The best ways to make a film? Snowballs & Unfair Advantages

Snowball Effect + Unfair Advantages

Each person you bring onto a film compounds to help you gain the next person. When you don’t have anyone yet, you have to use your own unfair advantages to get the ball rolling.

While studying James Cameron (have you seen my new video?) – I learned that it wasn’t until after his first big success with Terminator that HE was the big asset others wanted to glom onto.

But for Terminator it was mainly the script and Cameron’s excellent concept art that started the ball rolling. He leveraged his unfair advantages of being an excellent visual artist to help sell his fantastical vision for the film.

That got him Gale Ann Hurd – a colleague at Roger Corman studios where he was churning out low budget VFX work – to jump on as producer and help sell it. The snowball starts rolling.

THAT was enough to find $6M in financing from a production company… which is laughable for a high-concept sci-fi action film.

But that money was enough to afford to hire Arnold – acquired at the perfect moment in his career when he was known but not yet a superstar. Arnold was pretty sure it was going to be garbage, but took the chance (and the check). And that underdog of a film was off to the races.

My Experience

A similar thing happened to me on my first “big” short film, Will “The Machine”.

It started with only a script and our previous body of work. Nothing too sexy on its own.

But my lead actor/co-writer and I used that to woo a seasoned DP I’d recently worked with, who was fresh off shooting his first TV show, and hungry for all things narrative, even if there was basically no pay. Once he signed on, the project had some legitimacy and momentum.

I then presented the project to my main editing clients at the time, and the 2 owners joined as executive producers – lending their production insurance and producing wisdom to the film.

Next we tried to cast the other lead – and lucked out with a friend of a friend, Denzel Whitaker. He’d been in films like The Great Debators and Bad Lieutenant, and was about to play a role in a little film called Black Panther. After some wooing, he came on board.

That’s when the snowball really picked up speed. We shot a teaser scene for our Kickstarter, handily raised some much needed funds, and started scouting our Virginia locations.

From this point on, it was easy to start recruiting the Virginia crew at friendly rates when we gave them the rundown of our team – despite having no connection to these people.

Once we had a few key local crew members, we leveraged them to recruit even more through warm referrals/recommendations.

We shot a great film, and that pushed the snowball further, getting an excellent composer at a bargain rate, and the colorist of The Walking Dead… who did it for free.

The snowball was at peak speed and size. I couldn’t have imagined getting these kinds of people attached to the film when we first started the process, but momentum and the perception of quality/prestige are powerful forces.

The film had a solid festival run, picked up some awards, and hit a million views in the first month it went online. Wild!

On a Much Smaller Scale

When I was making little films in middle school and high school, sometimes we needed more people than just our direct little circle of freaks who always helped out.

I remember creating a house party scene in our last high school short film. We’d never had that many people in front of the camera for one of our films – how were we going to fill out a whole house?

Turns out, it’s the same principle.

You get a few people, then leverage them to get a few more people. You leverage your way up the high school popularity ladder, and once you get one or two popular kids at the fake party, it becomes way easier to get everyone else.

At a certain point, you reach critical mass and the tables turn completely – once it feels like everyone is at the fake party, everyone else wonders why the hell they AREN’T.

This is basically my understanding of how Hollywood works. Nobody wants you until everyone wants you.

By the way, want some help building a team for your next film? I’ve discounted my Crewing Up Playbook.

Favorites this week:

Book: The Futurist: James Cameron book

This biography was the backbone of my recent deep-dive video on James Cameron’s career. It’s such an easy and exciting read – short chapters full of candid anecdotes and inspiring stories behind the making of some of my favorite films. Highly recommend if you’re in need of inspiration.

Quote

I like difficult. I’m attracted by difficult. Difficult is a fucking magnet for me. I go straight to difficult. And I think it probably goes back to this idea that there are lots of smart, really gifted, really talented filmmakers out there that just can’t do the difficult stuff. So that gives me a tactical edge to do something nobody else has ever seen, because the really gifted people don’t fucking want to do it. — James Cameron

Let’s make some movies.

-Kent