Ben Affleck has revealed that they saved money on the set of his directorial debut Gone Baby Gone by shooting bar and street scenes around real crowds.

He said recently: “Basically, what we did was, wherever possible, we went down to locations - say we shot in a bar - and we basically said, ‘Whoever’s at your barstool, we’re gonna show up and make the movie, stay where you are. We’re gonna make the movie around you.’”

“A lot of times, and I’m not sure if this is legal, we were just buying people drinks. We would come into neighborhoods… we’d set the scene, bring the cameras and, as people came out of their house to see what was going on, say, ‘You folks are in the movie…’”

And aside from his brother Casey Affleck in the lead role, most of the cast were not professional actors: “We cast all our smaller roles from people who were not only local to Boston but people who were in that neighborhood.”