For my film studies class I'm reading an article about Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting, other films you've heard of even if you haven't seen them). He started his career by doing low budget gritty British films and then tried to translate that success into Hollywood.
"Boyle found that larger budgets and crews entailed creative compromises"(1) and the films that followed were flops.
Later he went on to win the Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire. He was competing against films that had nearly 8 times the budget. To me, him having $20 million seems like a dream. Yet The Curious Case of Benjamin Button had $150 million and Doyle beat it in every category.
So what can I learn from this? It's not a new lesson, but a reiteration of something I've long believed. Sometimes the best creativity comes from the need to solve a problem. I think it was Gordon back at Ithaca College who would give us very specific problems to solve for class assignments and people would complain because they had bigger ideas that didn't fit his narrow focus. He argued that ideas were like a river and the more he narrowed the banks the faster the water would flow.
Not all problems/challenges are from lack of money when making a movie. But people who are used to having budgets will be inclined to throw money at a problem when that cuts themselves off from searching for the non-money solution which might be even better.
(1) Danny Boyle: Lust for Life: A Critical Analysis of All the Films from Shallow Grave to 127 Hours, by Mark Browning.
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