Two questions asked at nearly every Q-and-A session at Sundance: "What was your budget?" and "How many days was your shoot?"

A decade ago, filmmakers were thrilled to answer both questions - especially when they could play film-budget limbo by telling how low they could go. (Kevin Smith's "Clerks" was made for around $27,000, while Robert Rodriguez said his initial budget on "El Mariachi" was $7,000.) Filmmakers also like to brag about how it all got done in three weeks or less.

But filmmakers now usually avoid revealing their budgets, lest a possible distributor mistake the budget for a sale price.

Writer-director Brian Jun, surprisingly, revealed during the Q-and-A for "Steel City" that his budget was "less than $1 million." Joey Lauren Adams gave an unusual but unhelpful answer after the screening of her film, "Come Early Morning": "Honestly, I never saw a budget. I would like to know the answer to that question."

Now the shooting-schedule question is sometimes considered out of bounds. When asked in an interview, "Right at Your Door" writer-director Chris Gorak declined to answer, on the advice of his producers. The thinking is that if a distributor knows how long the shoot was, the bean counters might extrapolate the size of the budget.

- Sean P. Means