5 Movie Iconic Details (That Came From Being Broke)

So passionate, that they were willing to work for free for Pegg and Wright if they asked. And Pegg and Wright did. On Shaun of the Dead, they realized they didn't have the cash for zombie hordes, which are kind of a required part of a zombie film, and they hit upon the idea of asking their fans to play zombies for free. They put out a casting call for zombies on the Spaced website, stating up front they wouldn't be able to pay people, and this would just be for the pleasure of appearing as part of an on-screen undead horde. It turned out that 1,100 people wanted to do that.

The production team winnowed down the applicants through an audition process they called Zombie Idol, which the people got into about as much as they did for American Idol -- some of them showed up day after day, again and again. And after all that, their enthusiasm was rewarded with physically grueling, monotonous work. They were cooped up on set for a week for long hours and pretty much just had to stand outside the pub's windows and bang on cue. Wright is "keenly aware" that some of them weren't fans of Spaced after that.

The whole zombie mob ended up having crazy energy from that. When Wright needed to record zombie sounds, he stood in the middle of the pub and told them all to rush him. They did just that, and one even bit his leg (perhaps sensing a brief window of opportunity for revenge). In any case, that was a price worth paying to Wright, since Shaun Of The Dead wouldn't have been possible without these people and their willingness to put up with grueling hours no pay, he says.

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A Star Is Born Filmed At Real Concert Stages Because Building Concert Venues From Scratch Was Too Expensive[/subtitle]

A Star Is Born definitely isn't a low-budget indie film, but it didn't have a blockbuster-level budget in the hundreds of millions, either. The $38 million they had to work with wouldn't be enough to build concert venues from scratch. This meant that, for concert scenes, they'd have to find real shows and bug people for some time to film scenes. 

Which was actually just fine with Bradley Cooper -- he absolutely didn't want anything, including the concert scenes, to look fake. It all had to be "authentic," as he said. Musicians watching the movie would probably spot obvious (to them) flaws in fake concert scenes, like the wrong amps lying around or a lack of wires everywhere, so real concerts it was.

But that also made those scenes super tough to pull off. For the song at the start of the movie, Willie Nelson gave them eight minutes between his sets at Coachella. Which meant they had eight minutes to record their first and only take -- there'd be no way to reset everything. Cooper played live (the audience didn't hear anything), and he pulled it off, but still felt that "It was terrifying."

So, for that and other concert scenes (including one filmed at Glastonbury where they only had four minutes), he spent hours working in his basement on Jackson Maine songs and singing and talking in the lower voice he'd use in the movie. Basically, he tried to come as close as possible to becoming Jackson Maine, so he could effortlessly be him on stage for a couple of minutes at a time (minus the alcoholic pants peeing).

Before shooting began, Scott and his team did extensive location scouting -- they'd checked out Boston, Atlanta, New York, and London (not Los Angeles itself, though). But Scott soon realized that none of those cities would work, just because there's no way he could fully control the way several city blocks looked for a couple of months, which he'd need to do. Basically, life in those blocks would have to go on, which means they wouldn't be usable as a movie set. So he'd have to use a backlot, which he absolutely dreaded because filming on a backlot always looked fake. Which means he'd have to go out of his way to disguise it.

And he did that by making it dark and rainy in Blade Runner's Los Angeles. When asked if the film's look was purely because of how much easier it would make filming, rather than for atmosphere, Scott's answer was simple: Sure, it helps the feel of the whole thing, but a lot of it was just having to hide the sets. If they had decided to film during the day, small hills would have been visible in the cracks between the buildings. And just to make absolutely sure those hills wouldn't be visible in the dark, he made sure it was always raining.

If the robot were made in a far-future setting, the movie would have to show that setting, which means it would be stupidly expensive -- around $35 million (roughly .92 A Star Is Borns) at that time, Cameron roughly calculated. 

Maybe that wouldn't be an issue for a big studio production helmed by George Lucas or someone, but it would be a problem for Cameron, who had directed a whole bunch of not-Star Wars at that point. There was no way anyone would give him $35 million or so to make a movie, and he'd written that script only to make a movie he could direct.

So, how to get around that problem? He hit upon the natural solution: Time travel. The robot would have come to the present day from the far future, making the movie way, way less expensive. As an added bonus, they could also save money on wardrobe by having it come back naked. Anyway, as interesting as a version of The Terminator set in the distant future would have been, with hi-tech gadgets and weaponry, it would have been totally unlike the one we love.

Top image: Warner Bros. Pictures