Film Rant: Finances

Finding financing for a film can be one of the most stressful and nerve-racking tasks you will ever do in your life. If you aren’t Spielberg you may not be able to get any investments at all, and this can very easily kill your spirits.

For independent filmmakers, finding a good source of funding can make or break a film. It is so hard for an unknown filmmaker to try and get any source of funds for their films because the industry tends to overlook smaller budget films. The whole industry is a giant web of conglomerates who own the studios that make the films along with the theaters that show them. This monopoly the elite have in the industry is making it harder and harder for filmmakers to get started.

For my documentary, Hardknock Dreams, I started a web campaign to help raise some funds for the film. Unlike most films, however, I have not been trying to raises money to make the movie, but to buy some fight footage from ESPN. The entire film is about a professional boxer friend of mine, and the fact that ESPN wants $2,000 per minute for footage of his fights is absurd. It’s just another roadblock in the advancement of indie filmmaking, because ESPN wants to get more money stuffed into their pockets. If they really thought about it, they’d realize that this is an opportunity to not only showcase their coverage of a fight but also help promote their network and an upcoming athlete.

Networks don’t care about you, they don’t care about what you want or how you feel. They don’t care about your film just like they don’t care about mine, and that is one of the harshest realities of this industry. As a kid, I would gawk at the TV and wonder about how awesome it would be to be a filmmaker. Now that I’ve pursued that dream, I realize that while it is one of the most amazing careers in the world, its also one of the most stuck up careers and is full of greed, lust and stupidity. There is less of a want for originality in Hollywood, because they don’t want original, they want the same crap over and over. If you go to a theater and watch a crappy film, you’ve just given them a reason to continue to make crappy films because it pays.

I’m not saying that every single big budget production in Hollywood is fueled by this crazy greed, but I would go as far to say that 90% of the filmmakers in Hollywood have forgotten why they ever wanted to make movies to begin with. They’ve lost sight of the dreams that once drove them into this industry, and have replaced the dreams with a numbing greed that is more powerful than anything in this world. 

-Michael