Last night I got some second-hand feedback on the Heartsgaard screenplay from exactly the person we're making the movie for. Her response stopped me in my tracks and more or less amounted to the following:
"It's hilarious! I love it! It's just... I was expecting more, you know... vikings."
Yeah. I'm the guy who writes a $300k movie about a viking horde on a rampage through modern-day Boston.
Don't get me wrong - those guys are out there. Filmmakers like Lloyd Kauffman and Roger Corman have been making very cheap, very silly movies and selling them on video for a tidy profit for decades. Anyone who works in film and wasn't born into the business knows these guys or lived among them, and some of the things they accomplish are truly miraculous considering their resources. Even the most hardened and cynical grindhouse lifer is an expert at getting the job done, and many of them are astonishing innovators. If you disrespect these guys, do it at your own risk.
At the same time, there's another way to approach microbudget moviemaking.
If your film matters to people, they will watch it. Producing a film people care about takes fantastic script, a fantastic cast, and the ability to consistently produce a cut that measures up. None of these things are easy, but some folks love the challenge.
Even if you make a gorgeous-looking, deeply relevant motion picture, you've still got to find people willing to see it and spread the word. Festivals like Sundance can be instrumental in this regard, and five years ago a tiny little time-travel movie called Primer made in-roads by winning the Sundance Jury Prize. More recently, a little modern fantasy called Ink managed to work it's way through the independent cinemas in city after city, all across the world, by using social media to unite their fan base. While the failure rate of movies like this is astonishingly high, the number of independent filmmakers willing to truly do anything it takes to get their movies out there is surprisingly low. Most artists today consider themselves immune to business, and those few who can walk confidently in both worlds are the ones who emerge as leaders in the industry.
My point is that unlike the schlockmeisters, Primer and Ink banked their fortune on the quality and relevance of their storytelling. While bombarding an audience with titties and gore may be a reliable way to build a following, it's not the most universally rewarding. Like anything, filmmaking is a process. If you don't love the process, you're not going to do good work. Good business is about playing to your strengths, and turning your liabilies and weaknesses into assets whenever possible.
Is that what Lloyd Kauffman does with his endless stream of cheesy, sex-infused creature features? Is that what Shane Carruth did with Primer? In both cases, yes.
While I love genre storytelling, I also love my actors and collaborators too much not to give them the very best of myself. Where I shine brightest is in exploring the reality and truth behind things nobody's ever seen before. While I can see the commercial value - and yes, even the creative value - in having a bunch of naked, bloodied college girls flee screaming from a barbarian horde, my heart is in a very different movie.
Of course, if anyone know where I can rent that movie...
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