We’re actively doing what’s called the “Effects Breakdown” for my untitled Moon film in order to budget the movie, given how effects-intensive it is. Kevin Elam and I go through the script and come up with every single effects shot we anticipate might be in the film. Obviously, it’s a guess right now because we’re so far out from shooting the film, but you read a line in the script and you think: How many shots am I going to need to make that idea work onscreen? Then you come up with this list of probably 1,200 shots. That list then goes to someplace like ILM (the mother of effects houses) and they bid, and that probably takes a couple of weeks. This is one page of the list that we put together. We’ve blacked out the numbers, but it’ll give you an idea of what we’re working on: Visual Effects Breakdown.

As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, I don’t think anyone’s ever done the mMoon to the level of realism that I’m going for, so all of this bidding is really so that the studio and I can agree on a budget number for the movie. We almost certainly will not spend the money in precisely the way we’re currently talking about it, since we need a certain amount of creative exploration to figure out how we’re going to get what we want. But to even have a conversation as to how much this movie might cost, we need a starting place.

The studios don’t want to hear that we need to figure it out as we go along. They’re in a business, and they want to know how much it’s going to cost. The exciting thing about film is that it’s this weird union of business and art. There aren’t too many other places where the two come together like this. And some “art” can really be reduced to the numbers. If you want to budget a Bourne Identity sequel, that’s going to make a business person very happy, because even before you have a final script, you know it’s going to have x number of action sequences, and the action sequences are all real, sans special effects. They know how much it costs to do a car chase and how much it costs to do a fight scene. You can make a business person very happy with your prediction of how much it’s going to cost.

The first Bourne Identity, on the other hand, where we were trying to do something new, where we thought no one had done action quite the way we were doing, got people a lot more freaked out, because there was no clear precedent for what budget number to put on the sequences.

In the case of a project like Moon, all we can do is try to be responsible. I have this reputation for going over budget, which happened on The Bourne Identity and happened on Mr. & Mrs. Smith but we went over budget for creative reasons, not for irresponsible reasons. And we went over budget for things, I believed, the studio would more than recoup by having a better film.

When I did Swingers (which was only a $200,000 budget, money came from a friend of my father’s, a client who invested the money. My dad called me every day to ask, “How’s it going? You’re not losing my friend and client’s money are you?” He really kept drilling into me that when someone invests money in you, you have to commit every waking moment in trying to be responsible about that. You owe it to them to do everything that’s in your power so that you don’t lose their money. The client who’d given me the money was a gazillionaire. $200,000? I don’t think he would have noticed one way or the other, but he’d given me that money, and it was a sacred responsibility. My father wasn’t preaching; he was calling every day because he was worried. My father handled cases where billions of dollars changed hands, and here he was calling me every day on a $200,000 investment. In the scheme of his work environment, this was not a lot of money, but his calls really instilled in me, early on, a sense of responsibility.

That said, if there was ever a better idea, and if that idea would create a better movie while costing a little bit more, I would fight to the death for that.

Another example is when we went over budget on Mr. & Mrs. Smith. We made a much better movie by spending more money, but when we were at the final stages of mixing the movie, I and the man who ran Regency were having an argument over the ending of the film. It was really about a piece of music in the movie (if you want to see the difference between the two, one of the endings was on the original DVD released, and the version I wanted is in the director’s cut DVD), and I was arguing with him, saying we should finish the movie without music. He said to me: “If you had made this film for $35 million, you could do whatever you wanted. But in all fairness to us, you spent $100 million of our money, so you should give us a more crowd-pleasing ending so we can make back that money.” And he said that the “I’m an artiste” argument kind of goes out the window when the budget crosses $100 million. They were not a big company, and this was the most money they’d ever spent by a factor of two or three. So they were obviously very worried. That made sense to me, and I felt that I owed it to them. I made the changes they wanted.

It’s a balance you have to work hard to strike. I think you become a hack when you make all your decisions based on business, and I don’t think I’ll ever be a filmmaker who does that. And I think I would start to worry about myself if I wasn’t wreaking some havoc. My father is no longer alive, but I hear his words resonating in my head whenever I think about art and business coming together.

More Doug Posts:

Read — Will Jake Fit In With a Roomful of Astrophysicists? Hell Yeah, And Be Better Looking!

Read — Ladies and Gentlemen, the Captain Has Turned Off His Sense of Caution. Feel Free to Cower in Your Seats.

Read — “Previsualizing” a VFX Moon Rover Chase

Read — Editing Fair Game: Freedom in a Locked Room

Read — Fair Game Reshoot Tests: Abducting an Arms Dealer in My Basement

Read — Of Hurricanes and Dinghies: Misadventures with Captain Ludwig

Read — Screening Fair Game for the CIA, and Why Cheney Is like Jaws

Read — Science Fact: On the Moon, You’re Superman

Read — Mountains, Cliffs, and CGI: Envisioning the Moon

Read — Obama Stole My Hangar, But Can’t Touch My Hot Peppers

Read — Chicken Coop Editing and Stark-Naked Script Meetings

Read — Doug Liman Blog — Running With Jake Gyllenhaal

Read — I’m Getting Hitched: Making a Commitment to Untitled Moon Project

Read — I’m An Action Hero?!!?! My Hudson River Rescue: Birthday Pie with a Side of Boat Crash

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Doug Liman Blog: Science Fact — On the Moon, You’re Superman
• Doug Liman Blog: Previsualizing a VFX Moon Rover Chase
• Doug Liman Blog: Moon Crash Party at Dawn — Descent Into Darkness With a Roomful of Astrophysicists
• Doug Liman Blog: Mountains, Cliffs, and CGI — Envisioning the Moon
• Doug Liman Blog: Aiming to Shoot the Moon — A Sample of Our Script Notes
• Doug Liman Blog: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Captain Has Turned Off His Sense of Caution. Feel Free to Cower in Your Seats.