5 Things: 5) Completion Is An Accomplishment

 5 Things I Learned Making a $4,500 Movie

 

5) Seeing project from concept to distribution is it own accomplishment

Features, from concept to distribution, are beasts constructed from hundreds of moving parts that are controlled by thousands of decisions made from an infinitude of possible choices.  The project will wear you down with debt and/or time waiting.  Completion timelines are guides, at best.

I spent almost five years on Holiday.  At this point, I can’t afford to spend any more time on it.  And that is because of a truth only Director/Producers know: no one, not the people you live with, not the people you worked on the project with, not your friends and family, none of them will ever have any idea how much time you spent getting you project to distribution.  Only you know all the dotted “i”s and crossed “t”s that had to be done by a particular time, at a certain cost, with no errors.  This last stipulation means checking and re-checking everything all the way to the release.  No one will know all the tedious hours you spent filling out this, filing that, waiting on replies in order to move to the next step.

So if you make it all the way to distribution with your project, you have accomplished something even if you never make a dime.  The great thing is, in today’s digital delivery world, there is an audience for almost everything and they have access to your product in a way never possible before for independent filmmakers.

5 Things: 4) Health More Important Than Age

 5 Things I Learned Making a $4,500 Movie

4) Health more important than age

Clint Eastwood still directs.  As does Woody Allen.  But the process is grueling for producers and directors for the duration of the project.  Everyone else plays a part or performs a task and moves on.  You are there, working all the way up to the release, and then on to promotion tasks.

A friend of mine who directs studio features told me, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.  Stay healthy.”  I thought, sure six months, a year, maybe.  It took five years.  If you are the energy moving the project forward, when you stop the project stops.  It happens at all budgets.

On the Fox lot I met a mid-thirties director completing his latest $45 million project and had only slept one night in the last four days.  Two forty-hour days with an eight-hour break in between was his reality.   It was a week before release and he would only sleep once or twice more, only when absolutely necessary as work is being done 24/7 at the studio.

I’ve been on the set of a $100 million project and watched a young director, who was not properly prepared for the job, wear themselves down to exhaustion and have to be replaced halfway through principle photography.

Exhaustion can happen to anyone, regardless of age.  The culprit is the never-ending to-do list a piece of intellectual property like a feature generates.  If you’re lucky and the work you do develops an audience large enough, you might be working on something related to the project until you die.  So stay healthy.  You want to get to release.  And even if you never make much off your project, just getting it done still being mentally and physically healthy is an accomplishment.

5 Things: 3) Don't Work With Assholes

 5 Things I Learned Making a $4,500 Movie

3) Don’t work with assholes

This is critical to stick to and almost impossible to follow.  You will say to yourself, “It’s just for this one thing.  I can put up with it if it means getting the project completed.”  You will regret this later.

Twice even on my little project I pushed this aside and have paid for it ever since.  Although the assholes were of a different nature—one was up front and the other stealth—I foolishly agreed to work with them.

I worked with one person who made it clear they were going to be a problem child on the first day.  I sat them down and explained their behavior wasn’t going to work and thought I had addressed the issue.  This person continues to this day to be a pain in the project’s ass.

Another person involved with the project became my best new friend, willing to go all out for the project.  Later, when it came time to sign the contract for what we agreed on, the person refused to sign, demanding gross percentage points.

The truth is, whomever you involve in your project, you are tied to them forever—even when you die, your relatives will have to deal with these people because the product will be out there in perpetuity.

All budgets.  No kidding.

5 Things: 2) Make Your Movie With What You Have

 5 Things I Learned Making a $4,500 Movie

2) Make your movie with what you have

This is the logistics flipside to lesson one on the financial side.  I waited 25 years to make a feature length project mainly because I couldn’t afford the equipment necessary to create images to be projected large in theaters.  This didn’t stop me from making films and videos, I just worked in short formats.  You should always do what you can with what you have.

In my mid-twenties I was complaining to my mentor about not having the computer equipment I wanted to complete a video piece.  He told me I should be able to make art out of two sticks and a rock.  His approach to the video and performance work he did was very low-tech.  I embraced that approach, moving from still photography into video, digital, and film long form projects in the 1980’s.  At that time, video was not a viable format for high-quality theater projection.

