Over 20 years ago, a thriller was made whose most expensive scene was filmed entirely without special effects. To this day, it remains one of the most expensive minutes in film history.
With a budget of 447 million US dollars, Star Wars 7: The Force Awakens is the most expensive film of all time (via Forbes ). However, the most expensive single movie scene is a different story. The D-Day attack from Saving Private James Ryan, the freeway chase from The Matrix Reloaded and the aerial bombardment from Pearl Harbor are among the favorites for obvious reasons.
On the other hand, a short scene from a psychological sci-fi thriller, which also ate up a lot of money, is more likely to raise eyebrows. It is less than a minute long and comes from a movie with a budget of just 70 million dollars, as The Numbers writes. What was expensive was not a huge prop, a special effect, an elaborate stunt or a specially built set, but something completely different.
One of the world’s busiest locations was cleared for one of the most expensive movie scenes
The first scene of the film Vanilla Sky begins with Tom Cruise, whose playboy film character David Aames gets out of his sleek sports car one morning in Times Square in New York. To his astonishment, however, there is no one there but him. He looks for other people, runs through the otherwise busy square and becomes increasingly panicked.
(Tom Cruise in empty Times Square in Vanilla Sky)
Filmmaker Cameron Crowe spent a whopping million dollars on this short dream sequence, which would be the equivalent of around 1.7 million euros today, adjusted for inflation. As Screenrant writes, the NYPD closed off the tourist hotspot of the American metropolis for three hours on a Sunday morning in 2000 so that Cruise could play the scene. Of course, it would have been much cheaper with a green screen in the studio, but it wouldn’t have been as impressive. During the corona pandemic, he could probably have had the empty space for almost nothing
The Spanish film Open Your Eyes by Alejandro Amenábar (in which Penélope Cruz plays the same role as in the remake) begins with a very similar scene in Madrid. And horror fans will probably be reminded of the empty London in 28 Days Later or the more expensive (but used for more than just one scene) New York from I Am Legend.
