Director Marc Price has a confession to make. At the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, the Welsh filmmaker became a major news story when journalists found out that he made his debut movie, a London-set zombie film called Colin, for just 45 pounds sterling, or around $70. To many, that budget seemed impossibly small, and Price now admits the figure was indeed an inaccurate one. “I don’t even know if it cost as much as 14 pounds,” he laughs. “The things that we definitely spent money on for the sole purpose of making the film would be a pack of video tapes, which we didn’t end up using anyway, and a crowbar. I said, ‘It would be really cool to have a crowbar to [kill] a zombie.’ So someone bought a crowbar. I think that was the only real expense. I wish we’d kept a record of the budget, but I’m sure doing that would have cost some money.”
Price was able to make his movie for so little money by recruiting actor pals to play roles — including Alastair Kirton, who essays the titular zombie Colin — and using the most minimal of crews. “It was mainly me and a couple of friends,” says the director. “Whoever I could grab to hold stuff for me.” Needless to say, Price didn’t have the money to clear London streets of pedestrians. “Me and Al were filming some intros for a couple of festivals today,” he says. “And we were saying how it’s nice to have these moments when it feels like a real film. We look at it as the movie we were running around shooting on a camcorder and waiting for the streets to be clear enough to just go for it.”
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