IFH 801: Breaking the Rules: Crafting Powerful Films Without Hollywood Money with Shawn Whitney
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You are listening to the IFH Podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting podcasts, just go to ifhpodcastnetwork.com. Welcome to the Indie Film Hustle Podcast, episode number 801. Cinema should make you forget you're sitting in a theater. Roman Polanski.

Broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood, it's the Indie Film Hustle Podcast, where we show you how to survive and thrive as an indie filmmaker in the jungles of the film biz. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, welcome to another episode of the Indie Film Hustle Podcast. I am your humble host, Alex Ferrari. Today's show is sponsored by Rise of the Filmtrepreneur, how to turn your independent film into a profitable business.

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If you want to order it, just head over to www.FilmBizBook.com. That's FilmBizBook.com. Enjoy today's episode with guest host, Dave Bullis. My guest this week runs Micro Budget Film Lab. He has directed two Micro Budget features and is in pre-production for a third with guest, Sean Whitney. Hey, Sean, thanks a lot for coming on the show.

Thanks very much for having me, Dave. I really appreciate it. Oh, my pleasure, Sean. I've seen everything you've been doing with the Micro Budget Film Lab and all the great things that you're doing over there. But before we start talking about all the things you do there, I wanted to talk about your career and about getting started. Growing up, Sean, did you always have this hobby of film or this love affair with film? And did you make films growing up as a kid? Yeah.

No, no. Short answer. No, no. I mean, I always was. I've thought of myself as a writer since I was probably 10 or nine years old. But, you know, there was no we didn't have any video cameras or anything like that. Like it just didn't.

We just didn't have them. So it wasn't really around. I watched a lot of old movies. You know, it was back in the days, first before cable and then cable. And so, you know, we would get like Channel 29 from Buffalo and we would watch, you know, bad movies or not bad movies, but old movies from the 50s and 60s. But it wasn't really until much later that I decided to pursue film, actually. So did you end up going to college for film? No. No.

No, I, uh, so I went to, I went to university in Toronto at York university and I did a liberal arts degree in humanities, kind of cultural studies. And then I did a master's in interdisciplinary studies that was focused on writing for the theater. And I'd started a small theater company that was doing like Brechtian musical theater. Uh, and we did a bunch of, uh, really great productions and, you know, I wrote stuff and, and,

I was doing that and then, but then I went, decided to make a turn towards film really in about the year 2003, I guess.

And at that point, I just began writing. I tried to do actually a theater production. I did like a workshop production and it went really badly and I lost a lot of money and I was really depressed. So I kind of hid in my basement for about three years and just started writing screenplays and just sort of learning how to write screenplays on my own. And then I guess three or four years and then I ended up getting accepted into the Canadian Film Center, which is kind of like the American Film Institute.

And that was my kind of, you know, my formal the formal official part of my education was that residency there.

You mentioned writing your own screenplays and sort of teaching yourself how to write screenplays. That's sort of something I did a few years ago, and I think that helps out a lot. And what I want to ask is, was there any particular books or even scripts or even movies that you sort of used to sort of pick apart in sort of teaching yourself how to write?

Yeah, there was a few books. I mean, Sid Field, I think, was maybe the first book screenplay that I that I read. And that kind of opened my eyes to structure and all that kind of stuff. And then I read another book by Epstein called Crafty Screenwriting, which was really good. And then the most recent.

Recently, I read, a few years ago now, I read Save the Cat by Blake Snyder. And that was, I know it gets a lot of bad people go on about it now because it has become kind of the dominant model in Hollywood in many ways. But I still think that it's a really powerful machinery that you can use. You can bend it to kind of more unconventional structures. But it was really useful for me in terms of creating a kind of method

to approach the screenwriting process. Yeah, I have noticed that Save the Cat has gotten a lot of flack. I mean, I think if you're at the top of any field and, you know, I think Save the Cat has sort of gotten to the upper echelon now because

I mean, well, Sid Field has passed and so has – the person who made Save the Cat has passed. But I mean I still think that it's been able – it's been sort of passed on through his program. And I think now when you're at the top of any field, I think you're going to get flack for a lot of things. Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean and it's partly – it's because of the way that Hollywood approached –

the whole process of storytelling. I mean, it really is the kind of formula that's in Save the Cat is

is used constantly. Like you can watch a movie and time it kind of just to save the cat structure. And I think people get, because of that and because a lot of Hollywood movies are pretty, you know, they're pretty empty sort of commercial properties that are really, you know, not about, they're not about art, they're about, they're a product, right? And I think people confuse the power of the story structure with the vacancy of the content. And I think that's where a lot of that comes from. It's like,

