I can certainly attest to this as well. My short film, a 15 minute thriller (four characters, one dinner, and one ticking timebomb for dessert, the bomb in this case being the combustible poison all four just ingested...) is still, even at such a short running time, primarily plot heavy. Five minutes of chit chat ("loaded," foreshadow-y chit chit, to be sure) and then the MacGuffin is turned loose from its leash at minute 5. Blood, sweat, and tears take us to fade out. I know there are a lot of these "contained" thrillers floating around but for my money you still can't do much better than Hitchcock's ROPE for inspiration.

Greg's point of making spaces within spaces reminded me of 12 ANGRY MEN and how that really could be a model "contained thriller" type of film. I mean, how many different spaces does Sidney Lumet create within that one little jury room? How many different narrative points-of-attack does he employ? And the overall shape of the narrative -- watching Jack Lemmon win over his fellow men one at a time with cleverness and dialog and psychology -- granted, it's not gun-at-your-head stakes, but it is very intense and claustrophobic and the men reveal their own pathologies and scars in the process.

Thanks, Greg. Excellent advice there. I figure a lot of us must be working on these kinds of lower budget thrillers, so I hope all this advice will be useful to other readers as well - and thanks to GITS and its contributors, we can all look forward to a new generation of excellent contained thrillers!

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