And yet every year, even in the midst of a global pandemic, we see hundreds of films made by independents. Like their BigBucksMegaStudio cousins, some achieve unexpected success; others turn out to be turkeys; and the vast majority fall somewhere in the middle.
What, then, do you see that's not working?
wellllllll..... this is where my personal opinions veer off from the popular sentiment
I basically respect about 1 in every 1000 "successful" indie films. I have cringed and groaned through every Nicolas Cage and Bruce Willis film for years since those guys became indie headliners. I can barely stay awake through a film that cost less than 10 million dollars. I watched "Zone Wars" yesterday, the number one independent film in the world, and it was so stupid and terrible that I could not make it half way through. I literally started watching youtube videos instead. They had better writing, content, and production values. I actually don't like a majority of actual studio films, which of course have astronomical advantages vs indies.
There may be semantics issues at play here, where we aren't exactly talking about the same thing, but basically I have worked on one indie film after another, and I won't even put my name on them. My experience has led me to a viewpoint where I think it's very rare for a movie to be worthwhile if people don't hit a minimum effort level. In example, it's very important to spend time and effort on casting the roles properly. Almost every indie film I've ever worked on, the director has a script, and starts looking around the room. Ok, my wife is the star, and my brother is the mailman, and this guy from the local dinner theater is the main bad guy, etc. It all sounds good on paper, low cost, no transportation and housing, etc. The problem is that they aren't casting a wide enough net to actually find the right talent for the characters. I see film companies that write 5 movies and the same 6 people are starring in every movie. That's not someone who did the job right. The attitude that any actor can play any character is wrong, it's desperation, leading to compromise, leading to the worst part of the cycle, the emperors new clothes.
Let's look at good casting by comparison. Alan Rickman in the Harry Potter series. His signature look, tone, delivery and veteran acting skills brought a rich dimension to a secondary character. Hans Grueber in Die hard was an exemplary role. Ok, so just for the sake of convenience, I'll use names you know. Lets say you're an indie filmmaker, and you can only afford to hire your cousin. Your cousin is Rob Schneider. You have another guy from your town. You didn't so much cast him as simply call him and ask him to do it. This guy is David Hasselhoff. Now try to imagine Die hard with David Hasselhoff and Rob Schneider. Now realize that most indie films don't have options that good. Are you starting to see my point? How many David Hasselhoff vs Rob Schneider action movies would you want to watch?
Well, Nate, you're being unfair, you can just make a drama film and then you don't need a budget. Ok, sigh, did you see "The Kings Speech"? That was good right? Now replace all the stars with people from your town, so you can't really pull from a worldwide pool to find charisma, chemistry, and talent. You have to take what you can get and hope some of the people that were available just happen to have chemistry. I've personally never seen an indie project do screen tests for chemistry, swapping out multiple candidates to see who clicked. There's a guy they promised a role, and he shows up, end of process. So when you skip all of these "optional steps" you basically end up with something that's way below standard. Instead of a castle, Your King makes his speech next to a hotel swimming pool, etc. Lack of funding hits so many areas of a film so hard, that it's an almost unrecoverable wound.
You know, I'm just talking about one aspect. There are issues like this that affect virtually every stage of development, essentially revolving around a low budget, and it's subsequent compromises. From what I've seen, many of these films can't get even simple things like colorist work right. I've personally gone in and done colorist work for a 150k film where they were just going to skip it. When you skip colorist, you're now at the quality of a reality tv show. I did one a few years ago where they used a BMCC as the primary camera (that's a camera they use as a crash cam in real movies), they decided not to film in RAW, to save money on hard drives. Hard drives are 300 dollars for 8 TB. Because they didn't film in RAW, they couldn't do proper colorist work. So the entire project looked like an HD version of a 1989 dr who episode. They get low end people that don't know what they're doing, and the Dunning Krueger effect runs rampant. It doesn't have to be that way, but on microbudget stuff it almost always is.
They frequently overload the film with tripod shots, shooting entire films with basically no cinematography whatsoever. Then you have to listen to them talk excitedly about their cinematography, and they are talking about how they pointed the stationary camera at something...... Sigh...... I could go on, but I wont. You start getting a trained eye after years, and it just looks worse and worse the more you know what to look for.
Now that's live action films. They suffer so much worse than other types. You really need a drastically higher budget to hit the same quality level in a live action production. 3d animation and 2d animation have their own issues, though they can be more forgiving in many aspects. I have seen both of these types do ok since voiceover artists work cheaper, and can work remotely. This give you access to the global pool, but on an indie budget.
Have you seen the channel "Dust"? It's generally fairly good, other than the actors. There's a problem there too though, where they make a pretty good film, and then it looses money. They drop 80k and end up with 22k in returns. (plus a 1st place prize from the southern Louisiana regional film festival, market value 1 dollar, application cost 2500 dollars)
For contrast I should list some indie films I actually did like and watch.
Palm Springs - 5 million
Minari - 2 million
It Follows - 1.3 million This is the one that I thought made most effective use of a limited budget. It was highly profitable, and not the worst movie ever.
Horror is basically the one area where you can get away with indie budgets, for a lot of reason, including the acceptability of unknown teenagers that can't really act, reduced need for lighting, and tension and interest that can be built mostly using a soundtrack and editing tricks.
Anyway, it's kind of a big topic and I can't fully cover it here.
To give an example of a 10k dollar film, which I think may be the kind of Indie film we are talking about here
Lilya 4-ever was an incredibly sad movie that was highly effective in spite of it's meager budget. If your theme is poverty and misery, you can display that pretty well on a budget. I probably will never watch it again. It makes Schindler's list seem cheery.
A mid level film that I really thought was masterful was "Chernobyl" the mini series. It was a remarkable bit of filmmaking, that relied more on the intelligence of it's direction than big name stars. They didn't pick expensive people, they just went to great lengths to pick exactly the right people, and it shows.
