Harsh Truths About Selling A Movie — Glen Reynolds
Film Courage: Why is your advice to filmmakers to not make movies for money?
Glen Reynolds, Founder of Circus Road Films: It depends on the level of investment of a film and my advice changes film to film for sure and filmmaker to filmmaker depending on their goals and what they’re doing. If your passion is to make a film about growing mushrooms and you want to spend an hour and a half just watching the mushrooms grow, you shouldn’t tell an investor you need $150,000 to shoot that movie and it’ll get on Netflix. But if you can go out and do it for your own pocket change and you can do it on your iPhone and then you can put it in an art museum, okay great. That’s your passion, you have found an interesting way to film those mushrooms. The point there is I guess that if you make something low-budget and because it’s your passion and everybody knows the high-risk of whatever you’re spending, then great. Everybody is going in eyes wide open but ultimately most films just monetarily fail (overwhelmingly fail) and that’s not because of distributors being crooked (although there’s a little of that in places). It’s not because they spend too much money advertising or putting it in their pockets or have exorbitant deals, it’s because there’s an overwhelming amount of content out there for consumers to consume and just no way to monetize every independent film that…
