Cheap Thrills - Writing Action On A Budget

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CHEAP THRILLS

Whether you're writing a low budget action script to sell to a small
production company or writing it to make as your own digital feature,
creating exciting action scenes that can be made on a limited budget
can be a challenge. How can you maximize your production value and
minimize the price.

The key to any scene on a budget is that your limitations are really
your assets - so a car chase scene might be too expensive to shoot on
your budget - so why not make it a footchase? Or a rooftop chase? You
can easily fake jumping from roof-to-roof on a low budget - and you
can fake hanging off the edge of a roof on a low budget. (Either find
or build the edge of a roof that isn't far off the ground, show your
actor hanging from a very low angle... then cut to a shot of legs
hanging off the edge of your high building - you can make the legs
from a pair of pants, shoes and some boards as the "skeleton".)

I once did a short film where a man being chased down a freeway
overpass jumps over the railing and lands in the back of a passing
pick up truck. It was a series of shots - the chase on the real
overpass, the man jumping over the railing at a section of the
overpass at the end only a few feet off the ground, a shot of the man
landing in the back of an unmoving pickup truck, shot of the man
standing in the back of the speeding pick up truck zooming under the
overpass as the pursuer watches... the man was safety strapped into
the truck. The main component in a low budget action scene is
imagination - you have to look at the problem and find the solution.

Guess what? A man chasing a man is more personal and emotional than a
car chasing a car. Cars can become "conflict condoms" - something that
comes between the character and the danger. The character interacts
with the car, and the car interacts with the other car, and the other
car interacts with that other character. By removing the cars you
probably improve the scene by getting rid of that "conflict condom".

But if you really want a car chase, you can do it on a budget. Back
when I was making movies on Super-8mm and 16mm I did car chases al the
time. I made an action feature on Super-8mm with a big car chase...
and even exploded my mother's car. She wanted it back in one piece and
unscratched... and I figured out how to do that.

What you need for a low budget car chase is to find a "safe location"
for your chase. Extras and other cars and closing streets can be
expensive - so find an interesting location without people and other
vehicles that is on private property. In Walter Hill's THE DRIVER
there's a cool chase and "auto hide & go seek" in a warehouse filled
with pallets of merchandise. I have a chase scene in one of my scripts
in a container yard - a maze. Country roads? Off roads? Parking lots
after hours? What "safe location" do you have access to that will make
an interesting car chase? If you're writing a script for a low budget
producer (or sale), what is the most interesting "safe location" you
can come up with? What kind of non-human, inexpensive obstacles can
you come up with?

Turning your limits into assets works for shoot outs, too. Gunfire is
very expensive on a low budget film. You need a weapons handler, pyro
tech, all kinds of people that you have to pay, but they don't show up
on screen. So the key is to limit the number of times the guns fire...
and that can become an asset.

In my flick IMPLICATED (MGM) there was a big shoot out scene that I
had to rewrite for budget - now the two guys wrestle for control of a
gun. The gun is between them, and each pushes the barrel so that it's
aiming at the other's *eye* then prepares to pull the trigger. The
other guy pushes it away from his eye and turns the tables - pressing
it against the first guy's eye. They wrestle with the gun - back and
forth - until it fires... against somebody's chest (but we don't know
which guy). This meant we never had to have a pyro tech at all (and
the gun was a replica - a fake). We just had the SOUND of the gun
going off. Then both guys eyes popping wide open. Then one of them
falls to the floor, bleeding, and dies.

I think having a gun pressed into your eye socket is more emotional
and scary than having someone aim a gun at you from twenty feet away.
This was a better scene BECAUSE of the budget limitations.

So, how can you make *limited shooting* into an asset? Maybe give the
hero only 5 shells? He can't waste them - needs a perfect shot before
he squeezes that trigger? Or maybe have a policeman nearby or have the
scene in a public place where firing the guns will bring trouble? One
of the gags in ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO Robert Rodriguez told me was
going to be "The best shoot out you've never heard. It's this big
gunfight in a church where all of the bad guy's guns have silencers.
You see people being shot, but without a sound," Robert told me. The
scene begins with a chase where the Mariachi is trying to escape the
bad guys, careful not to lose his guitar. Finally he's cornered and
smashes the guitar over a bad guy's head... exposing the gun inside.
The only weapon left from his past life. But his gun doesn't have a
silencer, and if he fires it in the church everyone will hear it. This
adds a new dimension to the shoot out, using creativity to up the
ante. "At the end when El Mariachi fires his gun, which doesn't have a
silencer, the sound reverberates through the church," Robert said.
Didn't quite work that way in the finished film, but the idea of
finding a way to *creatively* limit the pyrotech work in your script
can result in a better scene than the average action scene.

Or maybe find a way to remove the guns from the story - I've written a
couple of martial arts flicks where the hero and villain's hands were
deadlier than any gun. Hand to hand fighting and grappling are popular
in steel cage matches... and can be very effective in screen. No
pyrotech required if you're just using your fists!

In Trevanian's novel SHIBUMI the lead character specializes in a
fighting form called "Naked Kill" that uses found objects as weapons.
Kind of a Jackie Chan idea - using shopping carts or magazines from a
table or whatever you find in the room where the fight takes place as
a weapon. What if your hitmen specialize in using every day items as
weapons? A #2 pencil shoved through someone's eye socket into their
brain is gross, inventive, and can be faked on the cheap. And action
scenes using things you might find in the kitchen or garden will
result in lots of deadly props and really interesting and inventive
fight scenes. Let your imagination run wild. Hands in garbage
disposals, fertilyzer in the eyes - there's no shortage of weapons in
those two locations!

The key to working on a budget is to use your imagination and turn
those limitations into assets. If you can't afford a big explosion,
what can you do on a more personal level that has the same "wow!"
factor?

- Bill

copyright 2006 by William C. Martell
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