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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

the single greatest 1 LOCATION movie ever

collection so far - PRIMARILY 1 Location Movies

collection so far - PRIMARILY 1 Location Movies

Rope
Breakfast Club
Punishment Park
Das Boot
Cube
Rope
Lifeboat
Session 9
The Others
12 Angry Men
Rear Window
Casi Casi
Tape
Evil Dead
Clerks
Day of the Dead
Death and the Maiden
Dogville
The Shining
Glengarry Glen Ross
Oleanna
the fast runner
solaris
Psycho
High and Low
Flowers of Shanghai
Coming Apart
Two Girls and a Guy
phonebooth
Russian Ark
Hard Candy
Celebration (Festen)
mr smith goes to washington
The Thing
Assault on Precinct 13
Halloween
The Descent
Zabriskie Point
Panic room
Reservoir Dogs
SAW
The Terminal
Cast Away
Stranded
Silent Running
Alien
THX1138
The Hole
Open Water
Temporada De Patos
A Knife In The Water
Misery
One Flew Over The Cookoo's Nest
When A Stranger Calls
The Andromeda Strain
Nigth Of The living Dead
Das Experiment
The Last Castle
Midnight Express, etc - (or most Prison Movies)
Hell Night
The Haunting, etc - (or most Haunted House horror films)
Rashomon
Poltergeist
My Dinner With Andre
Night on Earth*
Feast
HIS GIRL FRIDAY
Wait Until Dark
Signs
Dark Star
Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Andy Warhol's Empire
Sleep, Couch, Blow Job
Gosford Park
The Return of the Secaucus 7
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Why Does Herr R Run Amok?
Bergman's Cries and Whispers*
Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice*
The village


Reply with any fixes/changes and I will fix this Master list, I went thru every post so far. (I've seen 95% of these and agree, but cant qualify 5% bc I havent seen them. Tonite I'm watching the original Solaris and 12 Angry Men. Yes!) Thanks for the list! Now to make sublists of Whats Doable from above on No Budget, etc. :)
 
Hey, I was joking about The Moonlanding...

THis is quite an impressive list.. An authoratitve must see list for any film-maker planning to shoot a one location movie. Good stuff. Should turn this into an amazon list.
 
How could I forget Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn? It's a beautiful movie about a possibly haunted old kung-fu movie theatre and its denizens the night before it gets closed down. Sadly, it works much better in a theatre than it does on DVD.

Also, would it be punkish of me to include Andy Warhol's Empire on this list? Sleep, Couch, Blow Job, and many of Warhol's other films would also certainly count as being shot in one location. And they're (perhaps surprisingly to some) pretty great movies (full disclosure: haven't seen Sleep, so I won't pass judgment on it here). Not for narrative junkies, but great nonetheless.
 
I hate to be a downer but some of these are stretching the concept of a single location.

Night On Earth takes place in 5 different cities around the world! For a no-budget film it would probably be much more realistic to film in 5 locations in your town than to film in a taxicab in 5 different international cities!

Logan's Run? Sure, a lot of it was filmed inside of a mall but there were definitely a lot of sets built as well, and then they go outside, and then to the capitol building, etc.

Swimming With Sharks? I seem to remember offices, houses, lots of different locations in this.

Or maybe I'm being too overly literal about this :whistling: Hell, a ton of movies that were shot on sound stages could theoretically be considered single location movies :tongue:
 
Here are a few more:

Gosford Park
The Return of the Secaucus 7
The Big Chill
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Why Does Herr R Run Amok?
The Rules of the Game (with two or three scenes excepted)

Sorry, but quite a few in the list above (La Avventura!? Reservoir Dogs?) don't even remotely qualify, no?
 