But 1980’s video improvements did have an impact on feature filmmaking, especially with low-budget production.  Anything I’ve ever shot on 16mm or super16mm since the mid-1980’s was transferred to video.  My days hunched over a Steenbeck with a chopping block and glue ended when I left college.  But I still couldn’t afford to pay for the film and processing costs to make a feature.

Robert Rodriguez, however, was able to put together $7,000 (in late-80’s dollars), just enough to make, El Mariachi.  Almost all that $7,000 went to film stock, processing, and transfer costs.  He used video to edit a version of the project that got him a distribution deal.  Another $1,000,000 was spent on the film for its 1992 studio release. 

By the late 90’s video was good enough for The Blair Witch Project to be shot almost entirely on that format and survive theatrical projection once transferred to film.  The project’s original budget of $25,000 (in late 90’s dollars) was then augmented with another $750,000 in studio post-production costs and $25,000,000 in marketing for release.  But you still needed access to very expensive editing equipment because magnetic tape was still being used and those player/recorders were pricey and high-maintenance.  My only access to such equipment was through employment by universities.  And the “video found footage” genre bloomed, but still could not be projected at high quality without expensive post-production.

Now, in 2018, things are very different.  My feature, Holiday, will not generate the revenues of those two features, but it does stand at an important moment in filmmaking history: I shot a feature for $4,500 with my phone—and projected it theatrically.  I had additional post-production costs, primarily for the score, totaling $25,000. 

5 Things: 1) Don't Spend More Than You Can Lose

 5 Things I Learned Making a $4,500 Movie

Here are 5 things I learned making a $4,500 feature that are scalable to any production budget level.  These are five things you already know, but offering a specific example might be helpful in remembering them when it matters:

1) Don’t spend more than you can afford to lose

A deceptively simple rule, but much trickier to negotiate the further you get into a project.  Movie making is a money sinkhole that gives you the illusion that you can see the bottom.

I thought I could get project shot and edited for $4500, which I did.  I thought that would entice finishing money.  I tried for a year and got nothing.  Finally, I chose to bite the bullet and raise money from the usual friends and family to complete the project.  The development process and completion took two more years.  Then I needed cash to enter contests.  We were accepted and awarded at festivals, but in order to screen in a theater, I had to pay for digital projection version.  Even after winning awards and being picked up for representation there were more costs.  All in, I spent about another $25,000 to get the project to distribution.

It is very easy to spend more than you can earn in the movie business because there is always a little more you could spend to make the project that much nicer looking and or sounding.  My project was an experimental feature with a very narrow bandwidth of the market.  There were many issues in the project that would have been resolved with further investment.  But I don’t think that would make much difference to the audience I’m attempting to reach.  My project was a filmmaking and storytelling experiment and despite the small audience I believe I can make all the investment back.  But I don’t know that for certain.

I was working at $4,500 but I saw this at the $450,000,000 level on Lord of the Rings.  The production for the first film ran short of money and time, releasing the initial version with multiple digital effects incomplete.  These were imperfections most audiences wouldn’t notice, but my point is there will be costs you won’t know about until you get there at all levels of filmmaking.  Be prepared for these.  If you can’t follow through to completion you will certainly lose all your investment because an incomplete feature project has no value unless you name is Kubrick.

Good and Evil on Holiday Conclusion

(this essay begins here: https://4kdirector.blogspot.com/2018/12/good-and-evil-on-holiday-introduction.html )

Conclusion

Holiday is an experiment in story development and film making technology.  The storytelling offers a deconstruction of the standard Good versus Evil and only came into being because the cost of production has been reduced to practically nothing.  This technological achievement points to a radical shift in the way the film industry will function in the future.

Obviously, my interest is in justice, not abduction.  What does justice look like?  For almost all abduction thrillers, justice looks like judgment and revenge.  Is there some other possibility?  Holiday considers justice absent judgment and revenge from within a genre that demands those elements.  The narrative is not a simplistic anti-judgment, anti-revenge filp-side to the abduction genre, but rather, something else.  Justice need not look like judgment, but that is difficult to imagine.  Alternative narratives such as Holiday are a mechanism to keep that conversation going.

Notes

1.  Cook, Robert.  Holiday.  On-line, Amazon.  Directed by Robert Cook.  Los Angeles: Shami Media Group, 2018.

2.  Gilles, Deleuze, “To have done with judgment,” in Essays: critical and clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1997), 135.

