For the latest in our series of anonymous interviews with film and TV industry professionals, we spoke to an independent film producer based in LA. In our candid conversation, we discuss how an indie project gets financed, why small movies are getting even smaller, and how aesthetics and craftsmanship are starting to matter more for films of all sizes.
What was your path to becoming a producer?
I knew in broad strokes that it was a thing that I wanted to do from a pretty young age. I was obsessed with movies as a kid. And when I was in high school, watching The Player and reading Kim Masters’ books about the business, I think I had an understanding on an abstract level as to the job of a producer or an executive. I would say my motives were of purer heart than the characters in The Player. I knew from a young age that I didn’t want to be the person telling the story behind the camera and calling the creative shots in that sense, but I felt a very strong drive in me to want to identify those people, champion those people, elevate them, protect them.
And then I got really lucky in that I didn’t actually go to film school. I studied communications with the somewhat mercenary thinking of, like, “If the movie thing doesn’t work out, I’ll be able to get a good job this way.” But my luck manifested because I wrote reviews for the college paper, and one of those reviews was read by a famed and subsequently canceled producer who made a lot of brilliant movies. I guess I can just say who it was: Scott Rudin. One of the many ways in which he’s crazy is he truly does read everything. And so, off of that, I was contacted by one of his executives to just start interning and doing odd jobs and writing coverage. That lasted off and on while I was in school, and then I ended up working for him full time. That was my first real job in the business, and it was as horrible and crazy as everyone has communicated.
I feel like most folks have a similar path, whether they’re coming up out of New York, where it’s a much more insular but also tight-knit film scene, or if they’re in LA doing the mailroom thing — you’re just sort of grinding as an intern at a production company, hoping that you can land an assistant job once that wraps up.
Did you spend time working for producers making bigger movies before you made the jump into independent film?
I did, and I had a really interesting experience in that respect. After working for Rudin, I worked with a book-to-film agent where my pet project was a book that became a studio movie, and I was very lucky to stay on through that experience and learn a lot through it. I’m proud of how the movie turned out, but in having originally read and championed the book, I think I’d conceived of it as maybe a smaller, thornier, more comedically awkward movie. But that was a crash course for me in what it takes to get a certain kind of studio movie made, which, even though it wasn’t that long ago, may already be outdated. The $17 million studio comedy feels sort of extinct and I think we’d all be happy to have that kind of movie exist again, but at the time I was wistful for what would have maybe been a more Sundance-friendly version of it.
You’re running your own company now. What led to the decision to strike out on your own?
I would say it was a combination of good fortune, bad fortune, and just serendipitous timing all around. I was in a position where I’d been a development executive for a while and I’d had three different bosses where, to varying degrees, I just felt unfulfilled and like I wasn’t really doing what I wanted to. I had always talked with my then-girlfriend, now wife, about the prospect of us working together. She’s a writer, and around the time that I had to leave my last job to tend to a family emergency, I got to witness as my wife’s writing career leveled up and she was able to sell a piece of writing as a TV show. And in this loaded time where I was figuring out my next move, I realized we had a degree of financial latitude and an ability to bet on ourselves. The timing happened to be right for us to start building a slate together and take this gamble of exercising my connections outside of working for a brand-name producer.
Do you find there’s a difference in the way people deal with you now that you’re the principal of a company as opposed to a development executive?
I think there can often be an assumption of impotence for a development executive or a creative executive. Depending on the company and your track record, there can be this feeling of, “Well, how much power do you actually have to move something along?” I have mixed opinions about The Studio, but one thing that I thought was very well-observed was the storyline with the Chase Sui Wonders character trying to bring in an Owen Klein picture. You get a moment in passing of the agent being like, “If you don’t actually have any pull, why did we bring you this project? You don’t seem to have the ability to get anything done.” When I was in my last job, there were times where, in the interest of actually getting something done, I found myself needing to go rogue or be a little more slippery to either overcome representatives or honestly just my own bosses being sort of obfuscating.
