35 Tips For Indie Filmmakers, From The Produced By Conference

[Heath McKnight]

Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily Indie Filmmaking: 35 Tips From Experts

Heath

[David Schuurman]

Didn't find the list itself particularly insightful personally but I really enjoyed the comments.

[Brian Standing]

Blecch! What a depressing list of short-sighted banalities guaranteed to produce "more of the same." "Anything with the word 'wedding' in the title?" That's certainly not going to inspire the next Orson Welles.

I'd rather hear from the likes of:

Eric Idle:
"You can always have complete artistic freedom, as long as you don't care about making any money at all."

Werner Herzog (from "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe"):
"If you switch on television it's just ridiculous and its destructive. It kills us. And talk shows will kill us. They kill our language. So we have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television. Commercials and – I think there should be real war against commercials, real war against talk shows, real war against "Bonanza" and "Rawhide", or all these things."

"If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!"

Errol Morris:
"I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not. "

Les Blank (after being asked why he chooses to self-distribute)
"Well, that's a good question. I started because regular distributors were not paying off, they would take the films, sit on them, and if they got some money they would often not share it with me. If they did share it, I would have to pry it out of them, it was hard to get my negatives out of them when we concluded our deal, it just became easier to do it myself, that way when money came in, I got to keep it all."

Barbara Kopple (on being asked what she hoped would come out of her documentary, "Shut Up and Sing" about the Dixie Chicks)
"You never think about that, doing a documentary. Because once somebody says to you, "OK, you can film us," you come to it with absolutely no agenda. You try to allow these characters to take you on a journey with them. And that's always the way that I approach filmmaking. When I got to do the Mike Tyson film [Fallen Champ], I just let every single thing I thought about Mike Tyson out of my head and started to allow the story to emerge, to follow it along. The same with Woody Allen [on Wild Man Blues]. It's so key if you're going to do something real and sincere. "

[John Vincent]

A few good tips, but mostly obvious or silly.

john

[Tony Davies-Patrick]

The after-comments on that page were far more entertaining... :)