Budget

I didn't ask you how much it costs. He's the writer of the movie, Get Him a Suite. A company who just never stopped doing favors for everybody on the picture. And he always had a little bit in his budget for what he used to call morale. A native of New Brunswick, Canada, Harry Saltzman, the co-producer of Diamonds Are Forever, traveled to Paris at a young age and became manager of a circus. During World War II, by some accounts, he was an interpreter for Allied commanders.

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james bond sean connery would drive that red mustang they would give us all the cars as many cars as we wanted to for the demolition derby so ford supplied all the police cars all the smashed cars all the villains cars every car and there must be 80 cars that get it in this movie between all the chases they're all ford it was just a huge budget item

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I remember Cubby intentionally making sure that Bruce got a shot in every location that we were at so that they could extend his deal by six weeks so that he'd get paid for six more weeks. And he would say, for what we're paying him, what's the difference on this budget? And it means a lot to him. And unless you scheduled him an old pro like Bruce would know you were giving him charity and would have resented it.

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Roger Moore

I believe that after The Spy Who Loved Me... ... which had been a big success at the box office... ...the budget was increased for this film. Which it had to be because it was... It really was larger. We moved from Pinewood to make Moonraker... ...and set up our headquarters in Paris.

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Roger Moore

Which I suppose was why he did this. It's sort of confessions of an English secret agent. Where we're shooting is Chateau Vaux de Vicomte... ...which is one of the most beautiful chateaus in France. And the man who built it... ...Was actually... ...[ think, minister of finance in France. And he was so pleased with this magnificent chateau... ...he'd built for himself... ...he invited the king amongst all the other dignitaries... ...for the opening party. And the king said, "Where did he get the money for this?" And he slapped him and his wife in jail for the rest of their lives.

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Roger Moore

When I think-- Looking at this, and think back to the years before... ...when I did a television series... ...we'd had technical things like this... ... how amateur were the ones we had as compared to what Bond had. But, of course, there again, a lot of money was spent on Bond. And the one thing that I always say about the success of Bond is that... ... they never cheated the audience. When it came to spending the money... ... they put it up on the screen.

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Oh, who was the karate kid but we couldn't afford him because we didn't have enough money? Ralph Macchio. Ralph Macchio. Matthew Broderick. Matthew... Did we see Matthew Broderick? I seem to remember that. There he is. There's that guy from the stereo store. Don't you think he looks like Richard Gere? Did you see his cute little butt? Okay, you guys. Let's talk about that fox that just walked in. We already were.

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That means one team has to win by more than 14 points to win the money. This dude was interesting. That was, yeah, an actual punk named Walter. I just liked his look, so we put him all over the place. Yeah. Here's where I really screwed up. Why? Well, okay, we went to the high school during a game and we shot all this game footage.

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That's good. I remember doing the research for the book. I was really struck at how everybody had jobs in the three years that I had been out of high school, or I think it was longer, four years or something. I noticed that everybody had jobs now, and there was this quest to get the money for records, clothes, and all that stuff, and it changed all their lives. Thank you.

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the little dangly pine tree, which was the only sponsor that you got for the film, besides Ralph's Markets. Ralph's Supermarkets donated some generic goods, including beer, and the Car Freshener Corporation donated about a hundred of these little Christmas trees without scent, so that we wouldn't have to smell them. That was our special effects, right? That was our entire special effects budget.

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I love this. They love this. They get run over and they, oh! My nephew got in a fight in Chicago in the movies about that. Why? Because they said I was stupid for throwing the money out the car. Oh, that's too much.

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See, it's a generic fetal nitrate. A metal hand. Can we feel it? You see, she's supposed to have a robot hand, you know, and that's not quite a robot hand. The budget didn't quite allow for that.

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This is so great, the way this woman plays the scene with John Mahoney. What hurts most is not that she declines the card or even that their flirtation ends. What hurts most is the pity. The pity! The pity is so brutal. It's like, take everything, take all the money, just please no pity. And she... Oh, this is a guy...

