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Producing Low-Budget Films: A Conversation with Roger Corman
From: American Film Institute
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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Motion picture director, producer and distributor, Roger Corman's third film, Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), was made in six days for $12,000. Soon after, he was directing up to eight films a year. With a  robust reputation for speed, Corman claimed in 1960 that he could shoot a picture in two weeks for less than $100,000. By 2000, Corman had produced 297 films and had given many great American directors and actors their first shot at a picture, including Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, among others.
Addressing the American Film Institute (AFI) community in a 1995 master seminar, Corman outlined the fundamentals of low-budget production. |
 believe the only way to make a film efficiently on a low budget is with a tremendous amount of preparation, generally a couple of months. |
I scout locations very thoroughly, I have every location picked in advance and I know pretty much how I'm going to shoot. I'll have a picture that I'll design, and I'll design the shots myself. The myth is that I design all my shots before I start the picture, and it has never happened exactly that way, but I'll sometimes get up to 70 percent of my shots worked out in advance. That is one of the greatest advantages to shooting well on a low-budget film: knowing exactly what you're going to do in advance. |
On the other hand, after having planned that much in pre-production, you must stay flexible enough so that if it doesn't work, you throw it out, even if you've spent weeks working on something. You're there on the set and you're working with the actors and it doesn't work. You've got to say, "O.K., I'm going to throw out the couple of weeks' work and I'll do it another way." Or you may get a better idea at that time. |
So, there are big differences between, say, an Alfred Hitchcock, who will design every shot and stay very, very close to the plan and somebody like Francis Ford Coppola. I read an interview with Hitchcock and he said, very logically, that he thought better in his office than he did on the set, so he figured out his pictures in advance. On the other end of the spectrum there is Coppola, who on The Rain People (1969) actually didn't know where his locations were going to be. It was part of his method of shooting. |
I put everything on paper. I have an engineering degree, so it probably goes back to the way I was trained. I'll have a rough plan with certain symbols I've invented for myself, arrows and dots and moving things to visualize the actors moving this way and the camera moving over here and so forth. |
I never really believe that the picture is going to be done right until I see it on the board, with the script broken down and a shooting schedule. I need to see a list of locations. I need to see where the actors will work and visualize the whole thing. It's crucial to beak down the script, put it on the board and get to a shooting schedule so you can lock in specific things such as the crew, the locations, equipment rental and so forth. |
On where to cut costs first
Save at the beginning with a first-time director. For instance, with Bruce Clark, Frances Scofield and Irv Kirschner, I made a deal with them to write, direct and cut. So I had, as it were, three elements in there right at the beginning, and frankly, they did not get a great deal of money for doing this. The reason was this: I was giving them an opportunity to make their first film on the basis, hopefully, that I would make a profit and, hopefully, their careers would take off. In each director's case, it did. |
Subject matter and low-budget production
I feel that any script can be made for any budget, but the result will be somewhat different. You could make Doctor Zhivago (1965) in six days for $50,000, but it's going to look different. At the beginning, I tried very much to hold down the number of actors, the number of locations and the number of moves. In other words, I would work to bring the project down to a small, tight unit. |
For instance, the first picture I directed was called Five Guns West (1955), and it had five people in it, five men who rode north from Texas. They met an old man and his daughter at a deserted stagecoach depot (and this was crucial). That was the entire cast. At times, I tried to go the other way, to get a big look. I feel that it's wrong to do that. I feel that you'd better not try to make a spectacle on a low budget. You're better to try to work in-depth on subject matter that lends itself to the process better. |
If you fall in love with some huge project, you can do it. But I think you dissipate a great deal of your crew's efforts and creativity if the energy is put into making something small look big, rather than taking something small and making it look good. |
Another example is a picture called War of the Satellites (1958). When the first Sputnik went up--when the Russians sent up the first thing--we got the news one morning. I was having lunch with a guy from a special effects thing and we started talking. I said, "How fast could you give me some special effects on this stuff?" |
And he said "I could have it ready in a couple of weeks." |
So I called Allied Artists, with whom I had made a couple of films, and I told them that I could have a film, and we started that day. The script was written, I think, in 10 days. But at the same time the script was being written, we were building the sets. We worked very fast. That's an extreme example. Nevertheless, it was not an inefficient production. |
Advice for young filmmakers
Deals can be made. You're at a tremendous advantage. The fact that you're young and starting is a huge advantage. You can, if you play it right, get a tremendous amount of help. I was still claiming to be a student filmmaker 10 years after I was making films and going on location trying to make films. Don't bypass that. Don't get into the trap of saying, "If I pretend I'm from a big studio, I'll be accepted better." Go the other way and say, "I've got little money and I'm trying to get started." In general, people will be glad to try to help you. |
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