Hollywood movies are kind of empty, not all of them, but a lot of them are empty, and it's because they all follow this model, and I think it's a little bit of a misrepresentation. Yeah, and I know you can't see this because it's a podcast, but I have a huge screenwriting book library right next to me to my left, and I sort of did what you did. I wanted to figure out screenwriting, the nuts and bolts, and getting down to the absolute sort of atoms of it and figure out what makes a

a great screenwriter, what makes a great screenplay. And I sort of just, you know, would buy these books piece by piece. Some of them you could buy, I mean, for pennies on the dollar at Amazon. Others, you know, they just came out and they're still full price. But, you know, there's a lot, there are some that really speak to

to me and there's others that I read and I'm just like I don't know maybe this is lost because you know I'm sure it happened to you too Sean where you have people recommend books to you like screenwriting books for instance and you read them and you're just like what was the big deal about this you know

Yeah, yeah, totally. And a lot of them end up, I don't know, after a while, if you read a few of them, it's like, okay, this is, I'm kind of reading the same thing again. And at a certain point, you need to just get a method that you're going to use and then apply it and then learn from it and find ways to advance upon it. You know, I don't think there's any absolutely perfect or the right method exactly, but you just need a method. You can't just be, it can't just be anarchy. Yeah.

Yes, absolutely. I think a method is key. Finding your routine also, which I guess is another way of saying method. But finding your routine and making sure, okay, well, 11 o'clock today or maybe a little earlier or maybe I'm going to get up an hour early today and I'm just going to write. I'm just going to write for 45 minutes to half an hour. And you're absolutely right. Finding that process is key because like you just said,

When I would read some of these books, I felt like I was reading the same things over and over again. And I'm just like, didn't I just read this book with a different cover and by a different author? But that's bound to happen. Once you start getting to a certain point, you're going to start seeing all that same information just basically used again or maybe presented in a different way. Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean there's only so many –

ways in a sense to tell a story. And if you're telling a three act story or a story that has a beginning, middle and end, anyway, there's only so many ways to do it. And, you know, the interesting thing, because I read a lot of scripts in my, I have a development job and I read tons of scripts. And what you see mostly is that is not, I mean, you do see scripts that come in that are kind of, you know, soulless machines, but

But mostly what you see from screenwriters who aren't established is that they just don't have the structure. They don't know how to tell a story that keeps moving forward. And you really need that. And so to go back to what you're saying is so it feels repetitive on the one hand. It is repetitive in a lot of ways. But it also is like people need to learn this because otherwise you can't tell a story. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

And you touched on something too, Sean. You said that some of the scripts that come in are like a soulless machine. I know you can't go into specifics or anything like that, but is there any sort of thing that that writer may be doing wrong, whether it be structure or is it because they don't have a voice that makes it sort of like that soulless machine?

Well, what it is, is that people write to the market and because, you know, people want to make a living. And so they think, OK, well, you know, like for a while we were getting all these found footage scripts, for instance, which, you know, were the rage. And they would come in and people would follow the beats, you know, would like X would happen on page 12 and Y would happen on page 23 or whatever. But what was lacking in them was that they were just, you know, it's like it's like watching a plumber fix your pipes.

It's necessary work, you know, but it's not interesting besides for you because, you know, your toilet's overflowing. But for most people, it's not going to be that interesting. And so what I find lacking is a kind of some kind of universal universality to it. So you need to have, for instance, your characters can't just be about, you know, chopping up zombies or aliens or whatever. They have to be going through an inner turmoil because really what stories are about is they're an argument, you know, about what makes the good life.

And you're making an argument. And if you're not making an argument and if it's not being felt through your character, then it just feels like watching a plumber fix a pipe or watching somebody build a house. It's kind of interesting to see the structure of it, but it's not emotionally moving. Yeah, I just took a webinar. It was a free webinar by Doug Richardson who wrote Die Hard 2.

And he actually was saying, you know, that whole thing about an argument and his, his whole thing was, Hey, structure is an argument. You know, how you structure your film should be an argument for your whole movie. And you know, that, that, that actually really stuck with me. And it, no, just great that you're here. I'm just hearing you, you know, say something similar about, you know, characters and argument as well, which is, again, is I agree with a hundred percent as something I've learned with screenwriting is that, and that,

When we were making characters, I think sometimes screenwriters have a tendency to write themselves. Just like you said, we put ourselves as the main character.

And I think that sort of ends up hurting us because the main character ends up becoming almost like a shell and everybody else is sort of having sort of like the witty banter or maybe they're actually the ones that are actually going through a transformation and the main character is just sort of there basically just going through the motions.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And I mean, it can be you, but it has to be you in a universal way. It has to be universal you, you know, like you have to, you know, there's things about your life. You know, there was a film, a micro budget film that I talk about a lot called Bellflower from a few years ago, I think 2011, that was shot for like 17 grand and it did really well. I think it went to Sundance. Actually, it went to Sundance. It got distribution with Oscilloscope. It's a great movie and it's about his breakup. So it's a very, in some ways, a personal film, but he took his breakup and he turned it into a kind of universal film.

crazy story about young male rage and representations of violence and stuff that's a lot of fun to watch and has universal value to it because he what he does is all the parts of

the soul of it all fits together. So the characters are characters journey fits with the theme of the movie and the theme of the movie fits with the visual styling of the movie and with the visual elements in the movie. And that all fits with what's happening with the, the secondary characters and so on. So it works together as a, as a machine, but a machine in the good sense, a machine in the sort of emotional, emotional sense that all the parts are firing, all the pistons are firing.