And now, for better or worse, if I’m cold calling someone or meeting someone for the first time, I do have to do a little bit of explaining about myself. But it feels like there’s an advantage I have now where the only thing that’s really going to get in the way is just my own ability or access. And I can make the sincere promise that if I’m communicating my interest in something, I will be putting my shoulder to the grindstone on it.
Producing is one of those jobs that everybody outside of the industry has heard of, but many people don’t really know what it entails. What is it you’re generally doing on a day-to-day basis?
In part because I was trained on the feature side as a development executive, a lot of my time producing is spent in a more nascent stage of projects. Either developing an idea with a writer or a filmmaker or finding a piece of material which I can hopefully matchmake with a writer or a filmmaker, or potentially with a buyer or a financier. Then there are times where you’re looking at the elements of a more cooked thing and seeing how you can put it together in terms of attaching cast and finding financing.
To your point, producing is one of those jobs where — and I don’t know how deliberate this is, as part of the gatekeeping in the business — but, no matter how much you study and research, there’s just so much about it that you really can only learn by doing. A producer is ultimately responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of the set, completing the post-production process, hiring everyone in the crew. You’re responsible for seeing the movie through from top to tail.
A lot of my work is a combination of supporting the ambitions of a project creatively and making connections. There are projects where I come in later and I can help find a piece of financing or get the right agent to read it who I think will be responsive and supportive when it comes to casting up roles. And then there are projects where my main role is rolling my sleeves up and working with the artists to protect the flame and spirit of the thing.
How do you get financing for an indie film in 2025?
There’s certainly not a one-size-fits-all answer. I think the best advice I’ve ever been given to this point is — and I hope none of these companies are reading this — to find a company that is relatively new to film finance and get in early with them before they’ve lost money.
There’s a good Chris Rock bit about how making a shoe is a business. You make a shoe for two dollars and sell it for sixty. That’s a good business model. Making a film is a terrible business. It really has always been a vanity business and a labor of love. You read stories about how Coca-Cola bought Columbia Pictures in the 80s, and then around the time of Ishtar, after the perceived financial failure of that movie, they were like, “This doesn’t make any sense. Why are we doing this?”
Everyone wants to be involved in the glitz and glamour of hanging around celebrities and making a movie with them. And then you actually look behind the curtain and it’s a crazy crapshoot that fails so often. And to succeed in it as a producer or a filmmaker or, in particular, a financing company, you need to be willing to fail and play a long game. The recent reporting on Sinners is a very interesting example of this where, for all the hand-wringing about the budget of the movie and Ryan Coogler having the copyright revert to him, it all came about because of a competitive bidding situation. Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy at Warners have been very clear, and I think very shrewd, about saying they were faced with running a studio that had just lost Christopher Nolan and they needed to bring in big name filmmakers who can call the studio their home. And this was an initial deal as a gesture of good faith with a person who’s only 38 years old and who they want to keep in their family.
When it comes to getting films financed, it really depends on the scale and it depends on the movie. There are indie movies made at three to four million dollars where the budget comes entirely from one or two companies with equity financing. Then there’s a whole world that, frankly, I have not worked in very much, because it tends to suit a kind of shitty dad action movie that I’m not as partial to, where you’re building a package through foreign sales which sometimes equates to, like, Serbian blood money or the laundered funds of foreign governments. And that’s how you get a Russell Crowe Middle Eastern-set action movie that somehow costs $30 million and barely gets a release in America, but it’s in the black by the time it’s already in production because they’ve pre-sold it in every territory.
Smaller movies seem to be heading into a more microbudget space, for better or worse — better because there’s opportunity there, worse just because it’s like, people weren’t getting paid before, and they’re really not getting paid on microbudget movies, and I’m a fucking fervent leftist who believes in everyone getting a fair wage. But a lot of those movies, interestingly, are assembled through micro-donations. And that doesn’t just mean GoFundMes, but either wealthy individuals or small companies putting in donations anywhere from $5000 to $100,000.
