Sundance odds, 2009

[Isaac Brody]

Ballast is a perfect example... low budget, very "slow" (avant garde), non professional actors, etc.... yet it was chosen and it won... and now Lance Hammer is doing the whole DIY route, walking away from a deal with IFC.

I'm really curious about how effective this is. I'm not sure if this is a successful model of things to come.

 

[jpp]

Guys, I think you're pissing in the wind, to put it unkindly. The longer people in this business summon frontier spirit or quote Star Wars on the expectation that they, unlike everyone else, will brave impossible conditions and be successful, the longer we'll remain in the dark.

Overall, art film, even at its best, does not make money. Anywhere. That's simply a fact. Ingmar Bergman made dozens of films because a state-owned company paid for them. Tarkovsky made epics because they were good cultural exports, and the USSR paid for them. Every film in competition at Cannes has several screens of public money credits, except for the American entries, which come from Hollywood if your name is Eastwood, Malick, Coppola or Coen. And on it goes.

So who succeeds in American indie film, assuming no prior connections (your father's name isn't Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Redford or David Lynch)? Highly motivated and extremely lucky people, as is true of most of the business world. Unfortunately, those qualities don't have a lot to do with art. Any number of talented and reasonably intelligent people do succeed, in some measure, large or small, just as they do in business. But the achievement level is not high. It could be lack of talent, lack of money, the quality of the producing, the difficulty of financing challenging projects in the U.S., or any number of other structural causes, or combination of causes.

But persisting in this notion that indie excellence will prevail in a cash-dependent medium like film, in the clear absence of such quality in the U.S., is just plain senseless to my mind.

Now, if indie film in the U.S. suddenly became a true meritocracy, maybe none of us would be working, for lack of talent or intelligence. But at least there would be work to admire, and it couldn't lose any more money than is currently being lost....

OTOH, if your chief ambition is to use indie film to succeed in Hollywood, well -- that's another discussion.