5 Movie Details That Came From Being Broke

Having to film in a real town also made RoboCop himself, in Verhoeven's words, "more interesting," since he sticks out even more in a plain, everyday world. They also had to adapt the script to the buildings that were there, which means that many of the movie's set-pieces would have been different if they had a much bigger budget. In short, not being able to show buildings more advanced than skyscrapers or vehicles more advanced than cars actually made the movie better. If you ask Verhoeven, anyway -- but it'd probably be hard to find anybody who disagrees.

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 and no pay, he says.

3A Star Is Born Filmed At Real Concert Stages Because Building Concert Venues From Scratch Was Too Expensive

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).