You’re always sort of building the plane as it takes off. I think you need to manufacture that kind of urgency to get anything financed. But it’s also a very scary thing about indie film. Maybe you have a crew assembled and production ready to go in July, but now you have a financing gap and you have a limited window to fill that. And maybe that urgency ends up working in your favor. But it’s why you see so many movies announced in Deadline at international sales markets that never end up coming to fruition, because they’re putting out into the universe, like, “We have Matt Dillon and Maika Monroe. We’re going to make this movie this fall. It’s called The Kitchen Killer or whatever.” And it’s like, if you don’t sell X territories at the Toronto market or wherever you’re shopping it, you’re out of runway.
You mentioned low-budget movies being replaced by microbudget ones. Is that a trend you’re seeing?
Yeah. I think that’s in response to struggles on the distribution front that have been exacerbated by streaming and COVID, where the specialty film stalwarts of our youth like Searchlight and Focus feel very challenged when they’re not working with a name legacy filmmaker who we all know and love. So Focus can still do Asteroid City with Wes Anderson and Searchlight can still do Banshees of Inisherin with Martin McDonough, but it almost feels like the window has closed for the rising class of filmmakers. I think those companies have really struggled to adapt to the times.
A24 and Neon comparatively are much better about spending less to release a movie and reducing risk and breaking filmmakers. Conversely, though, just because of the demands of capitalism and exponential growth, A24 has very consciously over the last two years been communicating the message within Hollywood that they don’t want to make Aftersun anymore. They want to make their version of a 90s New Line movie.
And I love 90s New Line movies. So on some level that’s a message I should get behind. It’s a bummer because A, I want them to keep making great small movies. And B, I think their attempts at making sort of indie-style programmers, like Opus or Death of a Unicorn, have just ended up feeling like cynical cash grabs. They feel like movies for no one. So I’m curious to see if their strategy changes after the financial failure of those films.
A lot of the places that we think of as cooler hallmarks of quality, be it Mubi, Metrograph, Sideshow, those places, just because of the challenges of theatrical exhibition right now, can only guarantee much smaller amounts in terms of what they acquire a movie for and how much they promote it. It does seem like Mubi is, with the success of The Substance, trying to branch out into their version of slightly bigger things again. I think that will be with the assurance of having legacy filmmakers whose names sell themselves.
So as a result, you end up having this field of really wonderful small films. India Donaldson’s Good One is an excellent movie made for between, I think, three hundred and four hundred thousand dollars. But it’s like, Little Miss Sunshine was made for $9 million. And that’s $9 million before inflation from 19 years ago. It would seem to be in keeping with this great enshittification of the economy, where the middle class has fallen out of both the studio and indie film worlds.
I think an interesting test for those filmmakers who have made a really strong small movie will be, what are the opportunities that they’re going to be able to make happen for themselves? And I do think that they’re happening at that bigger scale, even if they’re people who don’t want to make Kraven the Hunter or something. There is perhaps a little bit of hope for people who are dedicated to staying in the indie world where, if you’re Halina Reijn, you can get a little more money for Babygirl, or if you’re Emma Seligman, you can get a little more money for Bottoms. For people that Hollywood wants to bet on as a rising voice, the town is desperate enough for new blood that there’s still opportunity.
Something that’s unique about the space that you work in is you’re often discovering new talent and helping a filmmaker make their first or second feature. Do you have methods for keeping your ear to the ground and finding talented people who may not even have agents or managers yet?
I’m always tracking indies and festivals very closely. I’ve always been a true animal about that. Even when I was a kid, I was just inhaling the PVOD movies that Magnolia or IFC would put out on demand and I was learning about, like, the rising class of 2009.
You asked about people who don’t have reps yet — there are often people who maybe have a rep but have only made a tiny movie or a short who I track through trusting the representative’s taste. There have also been plenty of times where I heard about an awesome microbudget movie where the filmmaker didn’t have a rep, just through social media, and I ended up DMing them on Instagram and being like, “I love your movie. Here’s who I am. I’d love to connect.” I just went to a comedy show here in LA that was put together by a film screening group and there were people I knew there and people I’d never heard of before, whose names I was scribbling down to look into and watch more of their stuff.
For both people that are represented and people that aren’t, the connector usually ends up being that I heard about them through a person whose taste I trust. Their rep is someone whose taste I trust, or they were in the orbit of another small filmmaker whose work I admire, or there was some interesting person I follow online that had put me onto their work.
