10 Great Single-Location Films

Every indie filmmaker has thought it or heard it before. "We should do a movie all in one location. Now that would shrink the budget!" And it's absolutely true. If you've got a good concept that occurs all in one place, production costs will be exponentially less than a multi-location film, and the project will be easier to produce.

Finding such a concept, however, is harder that it seems. It takes real creative ingenuity, the kind possessed by some of our greatest filmmakers. Limits, whether they be financial or spacial, may seem like restrictions at first, but often they're the engines of creativity.

In that vein, here's a list of 9 films that pulled off the one-location trick with fantastic results. We're not talking about films like Cube or Saw that use single locales that take a great deal of expensive set building and intricate prop placement. These are films that occur in a single basic room, stage or house, and succeed in spite of it.

9. Buried (2010) - Rodrigo Cortes

8. Exam (2009) - Stuart Hazeldine

7. Tape (2001) - Richard Linklater

6. The Man From Earth (2007) - Richard Schenkman (written by Jerome Bixby)

5. Rope (1948) - Alfred Hitchock

4. Clerks (1994) - Kevin Smith

3. Dogville (2003) - Lars von Trier

2. Twelve Angry Men (1957) - Sidney Lumet

1. The Celebration (1998) - Thomas Vinterberg

Wait, you thought this was a list of 10 films? Well, there's one great film (perhaps the greatest one location film) that's technically on this list, but not included above. What's wrong with Number 10. Rear Window (1954) - Alfred Hitchcock?? The answer is that while Rear Window takes place from the visual standpoint of one location, it technically takes place in many different apartments, thus many different locations.

Indeed, the set of Rear Window involved the building of a set with 31 one actual apartments (8 of which were fully furnished) and 1000 arc lights...not exactly the kind of budget constraints budding filmmakers are facing today. So while it's certainly a great one-location film, it's not the kind of concept that will work on a shoestring.

The set of Rear Window

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