Is the investment in a filmmaking career worth it? If yes, why? If not, why?

Love, passion, need, hobby, calling, or career? What is it filmmaking for me? Why do I want to make films? What do I want to say? Why do I need to say it? Why through filmmaking? Three shorts, one film production documentary, and a master’s in film production. Plus, three student films. In two years. During the pandemic and its quarantines, as my MA overlapped with the Covid crisis. This means a bit more than two hours of content and learning everything about the past perfect of the film industry. For a filmmaker who did it on their own money, time, and energy, while learning and working in parallel, it is a lot. At least in Romania. Once I zoom out a bit for a bird-eye view, it is not even on the radar.

My first objectives in building my filmmaking career strategy were simple and clear:

• learn and get skills in the creative and post-production side of things;
• build my eligibility for financing;
• on a scale from 1 to 10, make my first films of 8, so they could all access some festivals of some importance;
• understand my voice and my need for expression, and decide if this is a good road for me or if I should keep looking for another position on the complex map of the film industry.

At the end of this intense journey, I bumped into a wall. A tall wall of questions with not enough coherent answers available accompanied by a blurry horizon. Just being a filmmaker with an entrepreneurial and business background was far from being enough to build a filmmaking career in the world of algorithms and online marketing. These questions led me further to a Ph.D. in Cinema and Media in search of more realistic angles or at least more pragmatic career scenarios that can work for me. My diversity felt more at home in the film industry, so it was a career dilemma and a market worth investigating.

What if I am not talented enough to make a career from filmmaking, but also not pragmatic enough to make a career from business?

This nasty question made me throw my entire MA graduation thesis in the recycle bin, postponing my graduation by one year, and starting all over again from an unexpected point of view, the algorithms’ perspective, for the purpose of answering another question: how to make it work without a distributor or a marketing budget? With limited resources, essentially. More precisely, how to make films, not necessarily more commercial, but better equipped, so that any film can organically find its target audience, fulfill its potential, and recover its production costs before getting a distributor and a film marketing budget? The potential answer that became my Ph.D. project was: write and make SEO-friendly films and videos.

The filmmaking career of the rare ones vs. the many

How the rare ones succeed in the filmmaking career was not a helpful question in my case, even though sometimes their unique pathway inspires me. How the average ones, the majority of filmmakers, can make it, felt like being a more realistic question mark, as even the best of us have long moments of being average between their peaks. If we treat algorithms as powerful amplifiers of visibility, maybe we can beat the odds the following stats show.

Screenwriters

Using a dataset of all live-action fiction films made in the last 70 years, covering 280,000 films and 145,000 people, a 2020 study from Stephen Follows: Film Industry Data and Education that wanted to answer the question “What percentage of screenwriters write a second film?” shows that most screenwriting careers could be described as “one movie and done”. 66% of writers wrote only one film, 16% had two credits, and only one in five writers wrote three or more produced films.

Directors

Previously, the same website did a study in 2016 (updated in 2019) which sought to answer the question “How many films does the average director make?” To better answer this question, the authors of the study created a database of all fiction films made since 1949, gathering 287,448 films worldwide. While they usually focus on movies that make it to theaters, this time they wanted to broaden their horizons as much as possible and study also the film production levels, not distribution. Of all feature films made worldwide in the last 70 years (between 1949 and 2018), 36.5% of film directors made a second feature film. Only 8.6% made more than five and a very small club of only 134 directors (0.1%) directed more than 20 films.

Distributors

A recent study commissioned by the American publication Dear Producer – “Distributors Fact Sheet: 2022 Edition”, an initiative to help demystify the distribution landscape for independent filmmakers, shows us that distributors are largely strangers to the force, the impact, mechanics and relevance of the online medium, with 50% of them saying it is not necessary for a filmmaker to have an online presence. This tells us that when we wonder why audiences don’t show up to independent films and why most filmmakers are on the other side of the open gates, that maybe we should consider the simple fact that people don’t know that so many films exist.