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Sweetheart, no. Don't be ridiculous. I need to know the truth. Honey. I swear to God. I swear to God. Oh, my God. I found the money. Oh, baby. It just drains out of him. Look at that. Ooh, I was a lucky guy that day. What am I supposed to think?

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In the kind of terror that happens in a studio before they put a movie out and spend all the money to promote it, there was a real feeling at the studio at the time, like, who's gonna go see this movie? Is it for the family or is it for kids? There was a screening, and someone invited a writer who brought his daughter, and they just kind of quizzed them after the screening, and some people decided that it was gonna only appeal to kids. So the movie was never really... Kids? Kids? What do you mean, kids?

1:35:58 · jump to transcript →

You know, we did not have to pay for this just for the pilots, you know, sleeping in core hotels and so on. And per diems, that's all. So that's really enormous help. Otherwise, the budget would go crazy with all these planes. And the next shot, again, is an effect shot. And this would be the model again. And then there's the capsule going out. And these clouds you see there, we shot these clouds, or I'd say boss films, shot these clouds.

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One of the dangers would have been, for me, dangerous to drop the dogfight. I was fighting hard to keep the dogfight in. And finally, they went back to the partners also, to Columbia and to Disney, because Disney, you know, is the film for international. And they all decided to spend the money for the dogfight. So I could do it. And this is a result now. And I think it's a pretty spectacular sequence. It's very, you know, it's not very long. It's, I don't know, like maybe two minutes or something like that, two, three minutes.

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where a guy honestly tells him why he was doing what he was doing. There's no time to say all that. So finally, we said, let's go just with the drama, with the incredible speed here and the pacing and the tempo and the time clock that the plane would crash any second that people can think about. He did it for the money or he did it for politics, whatever. Whatever the reason was, he just did it. And I think most of the people accepted that. Isn't this spectacular?

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Darren Aronofsky

hallucination part of the sequence. The whole score changes, as well as the sound design, as well as the camera work. This was all shot MOS. We couldn't afford to bring a sound rig down into the depths of New York City, and so we shot a lot of this with a Bolex, which is a very, very simple 16mm camera.

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Darren Aronofsky

um, spirals that he, um, sort of talks about, but we didn't have the budget to research and get any sort of spirals, and I tried going to the library and finding stuff. But even the internet didn't give me any help. So if you notice now, his POV has gone from like 18 frames per second to 12 frames per second. We just sped up, um, the speed of...

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Darren Aronofsky

And I was hoping that audiences, because they were sort of used to seeing the sort of continued hit montage, would have a larger sort of emotional reaction to the fact that it was broken. When you're shooting on a low-budget film, you get one chance to do this. The great destruction of Euclid. You've got to nail it. You've got to pray, especially when you're shooting such a tricky stock as Reversal, that the image is going to come out. And, you know, it's really, you know, faith and...

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Kat Ellinger

And as much as baisement can be considered a statement in feminist terms and a statement about rape and a statement about female anger, for example, it wasn't part of any kind of intellectual movement. Some of these choices were made aesthetically and some were made because they were working on a very, very small budget of less than two million francs.

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Kat Ellinger

the mode of production was no longer limited to distribution via studios or these kind of established routes. You had a sense of anarchy come out. And so in America, for example, throughout the mid-'80s, you had the SOV movement, the shot-on-video movement, which, again, wasn't really a coherent movement, but very transgressive, very low-budget, very gory horror coming out of America.

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Kat Ellinger

in the original novel and it is the sister character who tells them to go I think she's cleaning for him sort of tells them that the money's there but the way he says to Nadine you must have really suffered and he tries to be sympathetic to her now this scene is incredibly powerful because at first glance you think this guy

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All the people lying down, all those corpses that you see in the church are actually volunteers who turned up for us and I think we gave them a free cup of tea or something, some huge generous offering to ask them to turn up for a couple of hours. They were students because we couldn't afford to hire extras in a conventional way. We didn't have the kind of money to do that. There were people who just turned up and helped us. The man who played the priest was an enormous help to us. He did lots of workshops with us early on about movement. He's a brilliant kind of movement artist.

