Five Films That Used Constraints To Become More Creative
Freedom isn't great for creativity. In fact, limitations are reasons to get more creative.
David Epstein has a new book out called Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, and the timing is a coincidence because the connection between limitations and creativity is a pattern I’ve observed in my research lately.
Because when I look at the films we still talk about— from low-budget to even one of the most expensive movies ever made at the time— something that stands out is how the filmmakers used constraints in their favor to tell the story.
So let’s take a look at five memorable films that overcame their limitations to make a memorable movie.
Oculus (2013)
Mike Flanagan’s original 30-minute short film Oculus: Chapter 3 – The Man With The Plan took place in an entire room with one character and a mirror. But this wouldn’t be sustainable for a 90-minute feature film, so the first thing they did was change the story to two siblings in a room with the mirror; which was going to take place in the basement room of an auction house.
Still not enough.
So they had a second story running in parallel— which took place in the past and depicted the siblings’ first encounter with the mirror as children when they moved to a new house.
Then Inteprid Pictures’ producer Marc D. Evans proposed staging both stories inside the house instead of two separate locations.
You can see this as a practical move— they could save on the budget— but creatively, the restriction of keeping it one location actually opened up a creative possibility: instead of simply cutting back from one place to another, Flanagan could toy with audiences and disorient them in the same way that the siblings were losing track of reality.
And that’s exactly what he did.
The result: Oculus launched Flanagan’s film career in proper.
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
I’m not a big fan of Reservoir Dogs. Sure, it’s got its moments, and there are stretches of the story that are interesting, but the overall impression I got was that this was a director still working out his style and vision.
Naturally, I am in a tiny minority of people when it comes to that opinion.1 Still, that doesn’t mean I can’t study and appreciate Reservoir Dogs in my own way, and learn from it.
Quentin Tarantino wrote the script with the intention of making it cheaply for $50,000 in guerilla filmmaking style if he couldn’t get financing. So from the get-go, he kept the limited budget in mind when writing. One of the biggest things that he did was choosing NOT to show the jewel heist around which the entire story is based on. This saved money, but it also created an ambiguity about what happened. As a result, most of the film takes place inside a large warehouse where the criminals are hiding out; only a few scenes take place outside the warehouse, including the memorable diner scene that opens the film.
By limiting the number of locations, Tarantino had to focus on the characters and dialogue— his forte— instead of elaborate set pieces. I may not have been entirely taken with it, but the rest of the world was— and as they say, the rest is history.
The Terminator (1984)
When most people set out to make their first film, chances are it’ll often be a drama, since they can film in their house or the houses of friends, and keep the budget low.
And then there’s James Cameron, who made an action sci-fi film about a cyborg assassin who travels from the future to kill the mother of the resistance leader so that the future enemy is unopposed.
But since he was an unknown first-time filmmaker2, he knew that he was not going to get a lot of money, so he had to make certain decisions from the writing stage itself that could be realistically done within a tiny budget.
One choice was to keep scenes of the future war to a minimum— there’s just one major sequence of the humans fighting the robots— and to omit showing any form of time travel.
Another choice was a narrative decision. An early idea that Cameron had in mind involved Skynet sending two Terminators; the T-800 (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) who would get destroyed halfway through the film, and then a more advanced deadly Terminator that even Skynet was scared of: a liquid-metal robot. When Cameron realized that the technology didn’t exist to do justice to what he had in mind, he discarded the idea— though he’d later revive it for the sequel.
Lastly, Cameron kept most of the effects budget for the final showdown, which included depicting the Terminator in all its chrome endoskeletal glory. Even then, since they were using a mix of stop-motion animation and puppetry, the shots were deployed strategically for maximum effect.
As a result, despite its sci-fi action labels, The Terminator was filmed more like a conventional shoot— on location— and it plays more like a realistic action film from the 80s except with glimpses of its sci-fi DNA.
Here’s the funny thing: When James Cameron got a chance AND a bigger budget to return to the world of Terminator, constraints became even more important…
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
At the time, T2 was the most expensive film made. It was also responsible for really pushing the possibilities of CGI in movies.
