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Since then, filmmakers across Europe, Asia and the U.S. have stepped up to the challenge. "We jumped on it and exploited it," says Jean-Marc Barr, the French actor and director behind the fifth Dogme film, 1999's Lovers, which explores the romance between a Parisian woman and an illegal immigrant from former Yugoslavia. "It demystified the filmmaking process. All of a sudden, directors had complete creative control and the technology made it accessible." Dogme even caught Hollywood's eye: Von Trier made 2003's Dogville, which had Nicole Kidman on a scaled-back set made mainly of chalk outlines. And it has seeped onto TV, too: the popular Danish sitcom Clown is doing it Dogme-style (shooting improvised sketches on location with no makeup crew or costume department), and has Von Trier writing an episode to air next year.
The Dogme look — intense, immediate, documentary-like — was exactly what British director Danny Boyle wanted for his 2002 zombie film28 Days Later, which imagines what would happen if people were infected with a biological form of rage and then left to tear each other apart. "There was a very organic reason," he says. "I felt that if you survived a viral apocalypse, you could pick up a digital camera, which would probably still be working, and you could use it to record what was going on." Boyle's zombies went on to devour audiences, bringing in over $84 million worldwide.
And Dogme also gave filmmaking couple Chris Kentis and Laura Lau the biggest sleeper hit of last year. Kentis and Lau wanted something exciting, different — and cheap. "Anybody who's trying to make a low-budget independent film is naturally presented with plenty of challenges and obstacles," says Kentis. "Hollywood tends to solve its problems by throwing money at them. But Dogme is about setting up obstacles that would force a director to come up with creative solutions."
Looking for a story that fit the aesthetic, Kentis and Lau remembered hearing about a diving couple who were left stranded at sea, floating in shark-infested waters. With a minimal crew they traveled to the Bahamas and plopped their two lead actors, both unknowns, 30 km out in the middle of the ocean. Much of the equipment they needed was either too expensive or didn't exist, so they built their own, like the underwater housing for their cameras. "I bought a plastic file storage box, cut a hole in it and put the camera inside," says Kentis. "I did a lot of tests in my bathtub." They shot on location, using natural lighting, no makeup, very little music. And no special effects, not even for the sharks. "I think it's amazing what people can do with computer-generated effects," he says. "But if we wanted to embrace the sense of realism and immediacy, the best way was to work with real sharks. It only made sense." The result was Open Water, a white-knuckle horror with a palpable sense of danger and real fear in the actors' eyes. The film, which cost around $130,000 to make, started a feeding frenzy at the Sundance Film Festival, sold for a reported $2.5 million and eventually brought in more than $38 million at the box office.
With more and more unpolished, low-budget films rubbing up against the blockbusters in theaters, the motives behind Dogme may not be as relevant now as they were 10 years ago. But Dogme's influence is irreversible. "Dogme was a reaction against something and now Dogme can be something for people to react against," says Vinterberg. "So, for now, it's still alive."