With a micro-budget of just a few million dollars, the film will be Ferrell's latest indie-focused effort.
Following Retail (£15.99) Momentum Cert 15 A 70-minute, black-and-white film noir debut with a micro budget and unknown actors, Following is a little gem of subterfuge, with a twisty, pitiless, unpredictable plot, amoral characters worthy of Patricia Highsmith.
The micro-budget "quickies" of 1930s fly-by-night Poverty Row production houses may be thought of as Z movies avant la lettre.
The tense pans and long takes suggest a micro-budget version of Otto Preminger's dialectically balanced framings; the characters' voices are heard, as if in closeup, over distant shots of them in the lavish landscape, evoking a jagged inner disarray, reinforced by the insistent music.
That's a solid return for a film that cost a mere $10 million to produce and another summer success for Blumhouse, the micro-budget purveyor of "Insidious" and "Paranormal Activity". The two previous installments, "The Purge" and "The Purge: Anarchy," debuted to $34.1 million and $29.8 million, respectively.
The elder Rodriguez will also participate in a master-class on micro-budget filmmaking ahead of the film's premiere.
So what will it mean that DuVernay, a figurehead for diverse representation who proved her directing talents with the MLK biopic "Selma" and the micro-budget indie "Middle of Nowhere," has crafted a costly spectacle that's hardly wow-inducing?
But there's a difference: the writer's equipment is cheap, the writer's creation requires mainly the investment of time, whereas even micro-budget filmmaking costs thousands of dollars (conceivable that a budget clause could be written into a teaching contract, as the equivalent of a scientist's laboratory work?).
It would also allow them to work with industry professionals who might relieve them of the isolation and the lack of division of labor which are among the burdens of micro-budget filmmaking and also help to assure appropriate distribution for their work.
This chatty sitting around, with sex occasionally added, is not the sole subject of "mumblecore," a recent genre of micro-budget independent movies, but it's a dominant one.
