Living in Oblivion (1995)

Any actor who put up money got a part. That's how most of the movie was cast. One glaring exception: A guy in Brooklyn who worked at a fax store came in and blew the room away. This was Peter Dinklage in his first film.

LIVING IN OBLIVION (1995) is a single day on the set of a no-budget production where everything that can go wrong does, from spoiled milk to a boom mic in the frame. Steve Buscemi plays the director slowly coming apart, and it remains the definitive film about the misery of independent filmmaking.

Dinklage's Tito is cast in a dream sequence and stops the shoot to demand why little people only ever turn up in dreams, shredding the laziest cliché in surrealist cinema from inside a film that is partly a dream itself.

The vain pretty-boy actor was originally meant to be Brad Pitt, with whom director Tom DiCillo had worked before. Pitt dropped out days before shooting, and James LeGros stepped in.

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Living in Oblivion (1995) was originally shot as an independent, 30-minute short film funded by a $37,000 budget pooled from the cast and crew. Inspired by the initial footage, the actors worked for free and invested their own money to help DiCillo expand the project into a three-part feature film, which was completed in just 15 days. After premiering to critical acclaim at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, the film was acquired by Sony Pictures Classics for theatrical distribution.