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. It kind of reminds me also of sort of Mad Max. You know, Mad Max Fury Road, I know what we're talking about now, you know, with the main character. But in Mad Max, he never really changes, you know. But that, again, is the whole point of Mad Max, is that he... Max is never actually the main character in any of his movies, you know. He's just helping everybody else out as they're going on their adventures. But going into those...

even, well, that may be probably starting the second one, but in Road Warrior, but even, you know, Road Warrior, then you have Beyond Thunderdome, and then you have the newest one, Fury Road, you kind of see that formula at work, and it actually works. Like we were just saying, it actually works for that, but anywhere else, you'd kind of be like, well, what the hell's going on here, you know? It's not complementing itself, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the Mad Max model is also the model for noir, you know, like noir fiction and noir films is about this cynical, scarred human in the world who is giving us an entry into the world to see the journey of other people. And we become, we're the sort of cynical, we're the sort of brought in in the same way, in the same state as that person. And then we're learning through that process, the argument about that world and what's valuable, you know.

Yeah, that's a very good point. Kind of reminds me of Chinatown in a way. Jack Nicholson, at the whole end, he was very sort of scarred. And by the end, I don't know if he really changed, but the whole venture was absolutely amazing. No, absolutely. Absolutely.

So, you know as we talked more about your career Sean, you know you obviously you taught yourself how to write screenplays and you know So where was it where you actually started to sit down and actually you you made your own film? so I had after I Actually shortly before I went to the Film Center and then after I went to the Film Center I made a few shorts and kind of you know, I'd read I read a few things about you know How to shoot not cross the line, you know coverage and

that kind of thing. Uh, and then I sort of, I shot some, some shorts that were, you know, from moderate to bad and, uh, but it was really fun and I, and I loved it. And I learned a lot as both as a filmmaker and as a writer, because I learned, okay, well that doesn't work. You know, that's, you know, a doc, a block of dialogue that long isn't going to work. Uh, saying it this way isn't going to work. Like you just, you, you see it being played out. And so it's an extremely useful experience, even,

from the point of view of being a screenwriter. And then, you know, then when I came out of the Canadian Film Centre and, well, a bunch of stuff happened. I had a script options with like an Oscar nominated producer and it all looked, you know, great. And, you know, I was counting the money and,

thinking my career was about to take off, how could things go wrong? And that was 2008. And then at the bottom fell out of the financial market and subsequently all the money dried up for indie films. And Hollywood reverted to just retreads and remakes and tentpole pictures. And so while I got a job out of that in development that I still have, my career as a filmmaker and as a screenwriter kind of came to a halt.

And so after a number of years of having done that, I just was like one day sitting in my office with my wife feeling frustrated because I was reading a script that I thought was kind of bad but was financed because it had some A-list cast.

And I turned to my wife and I'm like, this is ridiculous. Like we're helping, you know, she's a wedding photographer, so she helps people realize their dreams in her way. And I was doing it with, uh, you know, story editing. And I said, you know, why don't, why aren't we, why are we just the bridesmaids? You know, why don't we make our movie? And, uh, and so we, we decided at that point, then we just started talking about a story and then it happened.

Yeah, the bottom fell out in 2008. Man, for so many people, I mean, that was so tragic. And, you know, I know other people as well who had things in development. And 2008 hit, and my God. And here we are in 2016, and we're still recovering from that here in America. But, yeah.

But yeah, and the shocks sort of felt worldwide. But so you were able to regain your composure, regain your motivation. And so what ended up – what did your first movie end up being? It ended up being – I mean it's like a sci-fi comedy called A Brand New You about a widower who can't get over the death of his wife and so he –

moves into this house and after trying to failing at committing suicide he convinces his landlord and his roommate to help him try to clone her in the living room because his landlord it turns out is this disgraced biochemist and so it's about him trying to kind of recreate this moment that is lost but it's a comedy so it's funny but funny sad I guess so is that available to watch like online or through VOD or anything

No, we got a sales agent and we've been going through the hell that is known as deliverables. And we just sent off for the second time for you have to get a quality control report in

before your film, like we've done all the other, the rest of the stuff, I think, I hope to God. And then we needed to make this quality control report. And so it goes, you know, you send it in and it cost you like 1500 bucks for, you know, four passes to cover your video and all your, your audio tracks. And they send you a report. And if there's any problems in there,

you know, and it can be any kinds of thing. And then it comes back to you and then you have to fix those and then you have to send it back. So we got that back and had to send it to our audio editor and our editor, our picture editor. And, and so we've, we've just sent it off for the second QC report and I'm hoping that it's good enough. Yeah. Those deliverables, Sean, uh, the more, you know, I didn't know too much about deliverables to a few years ago. And then I found out all that is in, that is involved with deliverables and,

We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show. And even when talking with, you know, my friend Jason Brubaker at the stripper, you know, just getting involved with those deliverables, you end up, it's like a, like you said, it's like, what did you call it? Living hell? I think that's pretty accurate. Yeah, yeah. It's totally brutal. So, you know, so right after you finished your first movie,

And again, you know, that was a micro budget film. And, you know, you made your second film, which, by the way, I love the name of this of this film, by the way, fucking my way back home.

