I, Spielberg

Once upon a time, only icons like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg could direct films. They bent huge crews and massive machinery to their storytelling wills! They had mountains of money to spend on transferring their visions to celluloid!

But as cameras have gotten smaller and cheaper and laptop editing has become commonplace, the barriers to becoming an auteur have fallen. In 1992, Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for a reported $7,000. These days, that seems downright wasteful. If the 1990s were the era of the low-budget film, the '00s, appropriately enough, are shaping up to be the era of the no-budget film.

Like today's filmmakers, the Astronaut Farmer (Billy Bob Thornton) works with whatever he can get his hands on to fulfill his technological dream. Photos by Richard Foreman/courtesy of Warner Bros.

If you want to make your feature debut and must spend some money, you can shoot on a Canon XL II ($5,199) edit on a MacBook ($1,099) loaded with Final Cut Express ($300). But why not save your cash for the wrap party and shoot on a series of 20-minute single-use DV cameras ($24.99 at Rite Aid) and edit on your friend's Mac, which comes with free iMovie editing software? Or better yet, try the My Date with Drew trick: director Brian Herzlinger shot his film in 30 days so that he could return the camera to Best Buy when he was finished. If it's animation you're after, you can use machinima, a technique that lets you create films by playing video games like Quake II or The Sims 2, which have recording features built in.