Fast, Cheap & Out of Control
(1997)
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Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is a 1997 film by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. It profiles four subjects with extraordinary careers: Dave Hoover, who is a lion tamer; George Mendonça, who created topiaries at Green Animals Topiary Garden in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, including giraffes made out of boxwood; Ray Mendez, a hairless mole-rats expert; and Rodney Brooks, an M.I.T. scientist who has designed bug-like robots. The film's musical score is by composer Caleb Sampson, and is performed by the Alloy Orchestra. It is characterized as circus-like, sometimes frenzied or haunting, and features percussion to give it a metallic, technological or futuristic flavor. In Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, Morris uses a camera technique he invented which allows the interview subject to face the interviewer directly while also looking directly into the camera, seemingly making eye contact with the audience. The invention is called the Interrotron. His four subjects narrate the film in their own words. The cinematographer, Robert Richardson, uses many of the same camera techniques he used in his other films, JFK and Natural Born Killers.