Yeah, yeah.

No, we were, well, we'd done the kind of the festival thing with the first one and gone to a few festivals and won some awards. And we were like, what are we going to do next? And so we, you know, I had some other scripts that we wanted to do, but they were bigger. They were like, you know, at least $100,000 kind of thing. And we're just, we're not in the position to make a $100,000 movie, unfortunately, at the moment. And so we, you know, my production team,

There's four of us in the company. And we said, you know, what are we going to do next? And I had this story that I'd developed with another writer years earlier that he and I were going to shoot together, a wonderful writer named Reese Crothers. But it just never happened. We'd both kind of gotten busy with our own things. And so I spoke to him and I said, hey, dude, can I –

take our story and write it up as a script so we can shoot it. And he was like, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So I, then I wrote it up and we started editing, you know, getting notes back and forth. Uh, and you know, I don't know how many months later, eight months later, maybe, um, nine months later, then we shot the movie. So when you shot the movie, did you have a slightly bigger budget than when you were when, than with your first movie?

No, you know, the irony is we learned a lot from the first movie. You know, we made mistakes that cost us money and we got better at improv improvising. And so the first film cost us, I think, twenty two thousand or something. And the second movie we shot for seven thousand. But it's actually more complicated and there's more locations. And we a lot of it takes place in a car going around the city. So we had to tow the car because it's.

Our driver, like he plays the driver in the film, is like maybe the worst driver on the planet. So the idea of him acting while driving this like 1974 Cutlass Supreme was a horrifying thought. So we had to like tow the car around.

So when you had to tow the car around, I guess the biggest part of production budget then was obviously a tow truck, a driver in the tow truck. You obviously had to get some kind of – I guess you had a route that you wanted to go. Again, I'm just thinking with a producer's hat right now, Sean. Yeah, yeah. No, we went – so our plan A was – okay, so plan A was we thought we had a connection with a post-production house.

and maybe he could get us a deal with a rental house, White's in Toronto. And he contacted them for us and they got back and they were like, oh yeah, you can get a tow vehicle that is like $10,000 a day. Plus you need to get cops, right? You need to have off-duty, paid duty officers. And we were like, well, it's more than our budget. So we tried U-Haul and we did a test shoot with a U-Haul trailer

pulling it around and so on. And that seemed like the way we were going to go. But that was going to be, I think, about a thousand bucks with insurance. And that still seemed high. So what we ended up doing was a guy who owns a cafe around the corner from my house had a tow truck. And well, he had a car. First of all, he had this Cutlass Supreme. And I was like, hey, man, can I rent your car for the shoot? Your car is like this big, ugly beast. And it's a beautiful sky blue color. And I really want to use it because it really looks good. And he was like, yeah, yeah, totally. And we told him we were going to tow it.

And he was like, oh, hey, do you want to rent my pickup truck? His little Toyota pickup truck. I'm like, yeah, sure. So we rented it off him for a few hundred dollars. And then we went on Craigslist and we found somebody who rented like a car tow trailer. And we rented it for two weeks for I think $300. So in total, you know, car, tow vehicle and trailer was like $800, $700. Yeah.

Wow. Again, that's amazing how by just sort of putting on your producer hat, you can actually get that down further and further and further. And again, I imagine also you're going to have insurance because I could just imagine you're turning a car around. So was insurance included into that $800 or $900 cost?

Yeah, we got production insurance and that was more of that was for the entire production. And I think it was about 900 bucks maybe to cover the whole thing. And it was a bit dodgy. Like we told them they were like, you know, we have this car and we'll be towing it to locations and then putting it off the trailer and shooting it in locations.

And so they, you know, if they found out we were shooting with people in the vehicle towing it around, we probably wouldn't have been covered. So we would have had to evacuate everybody from the car if we'd gotten into an accident. But luckily we didn't. And there was no there was no insurance claims were made. Excellent. It's always good whenever and whenever you never have to make an insurance claim. Right. So, you know, so now show with sort of finishing the film.

Is it on VOD yet or are you putting that together right now? Yeah, we just got picture lock like last week. And so we've sent it off to the composer. We've sent it off to the audio mixer to begin that process. And we've sent it off to the colorist.

So now that picture is locked. Now, again, I'm cheating because I have your whole info in front of me. And I know you made a third movie. So with your third movie, that's actually in development right now, correct? Yes. Yeah, yeah. We have a script that's written. It's I think a second draft at this point that we're hoping to do a little higher budget if we can raise the cash or I guess –

you know, figure out the, whatever the equivalent is of, uh, you know, a tow trailer for, for our, our spaceship. Cause it all takes place inside a spaceship. And that's called the century of redemption, right? Century of redemption. Yeah. Yeah.

