Question 1

What does it mean to be a filmmaker?

Seth Savoy · Accepted Answer

To me, being a filmmaker is about finding beautiful, honest moments. Making the audience really step outside of their comfort zone and rethink what they believe.

Question 2

What are the five stages of filmmaking?

Anna Keizer · Accepted Answer

The five stages of filmmaking are:

Development
Preproduction
Production
Post-production
Distribution

Question 3

What does a Filmmaker do?

Anna Keizer · Accepted Answer

The term Filmmaker is wide-encompassing… Individuals from Screenwriters to Cinematographers to Editors and beyond can all be considered Filmmakers. As such, each of these individuals have a specific job that contributes to the making of a movie.
Often, though, the term Filmmaker is used synonymously with Director. A Director is generally considered the person who leads the production of a film.

Question 4

What makes someone a good filmmaker?

Mike P. Nelson · Accepted Answer

I think a good Director is somebody with a strong point of view. There are Directors who get the job done and know how to tell a story; they’re the easy kind of “for hire” Directors that can fill the shoot and do the job. But then there are the great Directors who have a point of view and own it. They have a specific style or voice. When you’re watching their films, you feel that voice, that attention to detail and story.
The great Directors have a very specific mind towards storytelling or towards style. Those are the ones I look at and say “Okay, that’s what I want to do. I want to have that voice.”
[The awareness of that voice has] helped me land work and helped me in conversations with executives and Producers. You go into a room and an executive questions what you’re doing with a movie. For instance, with this last one I did, Wrong Turn, they’d ask, “Why isn’t the violence really coming through as we’re looking through the dailies?” And I’ll say, “You have to trust me, and here’s why.”
Then I’ll go through how I plan to assemble it in the edit and that we’re not necessarily making a splatter film where we’re ripping arms out of their sockets and showing it from four different angles with blood spurting all over the place. I’ll explain to them that they’re not seeing that because that’s not what we’re doing. It’s not that kind of movie. We’re going to be doing something that’s a little more grounded, more realistic, and you’ll see that when it’s put together.
Give a strong point of view and own it. That’s a huge strength. A Director being wishy-washy is the scariest thing for any executive. If I was an executive and I had to hear that, I’d be nervous, because that tells me my Director is trying to cater to what I want. But I think it’s important for Directors to listen to executives. Some executives have very good points.
As an artist in general, if your work is put out there, you want your work critiqued. Let’s say you write a script and you send it to a buddy. They’re going to tell you things that are useful, and they’re also going to tell you things where you’ll be like, “Yeah, that’s not the movie I’m making.” And you can just go, “Cool, thanks for the feedback.”
You take the stuff that works for you and that’s telling the story that you want. The stuff that doesn’t fit, you don’t need to worry about that so much. Put it to the side and just say thanks for the input.

Question 5

What skills do you need to be a filmmaker?

Mike P. Nelson · Accepted Answer

People skills are good. Being able to communicate your ideas well is one of the biggest things, both verbally and visually. I come from a one-man-band-type background. I learned all aspects of filmmaking. I learned to direct. I edited my own stuff. For a lot of it, I would shoot my own stuff, too.
As I started making bigger things, I didn’t shoot my own things and would hire somebody like a Director of Photography where that was their focus and they could be that specific eye. They could be a person that I collaborate with. Ultimately, coming up in filmmaking, I wanted to learn how to do it all so that I understood it all. That’s been very helpful moving forward. Understanding all those departments and what they do so that you know how to communicate with those people: that’s been invaluable.
I remember with the first feature that I did, The Domestics with MGM, that was often a question. This first-time filmmaker with a budget now, can he get his ideas across? Can he communicate? Does he know how a film set runs? And I knew how a film set ran [because] I’d been doing it for so long on a smaller scale. You have different departments, you give those people the ability to execute their craft, and you work with them and collaborate. They started to see that and thought, “He’s fine. Go do your thing.”
Sometimes someone comes in who wants to be a Director and has a vision for a story but they’ve never worked with those types of teams. It all comes down to how you communicate. Communicating your vision is one of the most important things. So is getting your hands dirty in all those different departments and understanding what they do.

Question 6

How do you become a filmmaker?

Seth Savoy · Accepted Answer

To become a filmmaker you grab any camera you can find and shoot as much as humanly possible. Mastering photography helps you as a Director and since we live in a digital age, there is no excuse to not shoot as much as you can.

Question 7

Is it hard to become a filmmaker?

