In praise of low-budget films made in garages

Cosmos, shot in a garage
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From small indies to Oscar winners, garages have proven a useful filmmaking tool. Hereā€™s a selection of films made in decidedly tight spacesā€¦


At a Film Stories Live event in 2019, filmmaking co-director Zander Weaver regaled the audience with tales of the production of he and his brother’s super low-budget sci-fi movie, Cosmos. Produced on a micro budget in the single-figure thousands, the movie ā€“ which follows a trio of amateur astronomy buffs who make a startling discovery ā€“ received a limited cinema release in the US and UK.

The chat covered a few tales of ingenuity and persistence among a team dedicated to getting the script on to the big screen, including stories of collective mucking-in among the core group of creatives, jury-rigged kit and clever workarounds. A key one of these was the revelation that a significant portion of the film, a slow burn story which takes place in the cramped interior of Volvo estate car, was shot inside an everyday garage. A garage that took some preparation, certainly, but a garage nonetheless.

The overall effect they achieve in the finished movie does little to belie its humble origins, and offers a stark illustration of just what is possible with minimal equipment and a little expertise in modern day filmmaking.

Read more: Entering the Cosmos | How we made our low-budget movie

While listening, it struck me how useful ā€“ certainly for low budget filmmakers ā€“ the humble garage could be in today’s world of smaller, lighter and more widely available technology. A large blank space, out of the way, ripe for weekend tinkering and making, free to be shaped to whatever’s needed, is high on the wishlist of most would-be filmmakers.

Reading into the idea a little more, among the stories of great garage-based scenes in big movies, I uncovered a couple of tales of low-budget garage filmmaking that prove that this has indeed been the case. Cosmos may be a recent example, but the the practice actually goes back over 100 yearsā€¦

Disney (1923)

Possibly the ultimate garage filmmaking-from-adversity story is the legend that surrounds the early days of The Disney Corporation. As the tale is told, Walt Disney ā€“ having folded his first, Kansas-based, animation studio, Laugh-O-Gram ā€“ put himself and his wife on a train to California to work with his brother Roy. When he got settled, Walt swiftly set up a workshop with a makeshift animation table in their Uncle’s garage.

It was in this Orange County outbuilding, a distinctly average-looking grey structure that now sits in a museum a few miles from Disneyland, where Walt Disney worked on ideas between August and October 1923 while attempting to sell the Alice In Cartoonland animations produced by Laugh-O-Gram. These would eventually be completed, and become the first releases under the Disney banner.

The advance he received for them, however, provided enough for Walt to incorporate officially and quickly relocate his operation. Thus, as nothing was explicitly produced for Disney in the garage, and it predates the formal creation of the company, it is not recognised in official corporate histories. Its role ā€“ however minor ā€“ is respected by Disney aficionados, though.

On the other end of the scale, Disney would once again rely on garages in the same part of the world to help complete 1994’s The Lion King. When its studio facilities were temporarily closed following a major earthquake in the Los Angeles area, animators working around the clock found themselves – in pre-broadband times, no less – having to work from home. Chunks of the film were thus put together in the spare rooms of animators and – yes! – in some case, their garages. A nice way for Disney to come full circle…

Blood Simple (1984)

Shot for roughly $1.5m, the Coen brothersā€™ neo-noir debut wasnā€™t exactly a zero-budget effort, but the young filmmakers still had to come up with some clever solutions to make their finances go further. Take the atmospheric shot captured above, which forms Blood Simple's title sequence. It introduces its two leads (played by John Getz and Frances McDormand) driving their car in torrential rain.

In reality, the carā€™s parked in a garage; the rain was actually a prop person sitting on the roof of the vehicle, showering the windscreen with a weed sprayer. Meanwhile, another crewmember rocked the car to simulate movement; the headlights of approaching cars were faked using some small lights strapped to a moving camera dolly. Ingenious.

Bad Taste (1987)

Bad Taste (1987). Credit: WingNut Films.

Fans of Peter Jackson should seek out the 80s documentary Good Taste Made Bad Taste, which outlines the guerrilla methods that set Jackson and his friends on the road to making the 80s splatter-fest, Bad Taste. That documentary, and the movie, heavily features work done in Jackson’s own garage FX shop. The same garage FX shop that would eventually morph into his Oscar-winning effects house, Weta Digital.

