When production time rolls around, know what you can do without in order to save your project hundreds of thousands of dollars: trailers for stars, fewer Teamsters as location managers, first- and business-class airline tickets for talent, your own salary, entourages, personal stylists, bodyguards, and assistants—even catering is negotiable for some filmmakers. In a typical star-powered Hollywood production, costs can include $500,000 for an actor's personal travel, or "jet allowance," and $1 million or more for a star's full entourage.

"You can skimp on any part of your budget, with the exception of food," says filmmaker Byrd McDonald, whose The Auteur, a sendup of the porn industry, has distributors buzzing in Tribeca this week.

Even working on a total budget of less than $500,000, McDonald still provided organic and locally grown catered food for his actors and crew. "You can't have 12-hour days with people eating sandwiches," he says. "We made sure there were creature comforts. [But] nobody had a trailer. Get in your own car if you need a place to disappear to."

McDonald also saved money by hiring actors under a new Screen Actors Guild policy that allows producers of films being shot for less than $200,000 to pay union actors lower wages.

Depending on where your money is coming from, you may need to keep track of every expense, down to the last cup of coffee. Jeremy Newberger of Ironbound Films spent five years with his two co-producers, Seth Kramer and Daniel Miller, making a documentary, The Linguists. They had $1.5 million from the National Science Foundation which Miller kept pristine track of in an Excel spreadsheet. "He would ask us a month later, 'Did one of you buy coffee at the airport in New Delhi?' And we'd have to remember if we had coffee."

"When you try to cut corners and hire cheap people, sometimes it does not exactly work out," says first-time filmmaker Abigail Carpenter, who was sued by two crew members she fired for negligence while working on her short film God's Beach. Carpenter managed to make up for the loss by raising money by setting up her film as a 501(c)3 so investors could write off their donations.

"Indie filmmaking, it's like a hustle," says Galt Niederhoffer, the third partner in the Plum Pictures trio, who, to raise money to make a film, has done everything from meeting with mobsters to placing ads in the Wall Street Journal. Part of that hustle, says Niederhoffer, includes offering walk-on roles to the investors' children or giving their kids some other job or internship on the production.

But in the end, keeping costs low promises a greater return on investment, she says. "We're making money for them—a 30 percent return, better than the market—because we keep our budgets so low and make these movies for very little."