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.