Both the $230,000 he received as funding to complete Bad Taste, and his obvious love for the surrounding exterior environments of Pukerua Bay, New Zealand, mean ā€“ even in this early period ā€“ it’s hard to consider him a true garage filmmaker. However, much of the early effects work for Bad Taste was undoubtedly produced with the kind of innovation and problem solving that still proves inspirational.

What’s more, it proves that the humble garage stands as an invaluable blank slate for ideas, innovations and making a hell of a mess when the time comes to do so.

Primer (2004)

Primer (2004). Credit: StudioCanal.

So far we’ve looked at garages used as de facto studio spaces, but probably the most famous garage filmmaking story of the latest millennium surrounds the cult 2004 movie Primer.

That film, created by Shane Carruth and his close-knit team of collaborators ā€“ not dissimilar to that behind Cosmos ā€“ used the garage space as a set for the film in-and-of itself. Indeed, while cleverly leveraging the ā€“ largely apocryphal, as it happens ā€“ legend of Apple’s garage-bound birth, this mind-boggling, almost-comprehensible, slavishly researched, time travel tale revelled in its restricted domestic surrounds, rather than re-dressing it as something else.

The movie, which made around $600,000 in cinemas, having been made for an alleged budget of $7,000, has gone on to be a heavily debated cult classic. Carruth subsequently struggled with getting later projects off the ground, but Primer shows what can be done with a small domestic space, some old washing machines, a heck of a lot of research, a good idea and a whiteboard.

It’s a distinctive and effective movie ā€“ indeed, its blend of extreme science and domesticity has a vibe that is revisited on a regular basis, in animated form, in Rick & Morty.

In interviews, Carruth has described the hot summer his team spent in that garage creating a low-budget movie about low-budget inventors as “painfully ironic”, but insists that his script was not meant to serve as an analogy for the process. The garage, instead, represented the “most mundane and realistic world I could muster.”

“Some of the best ideas,” he told an interviewer at the time of the film’s release, “come from the weirdest places that people aren’t set up to be exploring.”

Rango (2011)

Rango (2011). Credit: Paramount Pictures.
Credit

Sometimes, a project started in a garage can lead to the stage of the Academy Awards. That was the case for director Gore Verbinski who, off the back of directing the first three Pirates Of The Caribbean movies, decided to try his hand at an animated feature idea he had. Together with a few friends, they pieced it together at Verbinski’s house, allowing the project to be under the radar as long as was necessary.

Eventually, Paramount stumped up a nine figure sum to fund the project once the foundations were in place. The result would be a box office hit, and a Best Animated Feature Oscar too…

Thalamos (2016)

If you want to talk about going that extra mile, let’s look at the two Australian filmmakers that created a spaceship set inside a Sydney garage, all in benefit of their sci-fi short, Thalamos.

Andrew Jaksch and Scott Robson leveraged their collective talents for construction, handywork, making, and architectural drafting in order to convert a four-car suburban space into a space station for the 20 minute movie, which you can see above.

The four-year project looks impressive on screen, and excellently disguises its humble origins to create a 2001-esque vibe; a feat achieved by excellent craft rather than smoke and dim lighting.

Indeed, the whole movie boasts a DIY aesthetic that reflects the build it yourself attitude pointed at the sets. While, these days, the temptation to turn to CGI is strong, the pair demurred in favour of more traditional approaches. Not only did they battle for years to piece together the eye-catching retro-future interiors, they leveraged friendships and partnerships to build impressive miniature models for effects and access viable locations for exteriors befitting the movie’s Mars location.

“That sort of method of filmmaking is what really appealed to us,ā€ Jaksch told the Sydney Morning Herald, ā€œNotwithstanding we had no access to CGI, we wanted to go that way.”

The mothers of invention

The camaraderie and teamwork displayed by the team behind Cosmos, and all of these movies, typifies what low-budget movie making is often about ā€“ and that it’s not always just about the results, but the journey to them that fascinates us about film. That they have all managed to create such eye-catching results on shoestrings of differing lengths proves what can be done, and how the humble garage provides exactly the kind of environment where ideas can be made into a filmmaker’s own version of reality.

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