"Walt
Disney and David Lynch?
A few years ago, they would've been an unlikely pair. Today, actors,
writers, directors and producers can work with anyone. Independent
films such as The Blair Witch Project with a budget of $30 000
reap millions in profit. Studios like Miramax and Sony Classics
court unknown, innovative filmmakers with million dollar deals.
With ambition and a unique idea, anyone could be a major success
waiting to happen. But does it all just happen?
RJ
Millard, an independent consultant who promotes and markets films
for the Sundance Film Festival explains why it's not that simple.
Sundance, one of the pre-eminent venues to showcase new talent
premiered Steven Soderburgh's independent film, sex, lies and
videotape, in 1989. Miramax purchased the film and it grossed
well over a million dollars at the box office. Although independent
producers were making movies years before, it wasn't until the
success of sex, lies and videotape that 'Indie' film began to
fill the consciousness of the mainstream media. Since then, the
term Indie has been used to describe a broad range of productions
from the movie Fargo, created by the well-known Coen brothers,
to Chris Smith's American Movie. Although Indie films have achieved
remarkable success, for most amateur filmmakers, producing the
next hot film is still rare.
One
of the major challenges is finding someone to invest in your film.
Millard says, "If you do get someone to invest, once you
get money, you're probably not going to get the amount you want.
Then the challenge is to make concessions within the film to that
budget and when you're doing things below budget you're hiring
crew that may not be the best."
Even
if your film does actually make it to a festival-about 1200 films
are produced each year and only 200-300 are shown at a festival-there's
still no guarantee that it's going to be picked up for theatre
distribution. To make things even more difficult, if you are one
of the 75 or so that does get picked up, you may not even make
enough money to cover your production costs.
You
also have to consider timing and promotion. "Say a film gets
picked at the festival for 1 million by a small distributor that
doesn't put a lot of money into promotional and advertising costs
and releases it during a time of year when there's a lot of films
with the same sort of theme. It's not going to do well."
Millard explains. "You can have another movie bought for
the same amount that's released at a time of year when there's
nothing else out and if the audience is looking for something
that's really going to grab their attention, it's going to do
really well. For example, The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth
Sense were both released at a time when nothing else was out at
the theatre and people from that demographic grabbed onto it.
It really struck a chord with people, this is something new and
really interesting. You can have a really wonderful film that
will go nowhere because you're competing with so many others.
So, it's very important to know what else is being released at
the time."
A
good buzz also helps. When Millard promotes the line-up of films
for the Sundance Film Festival, he determines the marketable aspects
of a movie. "If you don't have any recognizable names and
talent, then you'll want to go with something unique about the
story or production." Millard says. For example, the festival
promoted Pi, a highly stylized movie in contrast with a stark
narrative. This created a unique experience for the market at
that time, and that's the kind of information Millard conveys
to the media. He facilitates the work of the journalist as much
as possible and keeps them informed about new trends. Millard
says, "Last year, we had a number of films that were sort
of on the lighter side of cinema, and that for us was a bit of
a departure from what people know about Sundance festival programming.
We were the people who broke the whole era of Quentin Terantino's
hyper-realized violence and so that was something new and we had
a couple stories on the changing face of the festival." The
more positive press attention your film attracts, the better chance
you have to draw a large audience, the top critics and a large
acquisition sale at a festival.
If
you have the right elements at the right time, maybe it's true,
anything can happen. It's difficult to get everything right, but,
Millard says, "If filmmaking was easy everyone would do it
and not learn the craft and learn how to do it properly."