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people pushing the car with her a hold of it, you know, and all that kind of stuff really. It's also the thing that led to a lot of these multiple endings because Jim has been shot and that was the key point. It was what happens from that moment in a way. Yeah. This was as far as we got with our first budget. In fact, this next shot was our last.

1:43:50 · jump to transcript →

Waking up. And Fox gave us the money to go to the Lake District and actually shoot this ending and another ending that you'll see on the deleted scenes, really. But to be fair, this was always, this scene, although in a slightly different way, was always in the original script, the idea of going to the Lake District. In the shooting script, it was there, yeah. But the film changed so much during the filming. I mean, quarantine and...

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But they said if you spend more than 5,000 feet tomorrow, you're sacked. It was really funny. Was that them talking or was that from the studio? Well, it's more from the Bond company. You know, they see the Bond company is a company who makes sure you don't go over budget. And they charge a lot, in fact. But there are people who like movies. Not all of them, but the ones we work with, they like movies. You know, we can talk with them. So...

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But it's the expense. If you spend the money for one week after one day of shooting, they talk to you and make sure you stop doing that. This is horrible, this image.

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So initially, this sequence was much more effective, the way it was written and the way we thought we would do it. And when we decided to go for New York and no Canada, we have to limit the budget and special effects. And I think it turned out to be more touching. It's less technical. Look, our files are confidential.

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someone actually on the other end of that phone, and they're really having that conversation with him. And it really helped a lot. It created a real sense of immediacy and reality for the actors on set. Another interesting thing, the mother of invention phrase, which is when we're making movies at this budget level, you have to get really creative with how to make these things

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look good and seem like bigger movies and without a lot of resources. One of the big resources in the cinematography department are big lights. When you shoot a lot of a movie at night, if you're lighting up outside, you need big lights. Big lights are very expensive and we couldn't afford them. Boyd was very clever and what he did is he used the sun as a big light.

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We're making a very low budget movie version, which involved showing Sam and kind of paying off the idea of the Sandman Sam, the doppelganger Sam that has light for eyes. And you'll see that in the deleted scenes. And it's a very cool image, but it's pretty darn abstract. And so that's always the thing.

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But it seems to me that that was something that, you know, you could relate to Welles' theater work only in the way of reusing sets in very imaginative ways. Sure, sure, exactly. Yeah, this was not a big-budget film. He had gotten into trouble with Heart of Darkness because the budget estimates kept coming in so high. And he was careful about this one. He didn't waste any studio money. But one of the things that's, I think...

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He really didn't do that. Many other more successful directors wasted money. Howard Hawks went way over budget in several of his films. Hitchcock did. But Wells stayed within the financial parameters that were set for him. By the way, there's a point in which he...

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David Kalat

He complained that he had to make do with a smaller orchestra than he was used to in his classical works. And to show how chintzy the whole thing was, he directed the musicians while the Foley artists recorded the film's sound effects simultaneously on the same track. The movie studios pinched pennies like nobody's business, even on a project as unprecedentedly expensive as this. The final budget is said to have been 62 million yen.

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David Kalat

Let's say for argument's sake that Iwayo Mori had never returned to Toho and that some other studio executive greenlit this with the giant monster Tsuburaya's octopus and with little overt Atomic Age subtext. What if Tsuburaya had been given the money to animate his octopus Harryhausen style? Would that version of Godzilla have been half as meaningful? You wouldn't have had to change much in the past to significantly alter the way this came out, but little changes could have had an enormous impact.

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But Sergio Leone was probably the first Italian director to be indulged with a budget of more than $1 million. You might see crowds like this assembled for the Hollywood on the Tiber spectacles of the 1950s, but those were Hollywood films using Italy and its environs as a location.