So obviously you're going to shoot that next year. And, you know, again, I wish you the best with shooting that. And so what I wanted to ask about was obviously your micro budget film lab. You know, you sort of started this. And what was sort of the impetus to actually start micro budget film lab? Well, when we shot the first film, I mean, finding information was it was really hard.

You know, we could find an article here, an article there and get, you know, pull some tips here and there. But a lot of it was really learning on the fly, which added added stress to the whole process. So and, you know, we were borrowing money and figuring out how to finance it and all that stuff that we had to kind of build the machine from scratch again.

as it were. And so my thinking was that it would be great because there are so many people out there who want to make a micro budget or who want to make a feature and are just waiting. They're doing like I did, you know, they're waiting for years and, you know, submitting to contests and spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on contests. And, you know, sometimes contests don't even send you the results and nevermind notes. And I was like, you know, people need to have that resource. And so I want to be that resource. And I wanted it to be different

than, you know, No Film School, which is a great site, but it has a lot of gear focus. And I'm, you know, because of my background coming in from the point of view of story and from screenwriting, I was kind of more interested in

the aesthetics and the story construction side and how to do things differently and how to create a kind of shared aesthetic. Like I, I mean, I wrote a post, um, a little while ago called about, you know, we need a micro budget movement. And I've been thinking about that a lot and the need to kind of, for us as micro budget filmmakers to move beyond simply, you know, atomized individuals all struggling to make our films. And I'm, I'm happy to help people out on that basis, just like the technical side of how to make a movie, but also, um,

you know, where there have been successes in the past with people outside of the system, they've generally been coming from people who exist as a movement. You know, you look at dogma 95 or mumble core or the neorealists or the French new wave, and they,

part of their marketing buzz and part of their power comes from this aesthetic challenge to the dominant storytelling models and cinematic models. And so I wanted to kind of create a space where that kind of could gestate. And that's what, that's kind of where the name lab came from. It was like a laboratory for, for film movements. We can do a lot of like experimentation, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like sort of mixing chemicals, like a mad scientist. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, making drugs. But experimentation film, I think that's what allows – with making micro-budgets and even when I made my own student film, it allowed for more experimentation because obviously, number one, we had no clue what the hell we were doing. I mean me personally. I had no clue what I was doing when I was making my student film. Two, the budget was like the change people have in their pockets.

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And three, I had nobody to answer to. So any weird, wacky thing we did, you know, is it funny? Okay, let's put it in there. But, you know, with micro-budgets, you know, it's always encouraged for experimentation. Because, I mean, you know, Sean, if you had a couple million dollar budget and you had people reporting to every day, you know, you try to do something out of the norm and they're going to say, you know, what the fuck are you doing?

Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. Yeah, there's a lot of pressure. There's a lot at stake when you've got a million or 10 million or $100 million. They want you to do what works, and what works is what worked last year or the year before, and so they just want to repeat the same thing because it's a formula that makes money. But that formula that works for Hollywood for $10 million movies or $100 million movies doesn't work for micro-budgets because they just look like cheap knockoffs, right? Yeah. And they look like...

They look like cheap knockoffs, but more than that, all the flaws of Hollywood are kind of hidden by the money that's poured into the great effects and the great sound and the great light and these awesome actors who are loved and so people forgive them any errors or whatever. All that stuff...

allows Hollywood to kind of smooth out the problems in their storytelling and the conventionality of their cinematics technique or whatever. You don't have that in a micro-budget. So you get none of the good of Hollywood, of all that money, and you get all of the bad when you're trying to just replicate a Hollywood formula film on their budget for their coffee cups. Yeah.

So true, Sean. And again, if you try to emulate that, you're just going to end up shooting yourself in the face. And that's something that I found as well. I tried to emulate different action movies with my second and third student films.

And I'm like, holy crap, I don't have the time, the budget, the resources to do all this stuff. So I can't make a whole scene about gunplay or I can't blow up this whole building, even with red giant effects. And it sort of reminds me also of there was this panel of discussion I was watching on TCM.

and one of the guys who hosts TCM said he actually loved the era of the 50s and 60s with movie making because they didn't have a budget to blow up buildings or anything, so they had to focus on the story. And to me, that's where we are again, is I think a hallmark of a filmmaker nowadays is you have to make a micro-budget film set in one to three locations, very minimal, and the story and the concept have to be what is your main selling point of this whole thing.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know about, you know, there's some dogma films that I really love, like Celebration I really love, and they had their vow of chastity or whatever that was very strict, and most of them ended up breaking it. And I don't know about...

all of the rules in terms of restrictions about what you can and can't do, because there's, you know, there's a film monsters by Gareth Edwards who went on to do Godzilla and Godzilla apparently sucks. I've never seen it, but you know, it's got bad reviews and so on and monsters did really well. And monsters did really well, I think because kind of of what you're, you're saying about story because it was a, it was a really fresh,

It's a monster movie, but it's not about the monsters. The monsters are just the backdrop to this road movie and this relationship between these two people in a structure that's not...

