One would think that great budgets would help make great movies, and small budgets not so much. After all, if the budget is too small, it can severely hamper the possibility of implementing the vision that the writer or the director had.
This is often the case with so-called B-movies. Lousy scenery and props, poor lighting, horrendous post-production and editing... Quite often it ends up as a direct-to-home-video product and forgotten by history.
But sometimes a great movie is made regardless of a laughably low budget. The Evil Dead, The Blair Witch Project, and Paranormal Activity are three of the most famous examples (hmm, there seems to be a common pattern here.)
Sometimes, however, a movie becomes better due to the changes that are needed due to budget constraints. If the budget had been larger and the movie done as originally envisioned and planned, it would have ostensibly been worse.
This seems counter-intuitive. It's easy to understand that a great movie could be made regardless of the budget being small. However, how can a small budget outright cause a movie to become better, compared to what it would have been with a larger budget? How could the movie have been worse if the budget had been bigger?
One of the most famous examples of this is the 1975 Spielberg movie Jaws. Neither the technology of the time, nor the budget of the movie, allowed the production team to create a shark prop that looked good. Spielberg's original plan was to make the shark much more prominent and have significantly more screen time. However, these technological and monetary constraints forced him to change the script so that the shark is visible on screen only very rarely and only for very short periods of time.
The movie became extremely suspenseful as a result. Quite serendipitously it was found out that not seeing the shark was scarier than having it on the screen all the time. A danger that's there, unseen, is scarier and more suspenseful than one that's in plain view. It taps into the fear of the unknown of the human psyche.
A less known (at least in general) example is the 1984 film The Terminator.
The script for the movie is based on a nightmare that its writer and director James Cameron had once, of a metallic skeletal robot walking out of a wall of fire.
His initial intention was to create a sci-fi movie set in the future, with such a robot haunting some people. However, once again budgetary constraints limited this. Because of this, he came with the idea that the robot would actually travel from this future to present day. Another idea, caused by budget constraints, was that the robot would, for most of the film, be disguised as a human (because back in 1984 it was enormously difficult and expensive to get a convincing moving skeletal robot on film).
Thus the movie became one of the most iconic movies of all time, in big part precisely because of this setting. Without the budgetary constraints and the changes needed because of them, the movie would probably have been significantly less iconic and more run-of-the-mill.
This is often the case with so-called B-movies. Lousy scenery and props, poor lighting, horrendous post-production and editing... Quite often it ends up as a direct-to-home-video product and forgotten by history.
But sometimes a great movie is made regardless of a laughably low budget. The Evil Dead, The Blair Witch Project, and Paranormal Activity are three of the most famous examples (hmm, there seems to be a common pattern here.)
Sometimes, however, a movie becomes better due to the changes that are needed due to budget constraints. If the budget had been larger and the movie done as originally envisioned and planned, it would have ostensibly been worse.
This seems counter-intuitive. It's easy to understand that a great movie could be made regardless of the budget being small. However, how can a small budget outright cause a movie to become better, compared to what it would have been with a larger budget? How could the movie have been worse if the budget had been bigger?
One of the most famous examples of this is the 1975 Spielberg movie Jaws. Neither the technology of the time, nor the budget of the movie, allowed the production team to create a shark prop that looked good. Spielberg's original plan was to make the shark much more prominent and have significantly more screen time. However, these technological and monetary constraints forced him to change the script so that the shark is visible on screen only very rarely and only for very short periods of time.
The movie became extremely suspenseful as a result. Quite serendipitously it was found out that not seeing the shark was scarier than having it on the screen all the time. A danger that's there, unseen, is scarier and more suspenseful than one that's in plain view. It taps into the fear of the unknown of the human psyche.
A less known (at least in general) example is the 1984 film The Terminator.
The script for the movie is based on a nightmare that its writer and director James Cameron had once, of a metallic skeletal robot walking out of a wall of fire.
His initial intention was to create a sci-fi movie set in the future, with such a robot haunting some people. However, once again budgetary constraints limited this. Because of this, he came with the idea that the robot would actually travel from this future to present day. Another idea, caused by budget constraints, was that the robot would, for most of the film, be disguised as a human (because back in 1984 it was enormously difficult and expensive to get a convincing moving skeletal robot on film).
Thus the movie became one of the most iconic movies of all time, in big part precisely because of this setting. Without the budgetary constraints and the changes needed because of them, the movie would probably have been significantly less iconic and more run-of-the-mill.
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