The Fog of Film…Making
I’m lucky enough in my career to occasionally be invited to conduct strategy seminars at film schools and universities around the world. This really isn’t a grandiose statement to tell you how cool I am, but rather a brief explanation for how I got to the premise of today’s blog:

Unlike any other profession I can think of, the way in to the American film industry is outrageously obtuse—even more so than Harry Potter’s invisible train platform.

If you recall, Harry had to have faith and run, headlong and full force, into a brick wall to get to Track 9 ¾. It’s clear to me that most, if not all, film students these days feel quite the same when it comes to figuring out what do when they leave school.

In a recently lecture at Columbia College Chicago it came down to a central question I posed to the grad students: do you want to go or do you want to stay?

To stay in Chicago, I reasoned, was to choose making a film as your way into the industry: Rounding up financing from wherever you could find it, utilizing your resources to the best of your ability, writing a script that made full use of your talents and locations the city had to offer, crafting a relationship with the local film commission…and then turning out a unique, striking, stellar film that would make it into one of the handful of film festivals that offer a mainstream profile you could turn to your advantage.

To go, I suggested, meant to make your way to Los Angeles or New York (because no matter what we think of these towns, they are our film centers), get a job anywhere in the business (agency mailroom or front desk clerk at an equipment house, doesn’t matter), start your networking, increase your skill set, fuel your dreams while paying the rent, work on your script, make a short film, make another short film, make your feature…getting it into one of the handful of film festivals that offer a mainstream profile you could turn to your advantage.

Choosing one or the other, I argued, had more to do with how old you are then with how talented you are. I’m not talking about the cliché that film is a young person’s game, although it’s hard to argue that point when talking to emerging filmmakers. It’s difficult enough to be willing to do 36 16-hour days in a row when you’re 19, let alone 45.

No, I’m talking about the footprints that come with age. Do you own a house? A condo? Have a baby? Are you married? Do you have debt? A car loan? Are the choices you make everyday yours alone to make, or do you have someone else to consider? The older one is, the greater the likelihood that your age footprint is bigger and deeper than someone twenty years your junior. That doesn’t mean you can’t move to LA or NYC, but it does mean you have other things to consider as you mull over the idea.

Another filmmaker recently asked me to watch his film in consideration for representation. When I told him, after seeing the film, that I wouldn’t be able to offer him my services, he made his own case for the fog of filmmaking. His point was that no one believed that festival programmers actually watch films anymore, and without a guide through the festival maze it wasn’t worth it to pay submission fees and just hope.

Forget for a minute that my instinct is to defend what I do for a living when I hear something like that, and instead let’s examine what might be at the base of his theory. Start with the premise that people see bad movies ALL THE TIME. You see films you can’t stand when you go to a theater and pay $12 at the box office. You see films you can’t believe got made when you rent off the festival list on NetFlix. Entire audiences see films they are CONVINCED they could have made better.

If you’re a filmmaker, you often go out and make your own films instead.

This sometimes works and results in great films that are universally beloved, but more often not (in fact, overwhelming not) the majority of filmmakers make films that aren’t universally beloved. Rather, they make films that many other people see and think “I’m CONVINCED I could have done better”.

The conclusion I’m coming to here is that choosing to be a filmmaker is a profession of faith. Faith that you really can tell your story better than anyone else, faith that the fog really will part, the brick wall really isn’t solid, festival programmers really do watch your films…faith that if you could do anything else (ANYTHING ELSE) in the world, you would.

And in this faith-based profession, whether you make a film or a job is your avenue in, remember that you as a filmmaker have committed yourself to a world of subjectivity—a subjective, populist, unbalanced (and ultimately unfair) world where your art is constantly deconstructed by the same adoring masses who are absolutely sure they could do better.

So while the veneer of “Hollywood show business” obfuscates the reality of filmic art, I propose to all emerging filmmakers to hold fast, retain your faith, find your footing, be ever vigilant, increase your skill set, keep your footprint small or your home-fires safe and, in the thank-you note words of Columbia College Chicago grad student Anu Rana, rest assured that “passion can be a work ethic.”