Not to mention that for someone who wants to film something in his own house, some of these titles will be of limited help. The Terminal, for example. Or THX-1138, which last time I saw it, had at least 20 different locations, including a high-speed car chase (though, except for the last shot, it IS all underground, which I'm not sure counts as "one location"). In fact, like krd and kmikami, I'm not quite sure how a few of these movies even make it onto the above list, unless you use the term "location" as in the sentence: "New York City is one location." (L'Avventura, for example - Italy's a location, right?) :)

All that said, chamber dramas and horror seem to work pretty well here. But why follow the trend? It would probably be much more interesting to try something else.

If you're at all interested in ways to build parts of movies around a location, you could do worse than to look at the Chris Doyle-lensed movie Last Life in the Universe, whose entire middle section was more or less improvised around a run down house (quite beautifully, I might add).

Also, they're not quite one location, but Bergman's Cries and Whispers and Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice use only a few locations to excellent effect.
 
If we're going mostly one location another plug for The Sacrifice and Solaris (Tarkovsky)

Also am I the only one who really liked The Big Kahuna? That was about 99% one location.
 
THX 1138 is not a single location movie.i have the DVD and George Lucas explained that some scenes was filmed in Japan... and main location was san Francisco area.
 
And how about M. Night Shyamalan's ...
The village
Runtime: 108 min
Nominated for Oscar. Another 2 wins & 9 nominations
 
For the Anal Retentive among us. Alphabetized


12 Angry Men
A Knife In The Water
Alien
Andy Warhol's Empire
Assault on Precinct 13
Bergman's Cries and Whispers*
Breakfast Club
Casi Casi
Cast Away
Celebration (Festen)
Clerks
Coming Apart
Cube
Dark Star
Das Boot
Das Experiment
Day of the Dead
Death and the Maiden
Dogville
Evil Dead
Feast
Flowers of Shanghai
Glengarry Glen Ross
Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Gosford Park
Halloween
Hard Candy
Hell Night
High and Low
HIS GIRL FRIDAY
Lifeboat
Midnight Express, etc - (or most Prison Movies)
Misery
mr smith goes to washington
My Dinner With Andre
Night on Earth*
Nigth Of The living Dead
Oleanna
One Flew Over The Cookoo's Nest
Open Water
Panic room
phonebooth
Poltergeist
Psycho
Punishment Park
Rashomon
Rear Window
Reservoir Dogs
Rope
Rope
Russian Ark
SAW
Session 9
Signs
Silent Running
Sleep, Couch, Blow Job
solaris
Stranded
Tape
Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice*
Temporada De Patos
The Andromeda Strain
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
The Descent
the fast runner
The Haunting, etc - (or most Haunted House horror films)
The Hole
The Last Castle
The Others
The Return of the Secaucus 7
The Shining
The Terminal
The Thing
The village
THX1138
Two Girls and a Guy
Wait Until Dark
When A Stranger Calls
Why Does Herr R Run Amok?
Zabriskie Point
 
Now, from this list above, what is do-able on:

A. NO BUDGET

and

B. has plenty of ACTION?

I'm looking for something kinetic, and intensely watchable.
 
agreed, til they showed the monster. that was pretty bad, you must admit. and shymalan's cameo.
 
Hey guys have a look to Familia is the first movie of Fernando Leon de Aranoa, completely shooted in a house, where a man rent some actors to be his family in his birthday, really funny!
 
km9000 said:
Now, from this list above, what is do-able on:

A. NO BUDGET

and

B. has plenty of ACTION?

I'm looking for something kinetic, and intensely watchable.
Click to expand...

Now, that all depends. What sort of action are you looking for? And perhaps more importantly, what do you mean when you say no budget? Because there's no budget ($1,000,000), no budget ($150,000), and no budget (just me, my buddies, a camcorder and YouTube).

Now, call me cynical, but when I hear that someone's shooting a movie with no budget (of the buddies-camcorder-YouTube variety), plenty of action, and possible commercial viability, I think "Ah, porn shoot."

Darren Aronofsky's PI had a budget of about $60,000, which is generally considered no-budget. It is also pretty gripping. It used a number of locations though.