So it is, on some level, all ultimately word of mouth. But I think there’s maybe a lesson in there for young filmmakers, that the more you can do to just build your community and work with other people whose stuff you dig and be in the stew with them, the more there will be exponential benefits in terms of the exposure and opportunity that you’ll gain from it.
What are the biggest frustrations of your job?
Going back to an earlier question of yours, I think a lot of creative producing is a task of exercising imagination. And it can be very frustrating when that imagination is something that other people are not sharing or seeing. I do think a part of my job in that way is making people see that and coming up with strategies and techniques to get people to see what I see. But so often in this business, I think people are impressed by names and known quantities.
There’s a really wonderful young filmmaker named Joanna Arnow who had a tiny comedy come out last year that was executive produced by Sean Baker. And it’s like, if I’m lucky enough to work with Joanna, if people haven’t heard of her movie, it makes my job a little bit easier to be able to say, well, don’t take my word for it. Take Sean Baker’s word for it. And as someone who very much wants to be a tastemaker, there’s frustration there. I’m also, I recognize, still building my name and getting myself out there in that way. But where it can be frustrating is when you get in early with someone and you’re trying to get their thing off the ground, and then their star rises in a way that would seem to benefit your project, but then, very understandably, they get sucked into other opportunities.
I know there are other independent producers who feel a comparable frustration of maybe working on a great movie with a young director and then that young director going into the orbit of Pastel or Plan B or some other name-brand, venerable indie production company. At which point it’s like, even if you do your job well and get the movie made and even make a great movie, which is always a miracle, there can be a frustration of, like, is the indie film space just a farm system to find these folks so that they can move on to these ostensibly more legitimate opportunities?
In your opinion, when was the best era to be making independent films?
I was just a child in this era, so it’s all secondhand, but it would seem to me that in the Sundance boom of the Miramax era — and that’s obviously a cursed reference point now — there was just this sense that going to the movies felt like a more urgent cultural thing, a cooler thing. I mean, Pulp Fiction legged out at the beginning of the home video era to over $100 million in North America alone. It opened to seven figures but then just kept playing. That was a time when indie movies that felt edgy or ahead of the curve could be at the center of culture. And resultantly, there was this excitement and demand for betting on people early and having them tell bold stories.
I actually do think on some level that we are overdue for a version of that now. And I think that bears out in a lot of the indie film success stories you see. It’s very interesting — before COVID, there was reliable turnout among older moviegoers. You look at the grosses and it’s like, movies that you or I don’t give a second thought to, like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, these movies that are almost like the flip side of the Miramax 90s, these sort of geriatric Harvey Weinstein movies, were enormously successful for a time. The Downton Abbey movie in late 2019 opened like crazy.
But since COVID, those audiences have been more reticent to go back to theaters. And I think what you’ve seen in turn is that the indie movies that have succeeded in the last four or five years are the ones that feel like they’re more youthful or more edgy. They have a quality that is conducive to word of mouth — movies that just make you text your friends or post online and be like, “I just saw the craziest shit. You have to go seek this out.” Say what you will about the movie, but the way that Neon sold Longlegs, where it’s almost like a Silence of the Lambs riff that they successfully sold like a snuff film, or Ari Aster’s movies, particularly Hereditary and Midsommar — those movies were like a Hot Ones challenge of people feeling like they needed to go see them because this is as big and bad as it gets.
The 2000s maybe was the migration towards the more staid Oscar-bait time of indie film. But it feels to me that if there’s any sort of cyclical repetition coming, the lightning-in-a-bottle quality of a Linklater or a Spike Lee is something that people seem to be hungry for right now.
It feels like the rise of Letterboxd culture has changed the way the public receives these movies. Is that a shift that’s felt in the business as you experience it? When you talk to potential financiers about a project, is the question of whether it will hit with young people and get a lot of word of mouth part of the conversation?
