I recently argued that the old festival-and-distribution path does not work anymore, at least not for anyone I know. So then what is working? The honest answer is that it is different for everyone. But it starts with a few honest questions.
How are you strategizing your artistic career?
Sit with these for an hour and write honest answers.
- What is your three-year filmmaking goal? Is it a hobby? Do you want to grow a social media audience? Do you want to make films you love? Are you hoping to make money doing this?
- What is the next project that gets you closer to it? Be specific.
- Who is the audience for that project? Do they know you exist yet? Where are they right now?
- Where does the money come from? Crowdfunding, self-funding, or investment?
If you can answer all of these with specifics, you have a strategy. Even if the plan shifts, structure is the basis of everything, and a roadmap makes the rest easier to digest. One thing I caution against: short or feature films sent to the festival circuit with no real goal beyond visibility and a vague hope of "distribution."
A recent example of real success: Anora
Anora cost about $6 million. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and Best Picture at the Oscars, and it has made more than $50 million at the global box office. But that is not the real story. The real story is that Anora is Sean Baker's eighth feature, and each one built the audience that made the next one possible. He made them for between $100K and $5M, and more than that, he made films that broke convention and were marketable precisely because they sat outside the box.
The working creator model is not a single jackpot. It is a cycle of projects that build momentum across a career.
Find inspiration in your heroes: Tarkovsky's Stalker
One film I keep returning to is Tarkovsky's Stalker. Now a cult classic, it barely survived its own making. A film stock disaster destroyed most of the first shoot, and Tarkovsky reshot it from scratch with different cinematographers and a different visual approach. The version we have is the second attempt, and he had to go find the money to do it all again.
If you do not know it: it is a kind of dystopian lo-fi sci-fi. Stalkers guide spiritual wanderers into a decayed, fenced-off zone called the Zone. At its heart is a room said to grant your deepest wish, and Stalkers are the transients who can enter that realm and lead seekers to it. Heady, sure. But in a nutshell it is a film about what you actually want versus what you say you want. Like so many great films, its point was woven into its creation, and it still stands the test of time by asking us the same question.
What do we actually want versus what we say we want? If you were handed a path to your supposed goal, what would stop you? To answer honestly, you have to look inward. That is the power of cinema.
The film is in the public domain, so you can watch it free on YouTube: Stalker (1979).
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