Paul Schrader's low budget tip

You know how Eric Rohmer made movies with long dialog scenes? And you know how one of his trademarks was that he'd show people going places in cars? If he didn't do this, some of the movies would haven taken place entirely in apartments, like they could have been filmed anywhere. Showing people driving through town gave a sense of place.

So here's an excerpt from an interview with Paul Schrader in Filmmaker Magazine discussing his movie The Canyons. The movie was made for a quarter million dollars but starred Lindsey Lohan among others. Read the interview here.

...Talk is cheap. So a microbudget film is mostly people sitting around talking. And if you have good dialogue and a good kind of story and interesting people, that can work. But it can start to feel like a stage play because you’re not spending money on action sequences. So in order to keep it from feeling like a stage play, you have to walk and talk, although not at the same time. So this film, it’s walk, walk, walk, talk, talk, talk, walk, walk, walk. That opens the structure up for music because you can just have these 50-second [music] cues [underneath] creating a mood. And then you get back into the talking again... In order to make a dialogue-driven microbudget film feel more kinetic, you have all these transportation scenes — how people are getting from one place to another — and those [require] big music cues. ... It just opens it up and makes it feel not very rushed. It’s nice. I mean, these music passages are one thing you couldn’t do for television. 

You want to see a movie where they didn't do this, see Henry Jaglom's Venice/Venice, filmed on location in Venice, Italy and Venice, California. They took the cast and crew to Italy for scenes of them sitting around a table talking.