But computer-generated effects was still a nascent technology, and Industrial Light and Magic could deliver what Cameron had in mind, provided that it wasn’t a huge volume.
Also, Cameron also had less than two years to write, make, and release the film, so he was running against the clock and budget.
So from the writing stage, Cameron and co-writer William Wisher kept this in mind. As they revised the drafts, they would get brutal in jettisoning any scenes or sequences that either extended the runtime or required visual effects that didn’t advance the story.
At the macro level, this meant drastically reducing the future battle sequence that opens the film to a few minutes— initially, it was going to be revealed that this was the decisive battle that Skynet lost, which prompted them to send back a Terminator the first time, which led an adult John Connor to send Kyle Reese to stop the T-800… which is how he was born. Another sub-plot was eliminated in which Sarah Connor reunited with her ex-military trainer, who presumably would help them in the destruction of Cyberdyne.
At the micro level, this meant removing any scenes of the T-1000 that didn’t serve the plot. Would it be cool to show the T-1000 picking up a cup of coffee and turning into it? Yes. Was it essential? Nope, so out it went!
In the end, T2 only had 42 CG shots and another 50-60 practical shots, which forced Cameron and Wisher to focus on the drama and character interactions to tell the story instead of relying on special effects.
And guess what? As cool as the effects are, everybody remembers the non-VFX parts best.
If they had an even bigger budget and time, there would have been more action and effects. But here, literally time and money forced Cameron to keep the focus on what mattered.
Iron Man (2008)
Marvel Studios is ponying up approximately $400 million to make the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday (excluding marketing costs, mind you), but there was a time when this $400-million plus was the ENTIRE cash available for Marvel Studios to make their first four movies.
And especially with their first film, Iron Man, they only had a $150-million budget to play with. That sounds like a lot except they also chose to film in California, which was more expensive than shooting someplace with tax credits. Money was TIGHT.
As a result, Iron Man keeps its big action sequences to a handful:
The convoy attack at the opening;
Tony Stark breaking out of the cave in a prototype suit;
Iron Man battling the Ten Rings in the fictional village of Gulmira, and a subsequent chase sequence with the U.S. Air Force;
The Iron Man vs Iron Monger showdown.
Smaller visual effects sequences include Iron Man testing out the suit’s capabilities for the first time, Iron Monger chasing Pepper Potts and S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives, and Tony Stark inside the suit surrounded by a virtual H.U.D.
Even when they realized that they needed to do some reshoots for the final battle, they were restricted to using whatever VFX plates and footage that already existed— which resulted in the scene where Iron Man tricks Iron Monger into flying up and getting his suit frozen due to the altitude. There was also little that they could do because they had to write whatever they could before the 2007 Writers Strike started.
What this meant was that Marvel could not AFFORD to film the kind of wall-to-wall action and endless reshoots that has plagued Marvel lately. They had to get it right early on as possible because there wasn’t money to do it all over again.
That’s why most of Iron Man is really just the characters stuck in a room talking to each other. Like an independent film. An expensive independent film, to be sure, but in its DNA and story, definitely more indie than subsequent Marvel films.
Guess what? THIS was what fans connected with when the film came out.
Not the action scenes— even if they did look cool— but the scenes of Tony Stark and Pepper Potts flirting and bantering; Tony Stark and Ho Yinsen talking in the cave; Tony Stark and his best friend Col. James “Rhodey” Rhodes trading quips and insults; Tony Stark and his mentor-slash-father-figure-slash-enemy Obadiah Stane; Pepper Potts and Agent Coulson.
Is it any surprise that the first Iron Man still remains the best of the bunch?
Do you know any films where its limitations turned into an asset? What would you add to this?
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Long live the movies!
D.L. Holmes
I believe that it is perfectly normal to be a big fan of a director without needing to love everything that they make. I love Stanley Kubrick but I dislike A Clockwork Orange, and I think the second half of Full Metal Jacket is weaker and less memorable when the story shifts to Vietnam. Eat me.
His official first directorial credit is actually for Piranha II: The Spawning, but Cameron considers The Terminator to be his real first film.