Consciously? No, but I think it’s a smart thing to identify. And I do think that as much as there has been a shift towards youthful movie going, Letterboxd is an enormous part of it. I’m very lucky living in LA in that I have access to so many great repertory theaters, and those theaters are constantly packed, much more so than they were before COVID. And it feels like on some level that’s the Letterboxd kids being fired up to, like, check a Kiarostami movie off their list together. At a time where mass culture feels so anesthetized, there is this opportunity to not eat fast food, to eat something that feels nourishing and to eventize it. I don’t think financiers are meaningfully considering that, because there’s maybe the feeling that that is just a loud niche. What I would say to that is cultural movements always come from loud niches.
Even if we’re not seeing the direct impact of Letterboxd culture on Hollywood decision-makers, you look at the rise of people like Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott — these emerging stars that are not just in very Letterboxd-friendly films, but are literally on Letterboxd themselves. And that contributes to a sort of parasocial engagement that the money people are not directly aware of, but they are aware in some form of the following that it results in.
There was a recent viral clip from an interview with Maya Hawke where she talked about how, when studios are casting movies now, they look at the social media followings of actors and try to maximize that online reach. Is that something you see in the indie space as well?
I have once or twice had the social media follower conversation in terms of reach, certainly. And I think that manifests in a few different ways where, when it comes to the question of value with an actor, there is just so much guesswork about, like, well, this person was just on White Lotus. And they actually have not led a movie successfully, but that’s a huge show. And there’s all this hype about how popular they could be, and maybe now is a good time to bet on them.
For small movies, if you’re making a $2 million movie and there are, let’s say, lead roles for a middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman, you want to cast those roles up to raise the profile of the project. But what is the value calculus of people who you can actually get at that price point who are going to be meaningful? You’re just choosing people who you think other people like. There can sometimes be this attempt to kind of moneyball things or quantify things in a way that to me just feels like junk science. It’s an attempt to mitigate risk in what is inherently an extremely risky space. And a lot of it is gut feeling.
There have been times where, with that gut feeling, I’ve advocated for an actor because I believed that they were on the rise and other people were creatively excited about them. And I’ve had to go back to the drawing board on a project because financiers were too skittish about them, or there was a sense of, “We don’t think this person is going to happen.” And conversely, there are people where there seems to be a lockstep brain thing of, “We all think this person is going to happen.” There are examples where that’s panned out and feels right. And then there are examples where it’s like… I don’t know how Jack Quaid got two studio movies financed this year. He seems like a lovely guy. I don’t want to defame him. I’ve never met him, but he’s just so boring to me.
The case I mentioned with the actor who I advocated for and really believed in, that was an actor of color who a lot of the financiers wrung their hands about. So I do think that even if it’s not overt, there end up being these forces beyond follower count that just end up reinforcing the status quo in all ways. My role and my responsibility as a producer is to put the movie together in the most valuable way so it can get made, but I also want to advocate for my own beliefs and politics and tastes. And there’s a constant push and pull there of, what power do I have to leverage, and where am I in a position to actually try and make what often feels like a broken system work to a cultural advantage?
As an indie producer in the current business climate, are you earning a living wage?
Candidly, I’m making most of my money through branded content work. As an indie producer, I’m really the last person paid in the process. I have to get every piece of the project in place so that cameras are rolling and the movie is real, at which point money comes to me.
When I think about the amount of time and work that I don’t get paid for if a project falls apart or if I help on something that ends up going elsewhere, it is sort of maddening. But it’s analogous to being a writer or filmmaker, where you’re putting your back into something as an artist and there’s no guarantee of it going anywhere. I’m not an artist in that sense, but I do feel like I have that sort of fanatical calling of, “I need to do this.”
I know indie producers who, even when they’re getting movies made, barely make any money off of them. But I guess going back to my earlier point about what I hope is internalized by financiers, I do believe that it’s a long game, and that the work ultimately does speak for itself.
Let’s say you produce a movie that has a $2 million budget. How much do you expect to make from that if it goes into production?
In the case of a $2 million movie, I would say maybe $50,000. And when you think about all the work that goes into producing a $2 million movie, and the amount of time that takes, we’re talking about an amount of money that’s lower than what would be considered minimum wage in a city like New York or LA. I’m not going to, like, play the world’s smallest violin for myself, because I know that the artists making that film are getting paid comparable amounts of money. With a movie that small, all the money needs to be on screen.