Seth Savoy · Accepted Answer

It’s extremely hard to become a filmmaker. This profession isn’t for people with soft skin and you have to love the craft.

Question 8

How do you create a low budget film?

Cassius Corrigan · Accepted Answer

Definitely, the production logistics are a huge part of it. Having a very limited and controlled location approach to your story is gonna make your life infinitely easier.
In our case, we shot 40% to 50% of the movie in an MMA gym in Little Haiti, and the deal we made was with Diego de Vera, the owner of the gym, who helped us out tremendously. He said, “Well, as long as you don’t interrupt the operations of my gym, you can shoot your movie here and you don’t have to pay for it.”
So, that meant we had to shoot overnight. Every day [that] we’re in the gym, our day was starting at like 8:30pm and finishing at 5:30am. It’s those types of compromises you have to make.
To get the gym in the first place, I had to do some commercials for the gym for their sponsor. They’re sponsored by Hayabusa, an MMA brand, and I had to find ways to give value to the people that I needed to give value to.
What I would say is you have to find a way to deliver value to the other people that you need to help bring your movie to life, and that goes to your locations people, that goes to your vendors, that goes to your collaborators.
I wasn’t able to get the most established Production Designers or department heads in my movie (because we couldn’t afford them) but what I was able to do was give people who did have some experience the opportunity to earn their first credit on a feature film in their chosen department.
So maybe someone who had only been a First AC in commercials and music videos, they’re gonna work on Huracán and get their first First AC credit on a feature film at a lower rate because it’s something that they don’t already have.
That mindset really unlocked the team-building aspect of putting Huracán together. The truth is, as much as you want to work with people who have some kind of clout or experience, on these low-budget or no-budget movies, you really are gonna be way better off—and I didn’t understand this until we did it—with people who maybe have a little experience, but who buy into the process of making this movie, who have a passion, and are really incentivized by the project.
That’s gonna take you so much further because people who you convince to work at a lower rate and it’s just a day job for them are not gonna want to go the extra mile. You’re gonna need people who wanna go the extra mile.
Those people are just not gonna do it because that’s not why they signed up. Maybe they were just available, and they just thought, “Okay, it’s a pretty shitty paycheck but I don’t have anything else on those days.” You wanna be able to discern in advance why someone would want to, and would benefit from, being a part of your production. That’s something that, even beyond filmmaking, is a huge thing that I’ve learned.
As you’re finding partners and collaborators, you really need to understand what they’re gonna get out of your collaboration and your project. You can design your system in such a way that you know you’re gonna get what you need from them, and they’re gonna get what they need from you.
Something that allowed us to do the movie, especially in this ultra-low-budget way, is the fact that you can work with non-professional Actors, and you can get great performances out of them. In our movie, we really only had two people who had ever acted before in our film.
Yara Martinez, who is an established Actress beloved for her role as Luisa in Jane the Virgin, she’s been in True Detective. She is a very experienced and beloved Actor, super-talented, and she was a huge part of elevating the performances of everyone in the film, specifically mine. Our Detective Carlos Guerrero, made guest experiences on everything from Bad Boys III to Atlanta on FX. Outside of those two people, effectively, everyone else was a first-time Actor.
That was a huge challenge directorially. My biggest takeaway from that was with non-professional Actors, you can get great performances out of them if you don’t ask them to act. What I mean by that is, someone without acting experience, you cannot expect them to just invent that experience and have the skill set to go far out of what their natural behavioral range is.
But what you can do is get real people who bring a similar presence and a similar energy, have a similar life experience to the character that you want to portray, and get them comfortable enough with the filmmaking process that they can just be themselves on screen. If you cast them well, you will get the performance that you need for the movie, and we did that with so many people.
One of my favorite examples is Camila Rodriguez, who’s a Columbian Actress, who at the time that she auditioned for Huracán, had never been in a movie before. She was (and still is) a Nurse in the ICU at Jackson Memorial Hospital, which is one of the biggest and craziest public hospitals in Miami. She had some experience in theatre, but she didn’t have any experience on screen.
In her auditions, I saw that she was maybe rough from a technique standpoint, but emotionally she got it. She just really understood who this person was, who this character was, and how they might react in a given situation, and now when you watch the movie—she plays Alonso’s mother, her flashback scene’s a big, critical one—she’s amazing!
In my opinion, she’s the heart of the movie. If her performance wasn’t as breathtaking as it is, the movie wouldn’t work in the way that it does. It wouldn’t impact people in the way that it did impact people emotionally. So, we got an amazing performance out of her, and it was her first time.
Everyone on our MMA side, they were all real fighters who trained at the gym that we shot at, and we were just able to put them in positions to be themselves on screen, and it worked because they were the real deal. They were the authentic people who would really be at that location doing that thing that they’re doing on screen.

