I think I had the most fun making a movie with 'Dedication,' just because you knew that it was a passion project for everyone involved. We had X amount of days to shoot New York in the cold. No trailers. Just sort of kind of doing it guerilla style in a way.
In the '80s, I can't say that Amy and I were aware of an independent film community. We could only get a certain amount of money for our pictures, which made them low budget movies, but they were distributed through studios.
The 'Damsels' crew was low-budget, young people who were doing their first thing almost. A lot of it. It felt like Pied Piper or Rumpelstiltskin or whatever: it was me and people thirty years younger or more. But it was great; it was really fun.
Saw' was a film that James Wan and I came up with back in Australia and we were just hoping anyone, literally, anyone would make that film and if nobody would give us the money we were going to shoot it in a garage somewhere.
Cinema ceases to be passive and becomes active: you, the audience, are now, in some senses, in charge of the filmmaking process. You have all got mobile phones, you have all got cam recorders, and you've all got laptops, so you're all filmmakers.
I usually make films with $2 and a paper clip.
'Insidious' is independent. It's like the 'Clerks' of horror films, you know?
By the way, today with digital cameras and editing on your laptop, and things like that, you can make a feature film, a narrative feature film easily for $10,000.
Because of the cumbersome nature of filmmaking, it's only recently that it has become available to the masses, with digital equipment and laptop computers. You can now actually make a pretty serviceable movie for very little money by yourself.
I didn't go to film school; I studied fine art - I learned how to be a filmmaker on everybody else's money.
I did a film that I shot in 24 hours that was self-financed for $5,000. It was a feature called Looking For Jimmy that I shot with a bunch of friends. I spent eight months editing because we had 24 hours of footage that made no sense and I learned a lot about directing while editing that film.
My early films look terrible! I didn't know what I was doing. I learned when I was doing it. I never went to film school.
If you want to make a movie, make it. Don't wait for a grant, don't wait for the perfect circumstances, just make it.
So many people wait around for funding, and if they're unsuccessful, they don't make the film; if you've got a good idea, that seems so pointless. There's always a way of doing it; you've just got to find it.
Independent filmmaking has always been there and it's not to be forgotten.
This is an age where you could put anything on YouTube; people can make films on their own.
Eight years ago, if I wanted to do a YouTube video, I broke out my camera and filmed everything myself and learned how to edit and kind of become a one-woman studio. But we're living in an era now, thanks to ICON, where any creator who is online, they can create in their own space.
In the beginning, it wasn't even a question of deciding I'm going to do independent film and not commercial films - I wasn't being offered any commercial films, and there wasn't an independent scene.
I came out of independent film, that's my roots.
There's no excuse not to make films on weekends with friends.
I guess in Australia every film is sort of an indie film because there are no studios.
My filmmaking background has really just been making movies with my friends since I was 12 years old. That's how I feel I learned how to tell a story visually, by just going out with a video camera and making movies with my friends and family.
When I started, we had just the camera and the person, mostly. And if you wanted to do a dolly shot, particularly working in Chicago where I began, you'd get in the back trunk of a car, and you'd have a friend drive the car, or you'd get in some kid's little wagon that he plays with and have someone pull that for dolly shots.
Indie film isn't dead, it just grew up.
There's a strange sense of accomplishment in making an independent film. Everything's against you; there's no time, and even less money - you bring a bottle of glue, chip in twenty bucks, and hope you all make it through the day. If you manage to finish it and it actually turns out to be pretty good, it's thrilling.
