Frank Perrotto
Active member
Can't wait to see this...
Can't wait to see this...
Don't listen to all that bunk about film festivals, one in a million, etc. Those films are exactly the model you should follow in MAKING THE BEST, MOST AMBITIOUS GENRE FILM THAT YOU CAN. I've been saying it for two years, but genre films have always found the most success in the indie world. It's only in the last 5 or 6 years that that seems to have been forgotten... or the stuff on offer has been thoroughly mediocre. I think part of the reason for that is A) Less searching for the best genre indies on the part of the bigger festivals. They seem to have just been going for names that have had previous success, like Adam Green with Frozen. Or, they just pick the best of those people that can actually get the film in the hands of 'the deciders', which doesn't necessarily mean it's the best. B) FEWER genre indies to choose from. The BEAUTY of the images that we're seeing from digital technology seems to have hypnotized everyone into forgetting to tell a compelling story. Phillip Bloom's stuff is great for seeing the best images these cameras can pull out, but would you or anyone you know pay to see that in a theater? Either that or you have the plethora of 'tone poem' type indies that include lots of shots of solitary figures walking against wide expanses or sitting next to windows with rain sliding down them in shallow DOF. While some of them are good, they just would never find a wider audience. The kind of drama that tends to find a bigger audience is the kind that almost has something in common with genre... There Will Be Blood is like a monster movie. No Country for Old Men is like an apocalyptic myth. They're big and they're bold, and they're entertaining, but they're still art.
Anyway, doing something like this, if it turns out great, is a way to just leapfrog over all that b.s. and get people with money to trust that you can turn out a great, entertaining film that people actually want to see. At the end of the day, if you want to do this for a living, you have to recognize that its a business first and art second in the eyes of the people who hold the purse strings. When you can find that middle ground of saying what you want to say, telling a story that satisfies you, but also ensuring that the film will make its money back and then some... well then you're Christopher Nolan. Or, you become such an important filmmaker, like P.T. Anderson, that people with a lot of money see it as you're 'right' to have a cinematic voice.
I'm sure I'll get slammed for some of this, but I just want to say to you it IS one in a million because TALENT is one in a million, maybe even less than that. If you believe you've got it, you go for the brass ring and don't let anyone tell you different or pull you down to their level.
As Barry Diller once said, 'talent outs.'
Can't wait to see this...
Don't listen to all that bunk about film festivals, one in a million, etc. Those films are exactly the model you should follow in MAKING THE BEST, MOST AMBITIOUS GENRE FILM THAT YOU CAN. I've been saying it for two years, but genre films have always found the most success in the indie world. It's only in the last 5 or 6 years that that seems to have been forgotten... or the stuff on offer has been thoroughly mediocre. I think part of the reason for that is A) Less searching for the best genre indies on the part of the bigger festivals. They seem to have just been going for names that have had previous success, like Adam Green with Frozen. Or, they just pick the best of those people that can actually get the film in the hands of 'the deciders', which doesn't necessarily mean it's the best. B) FEWER genre indies to choose from. The BEAUTY of the images that we're seeing from digital technology seems to have hypnotized everyone into forgetting to tell a compelling story. Phillip Bloom's stuff is great for seeing the best images these cameras can pull out, but would you or anyone you know pay to see that in a theater? Either that or you have the plethora of 'tone poem' type indies that include lots of shots of solitary figures walking against wide expanses or sitting next to windows with rain sliding down them in shallow DOF. While some of them are good, they just would never find a wider audience. The kind of drama that tends to find a bigger audience is the kind that almost has something in common with genre... There Will Be Blood is like a monster movie. No Country for Old Men is like an apocalyptic myth. They're big and they're bold, and they're entertaining, but they're still art.
Anyway, doing something like this, if it turns out great, is a way to just leapfrog over all that b.s. and get people with money to trust that you can turn out a great, entertaining film that people actually want to see. At the end of the day, if you want to do this for a living, you have to recognize that its a business first and art second in the eyes of the people who hold the purse strings. When you can find that middle ground of saying what you want to say, telling a story that satisfies you, but also ensuring that the film will make its money back and then some... well then you're Christopher Nolan. Or, you become such an important filmmaker, like P.T. Anderson, that people with a lot of money see it as you're 'right' to have a cinematic voice.
I'm sure I'll get slammed for some of this, but I just want to say to you it IS one in a million because TALENT is one in a million, maybe even less than that. If you believe you've got it, you go for the brass ring and don't let anyone tell you different or pull you down to their level.
As Barry Diller once said, 'talent outs.'