Question 9

Is filmmaking a good career?

Seth Savoy · Accepted Answer

Filmmaking is an extremely impractical career. There is no consistency, which is extremely hard but personally, I love how relationship-based this industry is. As an artist, it’s probably one of the hardest careers since making films is so expensive. You can’t just buy a canvas and paint like someone who paints can.

Question 10

What else do you feel aspiring filmmakers should know about getting into filmmaking?

Mike P. Nelson · Accepted Answer

When you feel like you’ve broken in, you get that gig and it feels like you’ve made it, that might be true, but in a way, you’re starting all over again. When we started out, we were kind of the ragtag crew that just wanted to make stuff.
I was an Internal Director at a visual effects house in downtown Minneapolis. It was like, wow, I did it. I made it to this point. But my goal was that ten years out of college, I wanted to make a feature film. It was ten and a half years later that I got that opportunity. You work up to that point and you get that opportunity. Then, you start working your way back up.
There are a few exceptions where people get up there and stay there and it’s easy for them. But I would say that with most people you see, it only feels as if it happened that way; you’re not seeing all the work. Look at somebody like Ari Aster, for instance. You can say, “Oh, he made Hereditary and his career just took off!” Yeah, to a certain extent that’s true.
He made a really great film that resonated with a lot of people. He’s a filmmaker to be reckoned with. But if you look back at the history of his filmmaking career and where he started, he went to AFI and made shorts and put in a lot of time. He didn’t just write a script one day and a Hollywood Producer saw it and said, “This is perfect,” and he made it and he was a great Director. He did a lot of legwork.
When you think you’ve made it, I don’t think you’ve really made it. You’ve gotten to a certain point. More than likely, you’re going to be starting over again. Like when I made The Domestics, it came out and I thought, “I’ve made it! I got a movie out into the world!” Things got really hard after that. Because then it was like, wait a second, people aren’t responding in the way that I thought they would.
I got some really great reviews and people were like, “Oh cool, look at this new guy, he has a cool voice,” and then crickets. Okay, what’s next? You’ve got the Agent and you’ve got the Manager and they’re trying to find scripts. They’re trying to find something you can do. You pitch, you pitch, you get a lot of “no”s. “Oh, we saw The Domestics! Yeah, it’s … interesting.” Ugh.
You sit there for two years or so and you’re trying to snag up small freelance gigs. You’re wondering, do I need to find a nine-to-five? Do I need to figure out how to become a Bartender to make ends meet? Does anybody care? Was that my last shot?
Thank God I have my wife who has always been so supportive of me. We’re supportive of each other. One thing she kept saying to me was, “Do you want this?” I was like, “Yeah.” And she said, “Well then you have to keep going.” It might sound cliché, but when you hear that from somebody who’s such a big part of your life, you think: yes, I need to keep going. And you keep going.
It’s still hard. But then one day that thing comes across your desk, or there’s a thing that just hits and God, the universe, they’re listening and stuff starts to happen again. You just have to keep going.

Question 11

Can you become a filmmaker without college?

Seth Savoy · Accepted Answer

Absolutely. Being on set is more valuable than being in a classroom. The beauty of being on set is that if you don’t know how to do something and you admit it, someone will show you. I think that is really beautiful.

Question 12

How do you market and distribute a film?