It's much more open and alive than really tightly bound Hollywood structures where there's a monster and they kill people one at a time in the woods and so on. And it wasn't that. And so he used – there's a lot of effects in that. But he shot it for like $15,000. And then he just happens to be this special effects wizard who has worked for years for the BBC doing –

you know, crazy compositing and all this incredible stuff. So he had those, he had that talent. And so, you know, kudos to him to bring that,

But then, you know, where he couldn't he couldn't do the kind of practical effects that you can do with Hollywood. So his his shooting was was this story, this really simple, beautiful little story about this relationship between these people. And that's what gave the movie its power. The the monsters was, you know, sometimes kind of was neat or whatever. But that's you know, when he got to Godzilla, then he could.

then he didn't have to think about stories so much. And so he ended up with a much weaker picture than monsters, which was made for, again, like the coffee cup budget for Godzilla. And, you know, I don't know what he's doing next, but that, that point that you make about story being so important and, and breaking with the, the conventions of what Hollywood does with stories and really allowing yourself to, you know, to take advantage of the freedom that you have as a, as a filmmaker, because you don't have that a hundred million dollar weight hanging over your head that you have to recoup.

Yeah, and I was also reading something about this as well where a lot of studios now are looking at the micro-budget film world, the independent film world, and they're taking directors who maybe made a movie for a million or less and all of a sudden they're giving them all this money to sort of make these franchises. For instance, Josh Trank with Fantastic Four. Prior to that, he made Chronicle for, I think, what, $3 million? Yeah.

And I've seen stuff like that. And I think also, I don't know how well that's transferred over though. I think that, I don't know if the studios are rushing because they're so desperate for a hit to sort of prop up all the other properties or if maybe these independent directors maybe aren't there yet, if you know what I mean.

I think it's more, I mean, they're trying to, I think there's two things. I think that often as artists, often we don't know what makes us special or, you know, our artistic production special, you know, we're not super self-critical all the time. And so we don't know how to necessarily replicate it. And when we're put in a new situation where suddenly you've got

10 or 100 or whatever million dollars, you're in a new situation. And so you're not... Before, there was all kinds of pressures on you that forced you to be the kind of artist that you were. And now there's different pressures on you that are changing you in a different direction. So there's that. But there's also Hollywood is...

Isn't interested in what is magical about the really small budget movies what they're interested in is the buzz and They are the cachet and the you know the edginess of them But they those are just words for them and they don't really know how to capture because again They're they're thinking about it's a hundred million bucks that they just invested and they need to recoup that and so they need to take all the edges off and

because you want to appeal to, you know, you know, it's like, uh, I had a meeting with a sales agent on a completely different project a while back. And the first question they asked me about the project was who's your white male lead. And, uh, it was sort of eyeopening to me, you know, and this guy was probably a nice guy or whatever. And,

probably not a racist, but he is speaking about how the market, the superstitions of the market conceive of it because they're like, well, black guys and women and lesbians and gays don't sell in China or they don't sell in Africa. So we need somebody who's like a universal icon or avatar in

for money making. And that is the white male dude between the ages of 35 and 50. And so that's the kind of the way that they think about it. And so even when you get an edgy director up there, you know, like Gareth Edwards doing Godzilla, now they're trying to fit it into the money making mold that they know, and it has to fit into that. And so even, you know, you know, you go into, it's like the old joke, right? Oh, I joined the government to change it from within. And then

Instead of changing the system, the system changes you. And I think that's what happens. Yeah, it's very true. And as we were talking about budgets, you have currently a micro-budget film lab fund competition, which I think is amazing. So could you go into a little detail about that? Yeah. What I wanted to do was to create a screenwriting coaching program because I think often people

People, you know, because there is so much emphasis on gear because gear has become so cheap and made it so possible to make micro budget films now, whether it's camera gear or sound gear or whatever. And people get so hung up on gear and they become gear heads and, you know, people talking about the latest red camera and black magic and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And they and the scripts I read are amazing.

And, you know, I read about 150 scripts a year. Like I've read well over a thousand scripts in the last eight years. And I'm telling you, most of them are are very weak and not developed. And it's kind of part of my my argument to my my community is you need to develop your script. So I was like, how can I motivate people to develop good, you know, edgy, fresh scripts?

and get them to focus on that so that they can make some great pictures and like really go deep in terms of the stories that exist inside themselves. So I thought, well, I'm going to do a screenwriting thing, but how can I get people interested? So I decided to come up with this

screenwriting coaching uh intensive that would last over a period of three months and i would work with a you know a relatively small group of people to go through each stage of the screenwriting process from you know how to come up with a story for a micro budget how to create a log line how to create a story structure developing characters theme all that stuff right through to revising how to revise your script with a micro budget in mind and then have this um

And provide feedback the whole time. And then at the end, have this potential award so that, you know, of the first 10 scripts that are submitted at the end of this process, I would give like a full story edit of their scripts, which is what I do professionally. And I would, you know, meet with them over Skype. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

And then the best script of those 10, I would give them an, you know, I would invest $2,500 into making their movie.

