10 Movies Made Under INSANE Conditions

Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 black comedy The Celebration (aka Festen) is notable as the first entry into the Danish film movement Dogme 95, which require movies in its "canon" to follow a series of rules, such as shooting handheld, bringing no extra props to shooting locations, and using no extra lights.

This emphasis on "purity" and realism extended to the film's sound, also, with the Dogme manifesto stipulating that all audio must be produced together with the images and cannot be generated later in post-production.

Beyond preventing Vinterberg from adding music that wasn't audible at the shooting location, it also raised a far graver challenge - the inability to re-dub dialogue after-the-fact.

It's no secret that every single Hollywood movie extensively re-dubs dialogue in post for a number of reasons - usually either because the on-set recording wasn't perfect, elements of the story have changed, or test screenings indicated that aspects of the script needed greater spoken emphasis.

Yet by making his film under the Dogme rules, Vinterberg had no such luxury, and whatever dialogue he recorded on-set would be all he'd get, no matter how awful it sounded.

The movie's sound quality certainly isn't great, yet Vinterberg was surely aided by the fact that the overwhelming majority of people watching his Danish film would do so with subtitles, making the fidelity of the dialogue less important than had it been performed in, say, English.