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War is a poor alternative to self-centered profiteering, end quote. I have a feeling it's really going to be a good long battle. Blondie? Huh? The money's on the other side of the river. Well, where? Maybe I said the other side, if that's enough.

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became very unfashionable for a long time, wasn't it? It was like most science... And obviously it's cheaper to make a Mad Max-type movie than it is to make a 2001-type movie. So if you're envisioning the future... Well, you mentioned budgets. Now, one has to say, and I agree entirely, the special effects in this are still terrific. They're not as good as 2001 because he didn't have Kubrick's level of control, he didn't have Kubrick's budget...

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Considering that this whole thing is all to do with the fact that the company would rather return their spaceships to commercial use, presumably Neil is spending a huge budget just to save this one guy who, A, doesn't want to be saved, and B, is a murderer. And I like the fact that this film has a sense that there is a larger story going on out there

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We have also that massive success in the form of Dirty Harry, which made $36 million on a $4 million budget. Two years later, a sequel in which he would reprise the role of San Francisco cop Harry Callahan makes even more. And this puts him well on his way to being one of the most bankable actors going. So there we are. Another one of these deep-focus, short-lens shots.

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He did what he was allowed to do. I suppose if they'd said make it for $80 million, he'd have done it for $80 instead of $40. What I wonder is what would have happened in a case like that in the old days. What would Jack L. Warner or Harry Cohn have done? They would have been down there when the guy was $100,000 over budget saying, take a hike, kid. When I read that they wanted to go back and re-edit Heaven's Gate with the same care it took to make the movie...

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mystical sense to it which i wasn't aware of i must say at the time it was inevitable because the the space launch program was there also wasn't aware of the times when it came out it was probably for pragmatic reasons and then it was the film commissioner was one of the main reasons probably in the budget but but i guess it was really always going to be made there

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A director like Nick, I think, tries to open as much space as possible between the planned and the unplanned. Most directors don't do that. They don't like to for very good reasons. They have complicated time and budget scimitars hanging over their heads and a very specific story to be told in a specific amount of time.

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What is it? This is Joe Gaggs. $185,000 of my money. We have this problem. What problem? What are you talking about? He was moving my merchandise. So the money in his pocket when he went out the window is my money. This is a plating company. What are you telling me to shit? Shit? I want my money. Hey, I don't know what you're talking about, Mr. Frank Lala. Whatever.

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remodeled most of the character, but she was really upset that he had gone out, and they had all the money they needed, apparently, and this and that. And I told her to take it easy, and I spoke to John. I said, why, John? And he said to me, some guys like broads. And God, that was really, I mean, what an insight. I mean, he just had to do it. He had to do it, yeah.

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Peter Greenaway

So we could see here all the foreign influences on the English aristocracy. The import of Indian tea, but served in Delftware, produced in Holland. It has to be said, the budget for this film, way back in the early 80s,

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Peter Greenaway

For a film of this complexity and this density and these production values, extremely small, and these objects on the table were the real items belonging to the house we used, and it was estimated that Christie's had insured those four items of ceramic on that table as ten times the total budget of our film. So we were very much indebted to the owners of the house to be allowed to use these real antique artifacts.

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Frank Morriss

So this is a terrific set. This is the one I pointed out to you earlier that we built-- Philip built right on the site of Piper Tech, up on the roof. And it looks-- It's totally believable, and yet, very flexible for filming. They actually didn't have anything like this that we could use... ...and we needed more space than what they had... ...so they let us use it. And then when the filming was done-- There's the building, right there, that we made. --We had to take the building away... ...because it really wasn't built up to code. Yet, we could give them all the aeronautics equipment-- The helicopter police-- --Give them all the aeronautics equipment that we had had to buy... ...for the movie. And they were delighted to have that... ...because the city budget wasn't so great. And a lot of their equipment was kind of out-of-date... ...and they couldn't afford it.

