Film Budgeting - Tactics For Cutting Costs

Tactics For Cutting Costs

• Eliminate night scenes. Shooting at night requires powerful/expensive lighting and the payment of nighttime rates to the crew. Broken Arrow cut costs by millions of dollars by getting rid of the night scenes from the script. Many directors choose to use the 'day for night' technique.
• Avoid location filming in famous or commercial areas. Shooting a scene on, for example, the Golden Gate Bridge, requires stopping traffic with a resultant drop in revenue to the city of San Francisco. Filming such a scene for Interview with the Vampire cost Warner Bros. $500,000. Shifting the location to the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge for close-ups could save hundreds of thousands of dollars in location fees. Some locations are more willing to allow filming than others - commercial enterprises such as hotels and nightclubs. Some producers of low-budget features avoid paying location fees and seek to capture shots by subterfuge.
• Film action scenes early on Sunday morning. Stopping traffic for a car chase scene is easier in the early hours of Sunday morning, when traffic is at its lightest.
• Use unknown cast members rather than stars.
• Ask above-the-line talent to defer their salaries. In exchange for dropping their large upfront salaries, actors, directors and producers can receive a large share of the film's gross profits. This has the disadvantage of cutting the financier's eventual takings. It has the further disadvantage of ambiguity. In the case of net profit participation instead of gross profit participation, disagreements due to Hollywood accounting methods can lead to audits and litigation, as happened between Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema, after New Line claimed that Lord of the Rings film trilogy, which grossed over 2 billion USD failed to make any profit and thus denied payments to actors, the Tolkien estate and Jackson.
• Use a non-union crew. Not an option for studios that have signed contracts with the unions—the Directors Guild of America (DGA), Writers Guild of America (WGA), and Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Directors Robert Rodriguez and Peter Jackson have been known to use the skills of experienced non-union crews for their films.
• Film in another region. For example, many Hollywood movies set in U.S. cities are shot in Canada to take advantage of lower labour costs, subject to fluctuating exchange rates. As well, they take advantage of federal and provincial subsidies designed to grow and sustain the film and television production industries in the area. Many U.S. states have responded with tax incentives of their own (Movie production incentives in the United States). The Czech Republic, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand are other countries in which Hollywood movies are often filmed.