10 More Movies That Did Crazy Things When They Ran Out Of Money
4. Switching To Black & White Film - If....
The Palme d'Or-winning 1968 satirical drama If.... is shot in both colour and black-and-white, with director Lindsay Anderson regularly switching between the two in a way that seems more-or-less random - despite some viewers' desperate need to extrapolate meaning from it.
The truth, in fact, is that the production, priced at just $500,000, was low on both funds and time. While shooting scenes set inside a chapel, Anderson realised he could save both by shooting in black-and-white, given that lighting scenes for colour takes much longer.
After that, Anderson decided to shoot additional scenes in monochrome, and with films generally being shot out-of-sequence, the rhyme and reason to which scenes were colour and which were black-and-white was... fluid to say the least.
Given the film's surreal bent, it's been said that Anderson additionally wanted to throw audiences off and keep them uneasy with these seemingly unmotivated divergences into black-and-white. It's weird, but it certainly works, while saving the production desperately needed money and time.