Film blog

No. Let's face it - the four tenners and a fiver tucked away in the purse of even the most cost-conscious pundit aren't going to get you a fat lot.

In the wallet-busting world of cinema your forty-five knicker gets you even less. There won't be much change for a family of four taking in Fantastic Mr Fox at the local multiplex. And if you factor in a bucket of popcorn... you're in debt. In Tinseltown, forty-five notes would probably account for one half-hour's overtime for Jennifer Lopez's pool cleaner. Or just ten minutes of her bums'n'tums co-ordinator.

Yes, in an industry where Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End - the world's most expensive production - apparently cost $300m to make, money doesn't just talk it screams. Through a megaphone. Cranked up to 11.

So how did courier firm worker and first-time director Marc Price manage to wrap a 97-minute British zombie horror Colin, released this week, for just five sheets short of a couple of Ponys? That's a staggeringly small forty-five quid.

Well, simple. As Terry Gilliam knows only too well, he kept the overheads down. Blood was golden syrup and food dye, burns got that "just scorched" look courtesy of instant coffee granules and, unlike Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts or even Dame Ben Kingsley, his actors worked for nothing.

The result - ramshackle but compelling - is more than passable... particularly when put up pound for pound against big studio zombie flick I Am Legend, which cost 675,000 times as much to make at $150m. And Will Smith's post-apocalyptic fable had its ending changed. That probably cost another couple of million. Plus a Mercedes convertible for Will.

Basically, in theory, that means that just seven or eight people have to shell out at the box office for Colin to go into profit. That's more than can be said for Lew Grade's Raise the Titanic, a film (cost £40m, recouped £7m) he subsequently suggested could have been made more cheaply if they'd lowered the Atlantic.

Whatever the cost, it's the quality of the film-making which counts. The Irish indie music romance Once was budgeted at £40,000 (the cost of quite a few rounds of Guinness in Hollywood watering holes) but went on to win an Oscar. The British thriller London to Brighton, cheerily featuring child prostitution, thuggery and redemption, punched well above its weight... yet troubled its backers for a mere £60,000.

In fact, quite often, a big budget can ruin a film. Geordie director Neil Marshall made a virtue out of tight economic strictures by turning in the lean mutant cannibal thriller The Descent for £3.5m. But, handed the purse strings, he went on to make the colossal pseudo Mad Max mess that was Doomsday, a £17m action movie notable for the gratuitous trashing of three Bentley Continental GT Speeds in a manner Top Gear can only dream about.

So, the next time you sit through the opening frames of the latest Michael Bay opus consider this: you could have paid your mortgage off even before the opening credits rolled.