3.  Ibid., 129.

4.  Ibid.

5.  Ibid., 130.

6.  Ibid., 134.

7.  Ibid., 132.

8.  Ibid.

9.  Ibid., 133.

10.  Ibid., 127-128.

11.  Ibid., 128.

12.  Ibid.

13.  Ibid., 135.

Deleuze and Holiday Part 3

(this essay begins here: https://4kdirector.blogspot.com/2018/12/good-and-evil-on-holiday-introduction.html )

Cruelty versus Infinite Torture

This fifth Deleuzian point of conflict is explored throughout the story via Graham and Anne.  Deleuze articulates a doctrine of judgment that finds its extreme limit in subjugation to an infinite law, beyond our appeal.  He asserts we must move away from judgment, although it risks physical cruelty.  Within such system of cruelty, debts are marked on the body, but the debts are finite.  Deleuze lays out a history where justice begins with this system of cruelty and develops into a doctrine of judgment:

There exists a justice that is opposed to all judgment, according to which bodies are marked by each other, and the debt is inscribed directly on the body following the finite blocks that circulate in a territory.  The law does not have the immobility of eternal things, but is ceaselessly displaced among families that either have to draw blood or pay with it.¹⁰

This system of cruelty, in its extreme would be anarchy with its corporeal pain and suffering.  That force is opposed to the mental infinite torture of judgment.  The promise of judgment is eternal existence and corporeal peace.  But that comes at a price.  Within this seemingly more “humane” doctrine of judgment Deleuze writes: “In the doctrine of judgment, by contrast, our debts are inscribed in an autonomous book without our even realizing it, so that we are no longer able to pay off an account that has become infinite”.¹¹

We judge because we are judged and it feels “just”, but judgment crushes creativity and possibility.  Deleuze warns: “The bookish doctrine of judgment is moderate only in appearance, because it in fact condemns us to an endless servitude and annuls any liberatory process”.¹²  Deleuze is speaking to our engagement with the world—from our brutality as apex predators to our capacity for infinite subjugation to an unknowable power.  These are not opposing magnetic poles, these are dynamic forces that are part of existence.

Anne’s character expresses affectation of all the opposing forces through her constant state of what Deleuze calls “becoming”.  She is Helen, weaving her story, willing to dominate and then express a will to power, to ally with War, then return to combat.  She allies and resists to the end, without judgment.  She doesn’t insist justice is about personal revenge on Graham.  Justice, first and foremost is about freedom to choose.  Deleuze states this requires combat, not only against external powers, but more importantly, internally, asking the question, “who is one being in the world?”  Anne’s acts of violence are not revenge or judgments, they are a manifestation of a will to live.

As Graham spirals down into himself he aligns with the forces of judgment and Death.  The specter of War haunts him as he passes judgment on all around him, most importantly, himself.  He lives an immoral life and can never escape the face of Death.  Eventually Graham becomes Death, although refuses to take accountability by imagining “the Russians” delivering the fatal blows to all but the hermit.  For this murder, Graham exacts his revenge for stealing his property, Anne.  In the end, he feels Death very close, but manages to slither away into the grass.

This conflict between Anne and Graham is also represented visually, but with an ironic twist.  Anne is in a constant state of becoming someone different, although visually very little about her changes.  For most of the narrative, Anne wears only one outfit.  In contrast, Graham is seen with numerous looks, from his early 30’s with tattoos and a shaved head, to early an early forties wealthy beach bum, to a late 40’s man on the run, to finally a grey-haired, middle-aged salesman, all while solidifying himself internally into a monolith of paranoia.

Graham’s need is the same as Anne’s—to escape.  But instead of looking to others as Anne does, Graham only sees himself and his own thoughts of Death.  There is no escape for Graham as he finds himself subjected to infinite torture in his war with Death as judgment.  Deleuze states: “Judgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence”.¹³  Anne will keep growing, Graham will keep dying.

These characters embody a conflict not based on Good and Evil.  These conflicts help us to consider justice, rather than judgment, as motive that is a significant departure for the abduction genre.  The project itself is an inquiry into nature of genre narrative and whether there might be a different way to represent justice.