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Hoyt Yeatman

Here's another almost-- Antiquity. You have to really go a long ways to find drive-in movie theatres. And I think Frank and I laughed a lot... ...about the idea of burying a tape inside a dumpster. You know, this-- - This is stretching it a bit. We're really, really stretching it... ...that Lymangood would put this stupid thing inside the dumpster. I mean, it was a lot of fun because, here, look what-- Candy Clark getting to flip upside down and so on. But it was not the smartest place in the world to do this. When Columbia later decided to make a Blue Thunder television series... ...this truck is the very one that they decided to use... ...because they couldn't afford to fly the helicopter... ...so they had to do it all on the ground, which was another brilliant decision.

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Kenneth Loring

are actors and filmmakers who do like their hand properties. And why not? You pay the rental, you want to see the money on the screen, as they say. Zivkov pockets the lucre. We'll maybe see that lighter again as he dons his hat, yes. He's forgetting the lighter and one wants to cry out, Zivkov, the lighter! Perhaps one imagines Fred Astaire and weeps for what might have been. And yet, this actor leaves us not

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Kenneth Loring

We serve a rather different audience. I like to think it's a connoisseur audience, interested in the more artfully done sort of thing. And, of course, we couldn't compete in acquiring the Rambos anyway. We just don't have the budget. So we ferret out those movies that have fallen into the public domain, the older movies, sometimes movies from countries not on board with the International Copyright Convention. It doesn't mean they make bad films.

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This little camera slide, though, that's a directing thing, which hopefully is good. And here come the flying basketballs to interrupt the dean's speech. And that's what would happen if you lived in a gym. Not a lot of guys left because a lot of people have found homes. And also because we couldn't afford to have that many extras every day.

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Here's a local guy that, we shot this in a Masonic hall, and this was the caretaker. So we put a jacket on him. Or maybe it was his own jacket. I don't think we had budget for extra jackets. Neil, gentlemen. We're trying everything. I think you can tell right there, but I've...

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Richard Donner

My name is Dick Donner, and I directed this wonderful film Scrooged. And Danny Elfman did the music. Paramount put up the money. A lot of great actors, a lot of great fun. And Scrooged was supposed to be advertised as, "You've been Scrooged." But, you know, people are chicken, and they were worried about the, you know, the right. You know which right I'm talking about. And, so we never said, "Scrooge," but I'm saying it now. And if you guys don't want to buy it, then go Scrooged yourself. How's that? Now, okay, this is a great little set. A wonderful little set. I have a lot of this at home. I know I shouldn't, but... And these are all the little people. We got little people from all over to come, and some of them turned out to really be Santa's helper. We didn't realize it and... But they showed up, because they heard about the casting and figured it would work. That... Last time a star appeared like that, it was Joel Silver. You should pardon the expression.

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Richard Donner

Now, this was tough. 'Cause how long could he hold it, without smiling or breathing or breaking it? So we were forced to cut away, as you see. We didn't have the money to make an artificial face.

1:09:32 · jump to transcript →

Mel Allen, his last movie. Yeah, that was a big... Another one. Wasn't that a big budget for one joke? Also buried in a dress. Big budget for one joke, correct? You had to get all those people? Well, some jokes are worth the bucks. Yeah. You have to have the courage to spend. Complete bullshit. Now, some of these scenes of Leslie and George we did on the Paramount lot later. With people just... People behind him. A section behind him and a section... You'll see that some of them were pretty close on...

1:00:14 · jump to transcript →

If you went over budget, if the movie is a hit, or I don't know. Probably not the same. Let me tell you, that's not true. Yeah, Bob didn't work for years after this. Yeah, exactly. After which? Yeah, the movie's a hit. Ah, another semaphore joke. Never miss with those. Yeah. Another night shot. This is what I'd call off-message to Dave. Oh, a corking the bat reference for your true love. Yeah, nobody got this.

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