by Garrett Smith, Contributor

Welcome to BIG IDEAS, SMALL BUDGETS, in which I will be examining movies that take big swings with shallow pockets. Everyone knows Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for $7,000, which is indeed an impressively small price tag for a legitimately exciting action movie. But if you told me you could make a movie about a musician that gets mistaken for a hitman for $7,000, I would believe you. I would, however, be less inclined to believe you could make a movie about a vampire lair that gets mistaken for a bar for that much money, just as a random example (From Dusk till Dawn cost $19 million). This column will focus on movies that I consider to have “big ideas” at their core and feel even larger when you consider how little money went into making them. I expect that most of the movies I cover will be genre movies, if not specifically science-fiction movies, and that I will be spoiling them in great detail.

This month our subject is a famous debut feature,
Pi (dir. Darren Aranofsky, 1998).

Say, what’s the big idea?

A mathematician on the verge of a breakthrough in finding a pattern in the number Pi is also on the verge of a mental breakdown. As his search for a pattern leads him closer to understanding the true nature of the universe, perhaps even the nature of God, he is beset by clandestine forces from both Wall Street and religious zealots alike that seek the same knowledge. The closer he comes to a conclusion, the further he seems to break from reality, and the more questions the audience is left with as regards to what we’re really watching happen, until the final, sobering moments.

And they did that with how much money?

Approx $135,000 total, broken up into a $60,000 production budget and a $70,000 post-production budget.

Well how’d they pull that off?

Pi is fairly well known for being shot “guerrilla-style” around New York City, meaning Aranofsky and his crew didn’t obtain the proper location permits for much of their shooting (some sources say the entirety of the film was shot this way). On the commentary track for the film, Aranofsky gets specific about shooting their subway scenes illegally, supposedly saving the production $18,000 per night. The money for the production budget was supposedly raised through $100 contributions from friends and family (though the math on that means Aranofsky has A LOT of friends and family) who received $150 back for their investment after the $1,000,000 sale of the film to Artisan Entertainment. This is all fairly impressive when you consider how many locations appear throughout the film, including many public locations such as parks, cafés, and subway stations.

Did it work?

This is one of those remarkable “small” movies that makes the viewer think they could make a movie tomorrow if they really wanted to. Some ingenuity in set design, a cheap prosumer camera, and a loud, active soundtrack seems to be all you would need. But I’ve seen quite few “small” movies that were made by ambitious amateur filmmakers and they’re rarely as effective as this. Personally, I think much credit has to be given to editor Oren Sarch and composer Clint Mansell whose work on the movie gives it a rhythm that ultimately provides this with some structure. We know how Max, our mathematician, is feeling and how his trials are going through the rhythm and sound of the movie. What Aranofsky lacked in production materials his team was able to compensate for in highly creative decisions with the very base materials any modern film has–a series of pictures and sounds.

Was it successful?

Pi was a success by almost every measure, launching the career of one of my generation’s most well-recognized filmmakers, Darren Aranofsky. It holds an 88% Critic Score on Rotten Tomatoes (and an 85% Audience Score) and grossed over $3 million domestically on its $135,000 budget. In Roger Ebert’s 3.5 star review he writes:

"Pi is a thriller. I am not very thrilled these days by whether the bad guys will get shot or the chase scene will end one way instead of another. You have to make a movie like that pretty skillfully before I care. But I am thrilled when a man risks his mind in the pursuit of a dangerous obsession."

Why should I watch it?

This movie means a lot to me on a very personal level. I was very religious in my youth, and even owned a Bible that had the original Hebrew and its numeric representation in it. I was actually familiar with some of this movie’s basis in religious conspiracy theory before seeing it. After seeing it, I would become obsessed with the number Phi (which honestly seems like what this movie is actually about, and was only called Pi because it’s a more widely recognizable named number, the basis of which is famously “it never repeats” AKA it has no pattern) and how it might explain what my religious texts chalked up to being supernatural phenomena of some kind. This movie genuinely helped me untangle some of the dogmatic bullshit my young mind had been warped by.

But that’s just why it lit my brain on fire initially. The movie’s propulsive energy is what kept me coming back to it. The story of its making is kind of punk rock, and that energy is reflected in the movie, which at times feels like it might burn up, right before your eyes. It was shot in very high contrast, noisy 16mm black-and-white, which makes the film itself feel alive, much in the way Max imagines the universe is alive and the language it speaks is numbers. We can almost literally see the numbers dancing across the screen within the film’s grain.

I really think it’s an inherently compelling movie, trying to scratch well below the surface of the questions that linger in the back of our minds as we drift off to sleep. Questions about where we come from to help us understand where we’re going. The movie succeeds at being a fun sci-fi thriller even if you think its hypothesis is bunk. And if you don’t think it’s bunk then it’s inconceivable to me that you won’t fall down its own rabbit hole with it. I re-watched it this week for the first time in probably a decade and was enraptured by it all over again. That such a small movie could tackle such an enormous idea about the origins of our universe remains its own kind of miracle to me.