After watching the state of film address from Steven Soderbergh at the 56th SFFF I immediately sunk into a deep depression. Cinema is dead? Does this mean everything I've done to prepare for a career in film has been for nothing and now I have to move to Iowa and sell oriental rugs for the rest of my life? How could this have happened? There must be a way forward.
Soderbergh's address was brilliant in the way it laid out why everything seems to be going to pot with specific details and numbers to back it up. Its all there and it makes complete sense. So why was I left with a feeling of despair after listening to this address? I should have felt motivated because of the transparency of it all, yet it had the opposite reaction in me. Then I remembered something he said that gives him hope. He said, "while we sit here, somebody out there somewhere is making something cool, that we’re going to love, and that keeps me going." This fucking terrified me! If someone as respected and successful and forward thinking as Soderbergh hopes someone else is doing something awesome out there, then we truly are fucked.
I started to think about hope as a basic idea. Hope is wonderful if we are also active in seeking out something we are hopeful for; a new direction in government, a new way of distributing films, a better job. However from my no-budget filmmaker perspective with the minimalist of resources, hope can be a dangerous word. It makes it easier for us to leave it in other people's hands. We do this all the time, we make our films and send it off to festivals and "hope for the best!' We send it to whatever connects we have and "hope someone likes it!" In all this we are still leaving the power to do something about our careers in the hands and tastes of someone else. Going back to that amazing new thing someone out there is doing, I sure as shit hope so but I have the feeling most people are making something they think some festival or executive or whatever connect they have might want to see. I mean lets face it, we all want our shit to be seen. So of course we should still send our films around but continue to move forward as if we are the only ones that get it done.
Maybe what needs to change is filmmakers definition of success. So maybe films will play to smaller audiences and we'll get less money back, so what. If we change our standards of what we expect a successful filmmakers life to be we'd focus more on getting more films out there and less time trying to get money back to sustain an impossible standard. Of course this means less eyes on our films but at least they would exist to be seen at all.
Don't get me wrong, what the leader's in the independent film community are doing is wonderful and they should keep doing it. They have the resources to put things in motion and hope for the best. Us no-budget filmmakers can't just wait around until someone figures something out. All those models are designed for large returns to sustain a shrinking but even still bloated machine. Hope, but continue moving forward at any cost, pave the way for the new era of cinema that for some strange reason no one can define.
What I'm suggesting is that cinema as defined by Soderbergh no longer belongs to that ilk of filmmaker. It can belong to the blu-collar filmmaker who just keeps making work and doesn't need a large return on their films. Hell, maybe everyone should move to smaller communities that need help cultivating a film or art scene and build our bases there instead of hanging in the already cultured centers of this country. At least that way we'd be creating audiences for future generations of cinema and maybe even save it in the long run.
So I say we reevaluate how we make films and distribute them all together. Make smaller films so we don't have to convince some executive how good something is. Just make it, live humbly, and deprive the studios of as much talent as possible. Now the work to be done is to figure out how to even make enough money to eek by.
Don't resign yourself to hoping someone else is going to figure it out for you. There's help along the way but by large its up to you to get your film seen.
Okay, so now I'm going to send my film to every festival and secretly hope it gets in.
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