Production
The film was originally conceived as part of a television series, and only belatedly became a feature, after Japanese investors proposed expanding it; as such, the script was hastily re-written. The dialogue was recorded before shooting began. Made on an extremely low budget considering the time-consuming process of working with puppets, the film went over budget and schedule. Some scenes (including the Vietnam flashback, were funded by members of the film crew, and filmed secretly under the title The Frogs of War. The Vietnam flashback includes a game of Russian roulette as a parody of The Deer Hunter.
An initial application for Film Commission money was rejected, ironically by Executive Director Jim Booth, who a short time later became Jackson's producer. The Commission did eventually grant the production two-thirds of its $750,000 budget, though relationships between the funders and the production soured and the Film Commission removed its credit from the film.
It is often mistakenly stated that there are no human characters in the film; the character Abi is a human. However, there are no real-life human characters in the film. Peter Jackson has a cameo as an audience member dressed as an alien from Bad Taste.
Every vehicle seen in the film is a variation on the Morris Minor, including a specially constructed limousine. Morris Minors also appear in Jackson's Bad Taste and Braindead. According to the Internet Movie Database, the production team could not get hold of blank rounds for the M60 machine gun used in the film, and therefore the gun was firing live ammunition.
Read more about this topic: Meet The Feebles
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)