Life as a Filmmaker

Life as a filmmaker falls into two parts: you’re either making a film or you’re trying to get a film made. The actual making-of-the-movie part is frequently easier. If you’re an independent filmmaker trying to get your first project off the ground, you’re facing one of the toughest uphill battles in the business. Many of the independent production and distribution companies have disappeared. You can try to make a movie on your own for under a hundred thousand dollars on money you might raise from family and friends. The odds are not great that your movie will end up looking good or being easy to sell. So if you want more money, it’s up to you to get together a business plan and meet with banks, the few indie production companies left and possible investors. So before the filmmaking ever starts, your life is a series of meetings, meetings and more meetings where you’re basically saying: “Please give me money!” It can take years to raise the money for a project.

Some filmmakers will just raise a little at a time and either shoot something very cheaply or shoot something piecemeal. Robert Rodriguez is famous for his seven thousand dollar first film; and “The Blair Witch Project” cost around thirty-five thousand. But those are the exceptions. Most distributors are looking for something that costs between five hundred thousand and a million dollars.

“The Dark Knight” director Christopher Nolan started out doing it the piecemeal way. His first film, “Following”, took about a year to shoot because they could only work on weekends since all the cast and crew had full-time jobs. But it worked for him – that film got critical and festival raves, which led to “Memento” and his leap to fame. Life as a filmmaker is made up of these highs and lows.

But let’s just say you finally found someone to make your movie. Then every day of your life up to the actual shoot is in planning. Because you have to plan everything, down to the smallest detail. Assuming your script is in great shape, you have to find the people and places to translate it onto film or video. You’ve got to scout the locations, see how they’re going to work for you, decide what equipment you need, interview and hire your crew – and perhaps the most important job: casting. You have to find those perfect actors. Some directors rely on casting agencies and online video to find their actors. Clint Eastwood does this because he says he hates to make actors go through the whole interview process and then feel rejected. But if you’re working on your first film, you may want to audition and meet your actors personally. That’s going to eat up a lot of time.

Once shooting starts, forget about sleeping – it’s up early and onto the set or location, skip lunch maybe for re-writing later scenes with the writer or looking at the morning’s footage over again before you move on to the next set or location, more shooting, then more screening of footage at night, possible re-writing, and planning all the next day’s shooting. But you won’t mind, because you’re doing what you love and living life as a filmmaker! Just remember the words of one of the great old-time directors, Robert Wise, who made “West Side Story”, “The Sound of Music” and the original “The Day the Earth Stood Still”: “My three Ps: Passion, Patience, Perseverance. You have to do this if you’ve got to be a filmmaker.”