You've Seen My Rock Bottom
Something that has happened to filmmakers through the cheapening of film production, whether through switching to digital, or just lower budgets, or both, is that you get to see them without clothes on. You get to see the nudity of whatever their actual talent is—its beauty or its ugliness. Some filmmaker you may have liked because of gorgeous 35mm photography and now-extravagant but then modest budgets, you see the work they’re creating now and you’d swear it was by an amateur. All semblance of their talent is gone—or at least whatever aspect of it enticed you. They haven’t gotten ‘worse’, mind you—all their smoke and mirrors have simply been stripped away.
Contrast that with me, and any number of other genuinely good filmmakers who have started out with inordinately low budgets, and consumer cameras, and made the most of them, and continue to. You’ve seen our rock bottom—you’ve seen what we can do with nothing. Or talent, or lack thereof, is plain as day. Which means, if you’ve ever liked any of my films whatsoever, ever thought I had anything ‘to me’, I’m probably one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.
I understand that this stuff can come off as narcissistic or whatever, but the truth is, there isn’t much of another way to describe it. I regularly make films that are lightyears better than the ‘first films’ of your favorite filmmakers, or their cheaper films now, and I do so with the same resources or worse. It’s not a competition of course, but let’s say you’re a gatekeeper, a person in charge of determining the next greats to elevate. Were that world to operate as it should, I would be the perfect person to strap a rocket to. But that is not how that world operates anymore—the plucking of indie directors out of obscurity experiment was determined to be an abject mistake.
Meritocracy requires volition. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum—you actually have to want to do it, want to let good people continue onward, higher and higher. There isn’t some ethereal mechanism that does it for you, if you are a gatekeeper—that’s your literal only job, and it must come from you. But decisions mean accountability, and accountability at best is not rewarded, and at worst can cost you your career. The smart play has always been to never be pinpointable as the person who said ‘yes’ to someone or something—even if your job is to be someone who ever says yes.
What audiences love, and what people who work in the system love, are not the same. This is not merely to say that they do not share the same tastes—it’s beyond that. You love cinema—they love their salaries. You want better movies—they want better pay, better perks. Film culture being good and healthy or bad and rotting away is not of any concern to them—and yet, they are the ones in control of the vast majority of the art form still. Whatever your concerns are as audiences, they can only fall on deaf ears. You must, and can, answer yourselves.
Obligatory last paragraph where I espouse the beauty of truly independent filmmaking. Of not caring whether or not I ever make a ‘big movie’ one day—of supporting me doing exactly what I’m doing, and supporting as many talented people as possible doing the same. I hate the system for the reasons I said and vastly more. I also hate that you hand a pen and paper to these ‘great artists’ and they can’t draw, essentially—their films, without bells and whistles, are ass. You hand a pen and paper to me—you give me a few hundred bucks to make a whole feature film—and my talent is clear. I can do it any time of day, any day of the week. If you want that out of your artists, show some love. Because it will not come from anywhere else.
If you enjoyed this piece, and enjoy my films, contribute $2 per month to my film studio, Kill The Lion Films.