Lindsay Lanzillotta · Accepted Answer

There are a number of pathways. Often people go to a film festival. You make an independent film and sometimes you can reach out to distributors and get a distributing vault early. It doesn’t happen a lot for independent films.
Or you make your film and take it to some good film festivals and hope it gets in and sells. Or you can get a Sales Agent if you get into some of those festivals, which is a wonderful thing to have because you’re not usually an expert in selling your own film.
If your film doesn’t sell at your film festival or event, you can go down the route of something like what I’m doing with The Film Arcade Carousel, which is the new arm of Film Arcade. Film Arcade is a North American theatrical distribution company but Carousel itself does distribution for independent films.
A lot of distribution offers that come to independent films are basically “no minimum guarantee.” That means not giving any money to anyone, but saying, “We’re going to spend these marketing dollars on your film and you don’t have to pay for that.” You’re going to sit behind that in your recoupment. So you give them your film, and you give your rights away sometimes for five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, and you don’t ever see a dime from your film.
There is some frustration in that process because you have no control as an independent. Our CEO Miranda Bailey, myself, Jason Beck who runs the Film Arcade, and my other colleague Natalie Wayland, what we’re offering is more transparent.
We’re saying, “This is how much it costs to release your film these days,” and “we can help service that so that you can retain control of your film, [and] sell the rights to it internationally, if you want.” There are all kinds of different pathways, but you can know how much that costs and control it and help guide the messaging and marketing of your film.
By the way, I don’t pretend to be an expert in the marketing of film. We have vendors who have done this. Film Arcade itself has serviced films for Universal, Lionsgate, and Paramount. So they [the vendors] have experience doing this with smaller films that studios have picked up and deferred to Film Arcade to do for them.
We’re providing a service for the larger companies, but we’re doing smaller films as well. We can go even smaller. “My friend doesn’t know how to get her film out of her living room.” If you need an aggregator, that’s one thing. If you want an aggregator who actually knows how to do a film campaign, how do you do that without feeling like you have zero Consultants?
You’re the person who’s made a $50,000 film or $1 million film, and everyone’s disappeared but you’re still holding it and don’t know how to get it out in the world. So this is what we’re trying to offer to people.
Films have been serviced for a long time. Big films. Peanut Butter Falcon is an example of a film where it looks like a big distributor put it out, but it’s actually a service deal. They paid and they controlled that because they didn’t like any of the offers they got for that movie. It has a big cast (like Shia LaBeouf and Dakota Fanning), it just didn’t get the offers they thought that movie could have.
And they were right. They put it out. They paid a very expensive service company to do it for them, but that’s fine and it worked out for them. So that’s what we’re saying; we need to offer this for smaller films with more reasonable rates. This is part of the education I do now with independent filmmakers.
You need to budget for insurance. You need to budget for locations. You need to budget for Actors. But you also need to budget for your distribution. It needs to be part of your budget before you even make the movie. You need to have it as an insurance policy. If your movie doesn’t sell at Sundance for a zillion dollars, if you saved $10K, $15K, $25K, then you can market your film more than you realize.

Question 13

How do you secure distribution for a first-time filmmaker?

Lindsay Lanzillotta · Accepted Answer

We’ve worked with first-time Filmmakers and we still do at Cold Iron Pictures. With Film Arcade, the theatrical releasing company, it usually does have to have some kind of cast or documentary storyline draw that’s a little more commercial to invest in a wide movie. With Carousel, the whole point was to open it up to films that have zero cast (documentaries).
As long as it’s an executed film that could have quality control to it–meaning, it would pass tests if you wanted to put it on Amazon or iTunes, that kind of thing–as long as it’s a well-made film in that respect, we’re here to help all films.
We’re open to looking at anything. That’s why we’re transparent. It even has my email on the website for Film Arcade because the transparency is, “We’re here to have this conversation with anyone.” If you want to know how to budget for a film that you’re making for $10,000 or $100,000 and it’s of a specific genre, we can even tell you the numbers you should budget for.
If you want to have a plan early on, you want to commit to servicing, and your Executive Producers are interested in helping you finance in that way, (your Executive Producer can be your parents, doesn’t matter), we’re here to help you navigate that.
The goal of Cold Iron is to be the sister company to Film Arcade. The build of this will help other filmmakers get their film seen, because we’ll have it up on our website and people can go and that might provide them with some interest. We’re hoping what we’ve been working towards for our filmmakers can spread to other filmmakers. That’s the whole point.
Sometimes I think I’m insane because a lot of independent filmmakers have zero money. They come to you with their film in hand and they can’t afford to pay your operating fee or even the aggregation fee, which they could go and do with someone that didn’t want to help at all. They don’t have any money left for that.
Which is why I feel like even a year from now, I hope I’ll be busier because I’ll be trying to educate about the need to budget for that. It’s just as important as insurance.

Question 14

How much do Directors make?

Anna Keizer · Accepted Answer

As with virtually every other specialty in filmmaking, the salary of a Director depends on several factors. First, are they a known Filmmaker? Second, what is the budget of the movie? Third, will they be taking on additional roles such as Producer or Cinematographer?
A Director like Steven Spielberg will inevitably have a bigger payday than a novice work-for-hire Director. A Director on a web series, streaming television show, or commercial will make less than someone who directs on a network TV show or feature film. And someone wearing multiple hats during a production will likely be able to negotiate a higher salary for it.
All to say, what Directors make can fluctuate greatly. Should they be working consistently, though, the salary of a Director in the entertainment industry averages out to approximately $107,000 a year.

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