And so that's kind of how I was born. And I also like you're doing the video question and answer section because I imagine as soon as you announced the competition, this flurry of questions came in. And it's a great idea, by the way, that you're doing it through video because video is – it's always – obviously, it's a great promotional tool. And I think also a lot of times people are more –

especially filmmakers, are more adept to watching a video tutorial or explanation, if you will, than just reading sort of like a blog post. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I try to mix it up a little bit and do a bit of both. But yeah, and it's kind of nice to do, you know, like with the FAQs that I've done

I can just, you know, I get tons of, you know, questions and I, you know, went through them and found some of the most common ones. And then I could just go up on my roof. Uh, you know, there's a terrace in our apartment. So I went up on the terrace and, and just sat there with my coffee and, you know, could just talk into, you know, my selfie stick that I'd put an elastic band on to hold it to a chair. And I could just talk to it and answer the question. Like, I would like we're sitting down having a coffee.

Yeah, it did feel that way as well. And so obviously, just to sort of answer a few of those questions, I know you already answered them, but just for obviously for the listeners, you know, like, I guess the one would be, you know, who actually owns the script at the end of all this?

The writer slash filmmaker owns the scripts. The only deal is for the money, the only conditions, I guess, is that it's an investment. So there'll be an investor's contract. And if the film makes money, then you have to pay back. You have to pay back the money, you know, and which seems reasonable. And I want people to take some responsibility for the process of

you know, their contributors to their film. And then that money, it won't come back to me. I'll put it into another fund so that I can grow a fund to ultimately supply, you know, help other people in the same sort of way. And then the second thing is that the money will be released on the first day of principal photography. So you actually don't just write a script and get the money. You actually have to go into the proper pre-production. And I'll work with people through the pre-production process

to help them get the show on the road and on the first day of principal photography that cash will be released from escrow. And I think that's an amazing idea, Sean. And so for people listening who might be interested, where could they enter this fun competition?

Uh, well it hasn't, the doors haven't opened yet. Uh, I've been taking, because I got tons of feedback from people and, uh, about what they felt should be in the program and so on. And so I'm going to open the doors, uh, to that. And as I say, it's not to, you know, it's not going to be to tons of people because, because I'm giving feedback. I can only deal with so many people before I would, you know, have to start taking amphetamines and stay up all night. Yeah.

So that will happen on not this coming Monday but the following Tuesday. So a week Tuesday. I'll open the doors on that. And is that for people just in Canada or people in the US and UK enter? Yeah, it's people internationally. One of the cool things – I've been promoting the Facebook thing.

and the website and so on through Facebook, which is, you know, in terms of, you know, micro budget film marketing, Facebook is actually has a really user friendly, very powerful interface. But I've been, I was marketing it and I was marketing it primarily to the United States and Canada because that's, you know, where I'm from. And by accident, I think I selected worldwide. And so it ended up promoting this thing, one of these posts out there.

to internationally and I started getting, I'm like, why am I getting all these people with names, like Indian names? It was like all of a sudden, like literally like dozens of people contacting me from India and I realized I'd made this mistake and it was awesome because it's, I'm meeting these filmmakers from India. Like I just interviewed a filmmaker who,

last week who did a micro budget film called D major, which is a beautiful film and has gotten, it's getting, it looks like it's getting distribution on the India's version of Netflix and it's got him, you know, a producer is coming on board for his next film anyway. And it was a fascinating interview just to hear how in Kolkata he made a movie for $3,000 and how they did it. And, you know, they didn't have a slider, so they put a camera on the sweater and they pulled it across the table and this kind of stuff. But anyway, that's a long detour to say that the, the, the program is open internationally. Yeah.

The reason I ask is because, you know, obviously America is my my, you know, U.S. is my biggest market, followed by the U.K., followed by China, then Australia, then Canada. So I just just obviously just wanted to make sure. So, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, Chinese filmmakers are more than welcome as well, obviously, as Americans and Brits.

Excellent. And I was as shocked as everyone else when I heard that China was my third biggest market. I looked at my numbers. I'm like, wow. Okay. But bigger, bigger. Yeah, seriously. Who knew? Bigger than bigger than the Australia and Canada. Wow. And, you know, so, Sean, you know, I know we touched on this briefly, but, you know, sort of, you know, in closing, I want to ask, you know, what is there anything else that you're working on that we should know about?

- Well, I mean, in terms of my film, it's the one you mentioned, Century of Redemption, which is a space kind of, there's a sci-fi, but it all takes place in one location, though a fairly elaborate location. And then, I mean, I'm a senior programmer at the Victoria, Texas Indie Film Festival, which is a wonderful film festival just outside of Houston.

