Independent Film Financing Quotes

I'm talking a lot on financing in the Masterclass and I know what it means to because I had to finance my first films, all of them, and I earned my money as a welder in a steel factory doing night shifts while I was still in high school during the day.

It's so hard to raise money for independent films and the fact of the matter is that the bigger my star or whatever is, as a result of doing bigger pictures, the easier it is for me to get money for my own projects.

I see very small movies being financed by crowdfunding. If you're a well-known actor or celebrity of some sort, you can probably raise between one and two million. I don't have that kind of cult [following].

To make a low-budget independent is not easy work.

You can get money and make a really cheap movie. You can, from independent financers who are just giving you money to support artists. This is what was happening in the '90s, and I was very fortunate to be a part of that.

I'm just thinking of 2001, which I think is the most expensive independent film ever made - which is great, someday I hope I will do one. But I know the parameters when I got onto this project - I have to take care of everyone, make sure that they are all on board, and this process interests me.

I've talked about this a lot, but 'The Witch' took four years to finance because there were certain compromises I wouldn't make.

In the '90s, indie movies could get financing, because financers gave money straight to directors... Now it's a different system. Indie movies got co-opted by the studio system.

Im gonna try to pay for CLERKS III myself. As much as I love the crowd-funding model, thats an advancement in indie film that belongs to the next generation of artists. I started on my own dime, and if Im allowed, I should finish on my own dime.

Some of the subject matters that I like to make stories about are definitely not inherently commercial. So I have to look for a very special kind of financing and go down a very gentle path in order to make my films, as do basically all social-realist filmmakers. It's a long process.

I've done a couple of movies for scale, and it's the only way to get a lot of these independent movies made. The actors negotiate deals where they're given just enough money to live on during the filming, but then they participate in the back-end. If the movie suddenly makes a gazillion dollars, we'll participate in that profit.