Creative Problem Solving

There is a particular pleasure in watching a director who has run two-hundred-million-dollar machinery choose to work small, because everything he does on the small picture tells you what he actually believes about the craft. Martin Campbell, the man who launched two Bonds with GoldenEye and Casino Royale, shot Just Play Dead in the Canary Islands as an independent production, and he names the terms himself without being asked twice: tight budget, tight schedule, delivered on schedule and on budget. Samuel L. Jackson plays a wealthy criminal faking his death to escape the feds; Eva Green plays the wife who prefers the death to be real and the insurance to be hers; everyone else circles the money. In Campbell’s summary of the character logic, nobody has any kind of redemption, they are all trying to knock each other off, and, of course, chaos happened. C’est le bordel, by design, and the design is the interesting part. ...

There are two kinds of first-contact film. The first kind lands the hardware: saucers over cities, armies in the streets, a planet’s worth of extras looking up. Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is this year’s grand version of it, and Wells’s Martians were doing it on the page in the nineteenth century. The second kind never shows you the visitor at all. It gives you a signal, an instrument, and a person who has to decide what the data means; Contact is its cathedral, and Clara and Ad Astra keep smaller chapels. The Outer Threat, the directing debut of the Toronto writer William Woods, belongs entirely to the second kind, and the interesting thing about it is not that a low-budget Canadian production chose the cheaper church. It is how far the film commits to the choice once made. ...

Bref, we all know the rule: independent filmmakers should not touch science fiction. The moment you introduce a spaceship into your script, the budget multiplies by ten, the production design swallows your schedule, and the visual effects supervise you into an early grave. Yet, here is Pavlo Ostrikov’s U Are The Universe, a film about a space trucker who becomes the last man alive after Earth is destroyed in 2070. He shot it in Ukraine, relying almost entirely on a single actor and a robot companion, and brought it across the finish line for $800,000. ...

Bref, recreating the past is usually an expensive trap. When a director says they want to set their film in the 1970s, the producers immediately start sweating. Period cars, period wardrobe, period licensing—it drains a budget faster than a bad storm. So, how did the Cairnes brothers manage to build a flawless 1977 American late-night television broadcast on a modest $2 million budget? They did what all great independent filmmakers do: they contained the madness. ...

The modern studio system spends hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring established intellectual property—comic books, video games, theme park rides—desperate for a pre-existing audience. For their $750,000 independent film, Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly bypassed the studios entirely. They sourced their intellectual property for free from an internet joke. The Meme as Foundation Safety Not Guaranteed is based on a bizarre, viral 1997 classified ad asking for a partner to travel back in time. On the internet, it was a disposable punchline. But Trevorrow and Connolly performed a masterclass in reverse-engineered screenwriting. They did not treat the meme as a joke. They treated it with profound narrative sincerity. ...

The standard lifecycle of an independent film is a financial tragedy: a writer finishes a brilliant script, and then the director spends five years going bankrupt trying to find the locations to shoot it. For their $20,000 debut feature, Resolution, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead refused to play this game. They reversed the process. They secured a free location first—a cabin owned by Benson’s parents—and then reverse-engineered a script specifically designed to be shot within its walls. ...

When a production is restricted to a single location, the instinct is to chop the narrative into pieces. You shoot coverage. You break the scene down line by line to protect the actor and give the editor options. In Locke, Steven Knight had a single location: the cabin of a moving BMW X5. He did not chop the narrative into pieces. He forced his actor to endure it in real-time. ...

There is a plague of good taste in independent cinema. Too many directors are paralyzed by the fear of looking foolish, resulting in films that are perfectly competent and utterly forgettable. The directors known as Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) reject this fear entirely. They operate under a “bad idea” philosophy: if a concept is juvenile, embarrassing, or horrifying—say, a feature film built entirely around a farting corpse—they force themselves to execute it with absolute, rigorous sincerity. ...

The modern studio model is built on specialization. You have a director, a writer, a lead actor, and an army of visual effects artists working in a windowless room in London. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead looked at this model, realized they had no money, and simply decided to do everything themselves. The Economy of Consolidation To achieve the massive, cosmic-horror scale of The Endless on a micro-budget, Benson and Moorhead aggressively consolidated roles. They co-directed, produced, co-edited, and cast themselves as the lead actors. But the true masterstroke of their production model lies in the visual effects. ...

Satire loses its teeth when it is rendered entirely in a computer. CGI is weightless; it does not displace air, and it does not intrude. Boots Riley understands this fundamental rule of visual comedy and violence, which is why the central visual gag of Sorry to Bother You is executed almost entirely in-camera. The Telemarketing Intrusion When Cassius Green (LaKeith Stanfield) makes a cold call as a telemarketer, he does not just hear the voice on the other end of the line. His entire desk—along with Cassius himself—physically drops from the ceiling into the private space of the customer. He lands in the middle of dinner parties, in bedrooms, and even in front of a woman grieving a personal tragedy. ...