Financing an independent film is no joke. For those of you who have gone through this process, you know just how grueling it is — taking meetings and phone calls with potential investors, entering your script into conferences and competitions — it gets overwhelming.
We’ve seen and experienced this firsthand with the films we’ve put together, and with clients as well. The process for our films and our colleague’s films begin with a process of cutting, compromise, and parring the script down to the very essence of the story.
While attending this fall’s film festival circuit and working with writers across the globe in mentorship programs, we saw a lot of great stories get wrapped up $50m-$100m bows.
Coming from film finance and production backgrounds, we were able to help these writers par their screenplays down to reasonable budgets while keeping the essence of their story in tact, and conveying one simple truth — the essence of every story costs nothing.
As a moviegoer, I like to keep an open mind, but I also have a crisp understanding of what I like. Because I know this, I know there are other people who share my understanding and also like what I like. How do I know this? I see them leaving a theater as happy as I am about having watched a great film, sharing what they felt, taking that positive experience home with them. Knowing this affords me comfort in the simplest approach as a filmmaker. I write the types of stories that I would want to see and steer clear of pandering to a potential audience.
A few weeks ago HBO and then CBS announced that they would launch stand-alone online services in U.S. in 2015. Before that, Netflix had made known that it would start producing features, crushing theatrical release windows once and for all, after it had contributed to the change of the patterns of attention and the way TV series are made by releasing its House of Cards episodes all at once, as a 13-hour movie. ‘Now the real shakeout begins’, wrote 
Recap: This series chronicles my wide-eyed and crushingly insecure processes that pulled back the curtain on my ideas about filmmaking – revealing what it really takes to write and direct my movie, Recess. Occasionally I gain productive insights that plant me on less insecure ground. Others I still talk to my therapist about. Perhaps the most important insight I’ve kept – from teething as a writer – the idea that creating detailed, well-drawn characters with original voices can make even a script about a haunted doorknob compelling. I realize there may be infinite approaches more resolute but, for me, the haunted doorknob concept puts character development into perspective. 