly. Good catch.