Why Most Filmmakers Lose Money On Their Movies by Mark Harris
Why Most Filmmakers Lose Money On Their Movies by Mark Harris via FilmCourage.com.
Film Courage: Most independent filmmakers would lose money I would say on their first project. What would you say is the reason? Is it mindset? They’re not doing proper research on what the budget should be?
Mark Harris, Filmmaker: The budget. If you’re doing a film for a million dollars, you can’t use your friends. You have to make sure you use actors that are going to allow for making all of that money back.
When I was doing a film for $20,000 or $10,000 or $1,000, I used local actors who didn’t have a name. But when I decided on my first film called BLACK COFFEE, why I actually got money from RLJ which is Bob Johnson’s company, we didn’t shoot that film for a lot of money. But I knew that they knew that I just couldn’t use those same actors because it would be a hard sell for BET or to TV One or whoever.
We needed to use name actors. If you are going to do a film for $500,000 or even $100,000 dollars, you have to make sure that the most of important thing (for me was) or the most important thing for filmmakers is to…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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