Now, here is the list; I've cut it down to things that I've seen that might be doable on a really low budget:

Andy Warhol's Empire
Celebration (Festen)
Clerks
Coming Apart
Evil Dead
My Dinner With Andre
Night Of The Living Dead
Open Water
Sleep, Couch, Blow Job
Tape
Two Girls and a Guy

And maybe not even all of these. Of these, really only Evil Dead and Open Water had some action of sorts (well, there's some action in Warhol's Couch of a previously mentioned variety, but we won't count that now), and really Open Water was basically a gimmick in which all the watchable parts came from the highly questionable practice of throwing the actors in the middle of the ocean with REAL SHARKS, which should really go on a list of all time great exploitation gimmicks.

Action can be very tricky to do on no budget, but it's not necessarily impossible. But obviously, action is worth nothing unless there's a point of interest for the audience. Namely either an interesting concept, story, or character. As far as I'm concerned, that should be your starting point here.

Also, if you're still planning on shooting in your house, I'd spend some good time going around the place, looking at it, discovering its unique quirks, visual or otherwise, and making conscious notes of what sort of movie it could support. Because, for example, my 2 bedroom apartment's not big enough to support 90 minutes of non-stop gunplay, and unless your house is freaking huge, it probably won't either. Or see if anything you can find in your house suggests a story. Walk around the place and really look at it.

As has been mentioned before suspense or horror might be easier to do here, though you need to be really good to distinguish yourself these days as a low budget horror filmmaker; lots of competition out there, most of which (probably thankfully) never sees the light of day.

As far as movies go, though, I still think you should check out Last Life in the Universe which is a thriller of sorts, to see what can be done improvising around a large house in the country.

Also, to see how someone can ratchet up tension for the first half of a movie in only one room, pretty much, see Kurosawa's High and Low.

Also, come to think of it, you should check out Patrice Chereau's recent film Gabrielle. It's a chamber drama set almost entirely in the house of a wealthy Parisian couple in the 1920's or so. It's pretty gripping, the cinematography is fantastic, and it uses that location wonderfully.
 
http://ufo-tech.com/WordPress/?p=66 has the locations and the camera tests i've done so far on my DVX. jason, check out pics 11 and 12 and the panoramas.

i just met a pro rigger who is interested in doing a no-budget action film too (i dont like horror, 'cept for evil dead). he has access to rip cords or whatever you call it--where someone gets shot or punched and goes yanked up into the air. i'm doing a godard-influenced film for my graduate thesis and i'm at the point of just doing something visceral and with crazy action.

i know i wont get much support here, but i want to do tests of straight action sequences first, see if i can pull them off (mariachi-style, except more, using this rigger--hes a safety engineer), then wrap a story around it if i get some great stuff. i have the idea already, it involves using the same stuntman over and over.

i am looking to do a NO BUDGET action--not 60g, NO G--just me, a crew (unlimited access to that and actors), matte paintings, my rigger, and the RED.) I just did a 2G movie that screened at the Cannes market, so budget is irrelevant. I can squeeze the s*** out of a buffalo nickel.
 
should watch these movie,

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Running time:140 min
Worldwide: $849,997,605

The film was shot entirely on sound stages at Fox Studios Australia in Sydney, although practical environments were shot as background footage later to be composited into the film.

read that? now thats what i call ONE location!
 
SWIII wasn't entirely shot at the studios in Sydney. They also ventured to Tunisia, again. But that kinda misses the point. I think most of us were viewing the location as what takes place within the film as the setting or location for the story.

In that respect, I'd have to back up to near the beginning of this thread and go with Ace's suggestion. The NASA moon landing. Think about it... What other piece of film has had such an impact on the world? Whether you believe it to be real or not, you can't deny the impression it made on a global scale.

EDIT> I guess the moon landing was actually video and not film, but anyway... Not like we're being picky here. :)
 
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