What is the cheapest feature-length movie ever made?
Of course, it’s practically impossible to do anything for free, but if you’ve already got a camera, editing software, and some pals who don’t mind acting without payment, then you might be able to make a movie on practically next to nothing.
That doesn’t mean it will be any good, though, as you need lightning, costumes, props, and everything else that makes a movie brilliant, and you need to pay the people you employ to work with you. Look at the average Hollywood film, even one made on $1million is considered low-budget. It took a staggering $533m to make Star Wars: The Force Awakens, with much of its budget going on expensive special effects and paying high-profile stars.
Hollywood is one of the most profitable industries in the world, and everything costs a lot, so no wonder it’s a place so full of corruption, deception, and abuse; that’s always the case when large sums of money are involved. Even outside of Hollywood, the average small-budget indie movie still typically costs tens of thousands at minimum, and if you want to make a proper film, be prepared to fork out a considerable amount of money, or you won’t get that far without it. Or can you?
There was once a time when a budding filmmaker decided he was going to make a movie, despite having no budget to do so, but that didn’t stop him, and with £45 (around $70), he was able to get Cannes buzz.
The cheapest feature-length movie ever made
Movie lover Marc Price was inspired to make a zombie film after watching Dawn of the Dead with some friends, but the problem was making that a reality.
He told CNN, “We were lamenting the fact that we could never make a zombie film, we wouldn’t be able to acquire a budget. Then I just woke up before everyone else, I was probably a bit hungover, and I wondered if a zombie movie from a zombie’s perspective had been done before.”
With this idea in mind, he decided he was going to use a camera he already owned, editing software already installed on his computer, and friends and budding actors willing to work for free to make his film come to life. Thus, Colin emerged in 2008 after 18 months of production, and it appears to be the cheapest movie ever made; you can’t even buy a good pair of jeans these days with that budget.
“We went on Facebook and MySpace and said, ‘Who wants to be a zombie?’ We managed to get 50 brilliantly made-up zombies and stuff them into a living room,” he explained. It was exciting, even landing some crew members who weren’t totally inexperienced: “One of our make-up people came off X-Men 3, so we were having the same latex that was put on Wolverine.”
The movie was widely praised upon its release, and it made it to Cannes, soon winding up in UK cinemas; audience-goers had surely never seen a movie so low-budget on the big screen before, and with his handheld camera, Price made a zombie film that was genuinely unnerving, aided by the realism of his shaky footage. The found footage horror movie The Blair Witch Project and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, filmed on a DV camera, had not long achieved success before this, so there was certainly a market for this type of low-budget horror movie, steeped in realism and intimacy, and while Colin might not be one of the most enduring horror movies of the 2000s, it was an ambitious project for Price, who was able to make his dream of making a zombie movie come true in spite of the financial odds stacked against him.
