We are on the verge of a new film culture and infrastructure.
Staying relevant. It is a fear actors, directors, content creators, and to be honest, most human beings grapple with constantly. The more than half-century year-old Sunset Boulevard exemplified this fear in the delusional Gloria Swanson. And while I’m sure this obsession is a random extraneous facet of the greatly evolved human consciousness, it may be spin-off on our desire to survive.
This wasn’t part of Birdman. This was Emma Stone actually telling MK the truth.
You’ve given me the support I needed to go forth and try to get this done. Granted, I had enough support from the beginning to actually believe there was a chance I could not just make movies, but make good movies. That is a real gift, an advantage few have. Courage, faith — those things were there, but so was doubt and fear. Love and hate. The wolves in battle.
What if it didn’t work? And then when that was true, when it did stop working, or at least start to stop working for most, what made me think I could help build something better?
What gives us the strength to make big decisions? To change our path? To take on new burdens?
Despite the growing trend towards self-distribution, AFM is still a hugely important event in the industry, and something to which we should all pay attention. I spoke with AFM’s Managing Director Jonathan Wolf on Wednesday about his opinions about the show and the general state of the industry. Here’s what you need to know as a producer
1. Asia’s importance as a territory is growing.
This should come as a surprise to precisely no one; at least no one who has been paying attention to industry trends. However by the numbers, buyers from Asia represented 30.7% of total buyers, and 28.3% of total buyer companies attending AFM.
Surprising, right? Everything you read is that presales are a dying business, but according to Jonathan Wolf, AFM’s Managing Director, about 60% of the business done at this year’s AFM was in presales. This means more than half a billion USD in presales alone.
According to Mr. Wolf, the market for foreign presales came back by 2010 or 2011.
I have accepted that cinema is an ever-evolving medium. But I never expected our heritage to be at stake. This post is not a podium for me to exclaim film is superior to digital, nor will I be stating the digital conversion (or DC) was a poor decision of the industry. As a society furthering itself in the Digital Revolution, the DC was the most obvious future for the way we exhibit motion pictures theatrically. But I never expected this:
“We have decided to suspend theater operations…”
How do you know someone is someone you are going to work with for the long term?
How do you know each other is capable of being supportive of what the other has to be doing?
What are things needed to make this unique relationship work?
The latest installment of my Film Courage interview attempts to answer precisely that:
Colin McCormick did a really great and in depth interview with me for SAGIndie. We covered a significant amount in pretty substantial detail. Suffice it to say that this excerpt is just the tip, and you will want to read the whole thing. But to begin with check this excerpt out on the similarities between producing and directing, and how they demonstrate everything has got to change:
I often say that there is the role of the producer and there is the role of the director that are remarkably similar. The producer comes in and has to extract the big vision, the dream of everything that you
