The Magic of Simplicity

The Breakfast Club's mode of production was super simple. It had a budget of one million bucks, which is really cheap: It's an independent movie budget—and a thrifty independent movie budget, at that—even though a major studio, Universal, was actually helping to produce it. Plus, the fact that Hughes limited the setting to high school and the number of characters to seven helped keep the costs extremely low.

The movie predates digital photography, so naturally, it was shot on actual, 35mm film. Hughes's cinematographer was a guy named Thomas Del Ruth, who had a long career before The Breakfast Club, working on movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (considered a great movie) and Myra Breckenridge (considered a terrible movie) as an assistant cameraman. After The Breakfast Club, he worked on other films and also did cinematography for a ton of TV shows, from ER to The X-Files to The West Wing.

The woman who did the film's editing was legendary film-editor (if a film-editor can be legendary) Dede Allen. She'd done the editing for such seminal films as Bonnie and Clyde and Dog Day Afternoon. John Hughes gave her a lot of credit for making the movie great—she forced him to sit down and really work on making this thing flow. They had over a million feet of film to go through, and Allen helped carve the movie we currently know out of it.