When it comes to the work that I love doing and consider myself good at in terms of creative development, it can be a challenging time investment at the $2 million level. If there’s something that already has a script and a filmmaker and is ready to start being put together, I’ll need to spend less time working on the thing for that relatively small amount of money. But no one is making a $2 million movie for the money. If you’re a writer, it’s very hard to find someone to pay you to write that script — you’re almost certainly going to have to spec it. The flip side, though, is you have more creative control and you’re chasing something that doesn’t feel like it has to check boxes within the system. And that’s something I tell myself: there’s a reward to the creative satisfaction and the art of it.
What’s something happening in the independent film space right now that you feel isn’t getting enough attention?
I was just at the second year of a really wonderful festival that gets put on here in LA called the LA Festival of Movies. It’s a swath of foreign films, tiny English-language films, a handful of restorations of lost movies. Last year’s festival had a Chantal Akerman restoration and Conner O’Malley’s Rap World. So there’s a true sort of high-low spirit. You know, great movies are great movies.
But a thing I clocked at this year’s festival, which I think has a really interesting parallel in the big studio space, is that there’s been an eventization of movies being shot on film and having a certain level of aesthetic consideration. So much of the marketing for Sinners was, “You have to see this in 70-millimeter IMAX.” An executive friend of mine made the point that The Brutalist might have only made one tenth of what it did without all the trumpet-blowing about it being shot on VistaVision and having this rarefied presentation that made it an event for film fans, especially at a time where, frankly, so many movies look really bad. I think movies in general look worse than they did fifteen years ago.
I always felt a little bit alienated from the microbudget movements of the 2000s where it was like, Joe Swanberg just shooting a movie on a camcorder that looks like shit. Because that’s so divorced from a lot of the pleasures I get out of filmmaking. And to watch a bunch of these microbudget movies that in many cases were shot on 16-millimeter — not that something has to be shot on film to be good by any means, but these films had a very deliberate aesthetic consideration to them.
I think it might be suggestive of how indie film almost seems to be in a parallel track with the fine arts — it’s for connoisseurs and the real heads, and there’s not a lot of money in it but it’s something to be protected as a cultural good. It would seem to me that there is a rising wave in the tiny movie space of things that are making a lot of very bold aesthetic choices. There’s maybe a sort of new classicalism that’s rising out of the microbudget world that I felt like I was getting a little bit of a window into at this festival.
Why do you think it is that movies look worse than they did fifteen years ago?
Oh, man, I can go on about this one. I think there are a bunch of factors at play. The way in which you light digital video is very different than the way in which you light celluloid. There are some brilliant older cinematographers who did amazing work on film and who, to me, would seem to still not really know how to use digital.
When it comes to studio movies, I think a lot of it is just the pipeline created by Marvel and the big comic book movies. It’s so funny how this came about. If you watch Iron Man or the first Thor or Captain America movies, they do actually still look like real movies. There’s a changeover around the first Avengers. And it gets even worse when the Russos come into it, where everything is in this flat Log-C look and the digital elements all feel so plasticky. Robert Downey Jr. didn’t want to put on armor anymore and wanted to just be in his athleisure and have CGI armor plastered over him and get paid $50 million for it. And so those movies ended up creating this digital workflow where they were being rewritten so much, and there were entire scenes that were being relocated after they were shot because they were rewriting the movie after they’d made it, where there just literally isn’t enough time to render the effects and they have to be lit in this completely flat way in order to be transferable in all these senses, in terms of location, in terms of lighting.
There’s a production pipeline that ultimately is adverse to specificity. And specificity is how something looks good. Something looks good when you’re making choices, when you’re being intentional, when you’re planning something out thoroughly. And I think what we’ve been seeing, both in terms of the giant Marvel movies and with what I believe a film writer has called this sort of “Jason Blum age of austerity” on the indie horror side, is that you can cut all these corners and it ends up being yet another blur between TV and film. There are a lot of big movies now that just look and feel like television, and it’s a bummer. But I also think that it’s something that audiences recognize more than they’re given credit for.