Producers

In contrast, in another study commissioned in 2021, the same publication wanted to find out, by interviewing more than 500 independent American producers of feature films and documentary films, if filmmaking is a sustainable career, like other crises, also the pandemic showing the fragility of this career. Here are some testimonials:

My situation is quite precarious. I got into this position because I lived in New York and was only paid $30,000 to produce an award-winning film at the Sundance Film Festival.

Even if my last film sold for double the production costs, I couldn’t have paid the rent and lived in New York without taking other jobs. People outside the film industry don’t realize that just because you have a movie on a big streaming site like Netflix or Hulu, that doesn’t mean you can afford the food.

The industry is not sustainable at all for independent filmmakers. The fact that I can make this work is purely due to inherited wealth.

It’s not a career, it’s a bad movie.

I’m constantly being asked by financiers to reduce or waive the fee to reduce the overall budget, if not, to them it means I don’t believe in the film.

I’m still promoting and working on the distribution of films I physically produced 2-4 years ago. This is unpaid work.

I love this job. I love the filmmakers I work with, the films we bring into this world to the public that needs them. But at some point, doing this work is a luxury my family will no longer be able to afford. I need to earn a real salary for my family to survive, and if that doesn’t happen in a significant way in the next 2 years, then I’ll be forced to either work radically more than I already do, or leave my career altogether by film producer.

It should be noted in this study that the average age of the respondents is 43-44 years, that most of them are not parents or caregivers of their children, that from the perspective of higher education, most have only college level education with less than half having specialized studies in the field of cinema, and that over 87% spent their own money on projects over the course of a year, $9,000 on average per project (production and festivals, not including development and overhead costs).

The reality is no different in Romania (my home country) for first-time producers and independents who cannot yet access public funding due to eligibility reasons, insufficient infrastructure and experience in project management and in relation to public funding mechanisms.

My first thoughts after interacting with some of the filmmaking careers’ hard truths

The producers and distributors in these surveys (and not only of these) are professionals who exist, who have portfolios, eligibility and who, through the advantage of age and the configuration of the former world, have already traveled a path of 10-20 years in the industry. Inertia still holds them on a fragile thread, but the distance between their world and the world of the public who is living today in the online layer of reality is considerable.

The debutante does not exist. He is just the idea of a possibility. Even so, most debutantes still believe in the “if I make the film, the audience will come” myth. Or they rely on film festivals and hope for a magical proposal from a distributor.

Until a filmmaker accumulates “value” in the eyes of the industry, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to get other people to support him. And this value is not visible and quantifiable until his work, his films, are connected to the public, in the fortunate cases where he manages to make at least one short film on his own. On the traditional route, this connection takes a very long time, rarely when it happens, the reality showing us that we need to identify alternative and complementary approaches to the existing models and to rely more on our own powers, intuitions, and tools specific to the era we live in.

In an age where video content and movies are predominantly consumed, what we as filmmakers naturally know gives us the biggest competitive advantage in online marketing equation right off the bat. In our strong absence from the online ecosystem, not only cinema loses, but also the world and cinephiles, and many films and compositions, probably many of them exceptional, many talented young and unknown artists who not to reach the public.

Algorithms are here for us to use. To consume or promote our creations and identities. This reality is here to stay. We can continue to downplay it, overuse it for consumption, telling ourselves that we keep up with the latest cinematic creations and novelties, or we can exploit it to our advantage, as algorithms love great content so much that they push it up for free.

So, maybe before taking the next step on the path of our vocation, when considering our strategies to build a sustainable career in film and screen industries, we should reflect on the question “How much do I want to live from making films?”. Because today, this means learning and doing a lot more than just writing and making films, especially in the indie and debutants worlds.

Sources:

“What percentage of screenwriters write a second movie?” Stephen Follows: Film Industry Data and Education, 2020.
“How many films does the average director make?” Stephen Follows: Film Industry Data and Education, 2019.
“Distributors Fact Sheet: 2022” Dear Producer, 2022.

“Is Producing a Sustainable Career?” Dear Producer, 2021.