My name is Sam Mestman, and I run a film collective in Los Angeles and Toronto called We Make Movies (www.wemakemovies.org). Moviemaker asked us to write a weekly DIY filmmaking blog about tips and issues facing up-and-coming filmmakers. And while I’ve got a million such article topics, I figured with this first post that I’d touch on some bigger picture ideas, investigating a few of the reasons we started our group in the first place. I think our experience will ring true for a lot of independent filmmakers working today.
With the rapidly decreasing cost of moviemaking technologies and the ensuing glut of movies getting made with those technologies, how does the little guy figure out a way to make the film he’s passionate about and get people to pay money to watch it, all while employing limited resources and competing with a million other filmmakers? How do you separate yourself from the crowd, retain creative freedom, and actually make a living in the current market without completely selling out and spoiling all the reasons you wanted to make movies in the first place?
Is there a clear formula for how to do this? Of course not. However, at We Make Movies, we have an approach that for a number of years has proved effective, and I’m going to spend a little time explaining why it works and why we do things the way we do them.
First, a little backstory. I was a producer, editor, and colorist for a smaller independent feature called How I Got Lost a few years ago (you can see it on Netflix and a bunch of other places if you’d like). The story of that production is at this point a cliché (which I guess makes me a cliché). And the cliché goes like this: A group of talented and ambitious individuals got together, cashed in every favor, tapped every resource, and put their lives on hold for two years in pursuit of following their dream of making a feature that was theirs. They went out and kicked ass on set, and made a movie they shouldn’t have been able to make for the budget they had. At the end of the day, the movie wasn’t perfect, but by any standard was more worthwhile than at least 85 percent of the trash Hollywood turns out. It was a solid, well-crafted film that, for a particular audience, resonated. But they made one critical mistake: They believed that just making the movie was sufficient. They thought some magical angel (studio) would come down from heaven, see their genius, hand them a whole bunch of money, make their investors whole, and grant them carte blanche to go make whatever the hell they wanted to make next, no questions asked.
Rereading that paragraph, all I can do is laugh. We were a joke. We were a car accident on the side of the road in a town that didn’t have an ambulance.
The journey we embarked on after making How I Got Lost was a rude awakening. We’d put all our money into making the film, not realizing we had to keep some in reserve to get people to actually care about seeing it. That’s how we got introduced to the bottom-feeding sales agents, publicists, film festivals, and distributors that feed on filmmakers’ blood, sweat, and tears without any real intention of giving anything back. (Obviously, there are wonderful non-bottom-feeding middlemen, but the scam artists out number them severely). The specifics of our experience trying to exhibit How I Got Lost are for another article entirely, but after fighting vainly across the distribution battlefield without a damn thing to show for it, I told myself I’d never let myself get taken advantage of again. But I also vowed not to quit pursue my dream of making movies. The problem was now, though, that I was in debt, living in a new city (Los Angeles) that had just been hit by the financial crisis. Bottom line: Things sucked—for a while. But I barely remember it, and I think that’s the important thing.
The post If You Make a Movie In the Woods and No One’s There To Watch It… appeared first on MovieMaker Magazine.