Aaton had already selected most of his cast when I came on board. He had made the decision to go with a SAG contract already, so I set about locking in and finding locations, hiring the crew and trying to schedule this behemoth of a very low budget movie shot on film into the framework of the budget. There are two ways to budget a movie, the right way and the low-budget way. The right way is to break down the script, schedule the shoot from that breakdown and then make the budget based on what you need, where you want to shoot, who you want to hire, etc. The low-budget way is sort of backwards in that you are usually told what your budget will be before you ever begin to break it down. This means that instead of making the budget fit the movie you are trying to make the movie fit the budget. This, of course, will lead to going over budget pretty much every time, BUT, you will still get the movie made and still usually for a very reasonable amount of money.
