Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ was mostly an independant movie, for about 60k IIRC. Shot in less than a month-the shower scene took a week though. I’m sure the Coen’s first feature, Blood Simple, didn’t cost too much. Time frame is a consideration here-i’m sure many fine movies were made in the thirties and forties for around 200k. Citizen Kane didn’t even cost a million!
i heard that El Mariachi was made for under 10K, but the post production was about a quarter of a mil.
“hmmmm…yes, my movie lord of the rings was done for free-but, then, we had to PAY people”.
What the…!? Sixty-thousand?? More like $800,000, not an enormous budget for 1960 but on the low end of typical. Independent? It was a Paramount picture! Alfred Hitchcock shoot a picture in less than a month? Pish-posh!
-----No cite, but I seem to recall an article in one of the film mags, some years back, in which a former friend of Rodriguez claimed that the real cost of El Mariachi was more like $200K. Of course, that would spoil all the fun, so I choose to believe the lower figure.----
He did make the original El Mariachi for $7000 and tried to sell it to Spanish Network or video distributor (cannot remember exacly who, but Spanish). Then somebody saw it and recognized the potential, which resulted into additional money to brush it up and bring it to the sellable state.
About Slacker – it has truly brilliant moments surrounded by lots of slow bits. Just like most of Linklater’s other movies. For instance Waking Life (not low budget) was good overall, and brilliant visually, but had very very boring stretches in it which seemed pointless.
The real reason I love Slacker so much is because I went to the University of Texas and I have eaten, lived near or in, and walked past about 90% of the movie background. That’s pretty cool.
To Torgo, i could be wrong about the amount of money involved, but Hitchcock put up alot of his own money. The studio thought this would be a disaster-the female lead gets killed in the first forty minutes??!! Then what, they asked? Also, it was in black and white-color and spectacle were all the rage(Vertigo/North by Northwest). Nothing quite like this had ever been done before-it virtually created the slasher/horror genre.
And he did shoot the movie in a month. Some have speculated that he was trying to outdo Welles’ ‘Touch of Evil’. There are a number similarities between these movies.
John Sayles’s first film, The Return of the Secaucus Seven, was made for about $45,000 IIRC, and in my opinon did a better job of examining college friends getting together for a reunion and bemoaning their lost idealism than did the much more expensive The Big Chill, which was made three years later.
The Roger Corman Vincent Price Poe movies in the early 60’s were a lot of fun for a little money. I read somewhere (can’t remember where) That one of them was made for about $300,000 with Prices salary at $100,000. Don’t know if thats true but I’m sure someone will tell me.
Rande…
The original “Star Wars - A New Hope” was a very low budget film. George Lucas had very little money to make that film. I would say it’s in the top five for low-budget film.
Everyone’s already said my favorites, so I’ll toss another one out there: Swingers. Any film that has to have a police lookout on all the exterior shots because the crew hasn’t secured the prerequisite filming permits has to count for something in this category.
Also, when Vince Vaughn later went to star on Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World, he was comparing film budgets with Spielburg one day on the set, and found out that the budget for Swingers was less than the catering budget for JP2.
And then there’s always the original Terminator. While 6.4 million might seem decent, it was woefully small for a sci-fi actioner in 1984. The Budget was so low, the film’s audio as origionally released, was monophonic.
I think people are blurring distinctions here. Clerks, El Mariachi, The Blair Witch Project and Slacker were ultra-low-budget films, although some of them required the distributors to spend $100,000 or so to clean them up before distributing them. Swingers, at $200,000 is at the low end of what’s traditionally thought of as low-budget filmmaking. Star Wars at $11 million and The Terminator at $6.4 million were moderate budget films. Something like Jurassic Park: The Lost World at $73 million is at the low end of high-budget filmmaking.
I don’t know if this counts, considering the budget is listed on IMDB as $4.5mm, but I find Donnie Darko to be an unbelievable flick. In the directory’s commentary, Richard Kelly remarks that a lot of the people who worked on the picture wound up not getting paid because the budget was so tight. They did the work only for the credit because they couldn’t resist working on the project.