And, you know, I mean, I'm working on stuff all the time with this company I work for in Canada, Media Biz, and I've been with them as an executive story consultant for years.

about eight years doing both story editing and also developing original content so I have I have some TV series that are in development that I'm pretty stoked about and hoping something happens with them but you know I'm at the point now you know if you've been in the film industry anytime at all you know you know producers come to you and they're like super excited about your project and you get all excited and it's gonna happen and then then they don't happen and so I'm I'm I still retain a small glimmer of hope in my heart but a part of me is always like yeah you know I I've

I can't get excited about the mainstream stuff any longer because it's just so hard. It's so hard to get stuff off the ground. Things crash and burn all the time. Yes, I couldn't agree more, Sean. I just was having this conversation the other day. It is so hard to get things...

with even a pretty sizable budget off the ground. And people who listen to this podcast on a frequent basis know that I talk about that a lot. I talk about my own projects and things that have just crashed and burned and things that never really got off and things that got off and still had a lot of problems on takeoff. But so in closing, Sean, is there anything we didn't talk about that maybe you wanted to discuss or any sort of final thoughts to sort of put a period at the end of this whole conversation?

Well, I think the main thing and the main inspiration from MicroBudget Film Lab is, you know, following on from what we were just saying, where everything's crashing and burning. And, you know, I looked up, was reading some stuff on the spec screenplay market recently, and something like 100,000 scripts are registered every year with the Writers Guild of America. And this year, less than 100 were purchased by the studios and the indie majors. And

And it can look really depressing and you can sit around sending query letters forever. And it's just important that people know that you don't have to do that and that you can make a great movie, you know, and there are some awesome movies. People, I think, forget.

you know, the French new wave breathless was a micro budget. It was under a hundred thousand dollars. And, you know, some of these great movies for lovers only made by the Polish brothers was shot for like zero and made $500,000. And, but more than that, it was, you know, they made a really cool romantic movie. And so you can make really good stuff for not, not a lot of money. And so you shouldn't feel like you have to wait around for

for some benevolent producer to sort of land in your lap and do it for you or some dentist with you know more money than then he knows what to do with to invest in your film you can you can do it with a relatively small amount of money yet you know that that's a something I've been talking to Sean about you know in a lot of my intros about talking about this whole you know don't wait around you know figure out what you have at your disposal location wise I you know what I call the resource list I you know locations

actors, and sort of like props. So if you can make those lists and you can sort of brainstorm and sort of reverse engineer a script, because that way you're not, you know, if I know my uncle owns an abandoned house somewhere, how could I use that for a film, you know? Or even if I use my own living room. I had a friend of mine who shot a film of his in his own living room, and he literally regretted it.

but because he wanted to do all this blood stuff and he did it all but then he said look that smell got in the house and so there's a tip if you're going to use blood a lot a lot of blood maybe don't do that in your living room but yeah yeah

But yeah, you know, and I think, again, you know, Jason Brubaker calls it backyard indie. I think, again, this is going to be the hallmark, Sean, where you have to be able to sort of make a film in a very minimal location with very minimal locations, actors, props, and be able to tell the best story you can. And I think that's going to sort of be like the hallmark now with how, you know, you can sort of, you know, build your career from that. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.

And now back to the show.

Yeah, no, I think that's totally true. And I think that, you know, make a list of your resources is really important and extend that list not just to, you know, cool stuff that you have lying around and cool locations that you have, but also to your skills and the skills of people around you. You know, if you're like Gareth Edwards and you can do great compositing and great, you know, visual, you know, VFX on your computer, that's a resource also. Or if you can, you know, blackmail your brother-in-law to do it for you, whatever it happens to be. Yeah.

That's a resource that you should make the movie that you can, not the movie that you want because it's what you've been told is the right kind of movie. Yeah, I definitely agree. So, Sean, where can people find you online? They can go to our Facebook page. They can just, I'm sure, search on Facebook to Microbudget Film Lab or our website is MicrobudgetFilmLab.com and they can find us there. Are you on Twitter or Facebook? Oh, I'm sorry. You already said Facebook. So are you on Twitter or anything else? Yes.

Uh, I'm on Twitter a little bit. Twitter, I've never really gotten into. Uh, we do, I do have a YouTube channel that I'm slowly adding material to. Um, but those, the primary locations at this point are, are Facebook and, uh, the website. Sean, Sean Whitney. I want to say thank you very much for coming on, sir. Thank you very much for having me. It's been great talking to you. Oh, it's been great talking to you as well. And I wish you the best of luck with everything.

Thank you. You too. Thank you very much. Good luck in China. Thank you very much, Sean. I'll talk to you soon, buddy. Okay. Take care. Bye-bye.

I want to thank Dave so much for doing such a great job on this episode. If you want to get links to anything we spoke about in this episode, head over to the show notes at indiefilmhustle.com forward slash 801. And if you haven't already, please head over to filmmakingpodcast.com, subscribe and leave a good review for the show. It really helps us out a lot, guys. Thank you again so much for listening, guys. As always, keep that hustle going, keep that dream alive. Stay safe out there, and I'll talk to you soon.

Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle podcast at IndieFilmHustle.com. That's I-N-D-I-E-F-I-L-M-H-U-S-T-L-E.com.