What Makes a Movie Commercial?

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As I’m navigating the indie filmmaking process and understanding more than ever that everything is connected and evolving in a more-or-less organic way, I’m paying attention to advice and tips from seasoned filmmakers and producers with a brand new ear if you will.

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There are two people I’ve mentioned before in this blog that have shared their wisdom in more than one useful ways, and they indie producer Christine Vachon and indie filmmaker Joe Swanberg. They both talked about their craft and you can watch their related full-length videos by clicking on their names, but here I will make a mash-up of their conversations, that highlighted an aspect of filmmaking that seems so obvious to me now, but I had not put clear words on before: the commercial aspect of a film.

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From the producer perspective, here is what Vachon says:

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“What makes a movie commercial is really, very, specific, it’s if it makes its money back, it returns to its investors. So you can make a movie that’s out there, and crazy and for a very tiny audience, but if you make it for the right amount of money, it’s a commercial film.So one of the big things that I have to think about when I’m making a film, when I’m deciding to get behind a movie is that I have to think about its makability. And it’s makability isn’t just like “How do I go out there to craft it?”, that’s way down the line, it’s “Will I get it financed and why?”

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That’s really the trick. How do you balance all the elements that make a movie makable/commercial/you guys going to see it.

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That is what I do, try to figure out how to make the most commercial version— now when I say commercial version, you guys might be like “hoooo ‘commercial!!” but what I mean is the version most people will want to see. Even like taking Carol. I don’t know if Carol would work as well as it does if it didn’t have two movie stars. They are real movie stars, you want to see them, you want to be in their world. So would Carol have worked with actors who maybe would have been just as good but wouldn’t have had that kind of like fooom?”

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And then, here is what Swanberg said about Drinking Buddies, which was his

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“(Drunking Buddies was) entirely career changing, and life changing, and what was interesting about it was that I didn’t do anything different than what I had been doing on all these other movies. Just that there were famous people in it.

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And this is like a weird thing about humanity, or how our brain works, but when you see famous people doing something, it looks realer and better to you and you just like it and trust it more. It’s like a gatekeeper quality to famous people.

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What’s crazy about Drinking Buddies, is that looking back on it now you’re like “Who the fuck wouldn’t want to finance an indie movie with Olivia Wilde, Anna Kendrick, Jake Johnson and Ron Livingston.” That seems like a no brainer but it was just really hard to get made and the lack of a script made it that much harder to get made. But when we finally did it, and the movie came out, it was really interesting to observe, the change of response to my work and who I was and suddenly it felt like, fifteen features in, people were like ‘oh yeah that guy is a filmmaker’. And then this really interesting thing happened is that then everybody wanted to give me money because I made a movie that made real money.”

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What interested me and stopped me when listening to both Vachon and Swanberg is that, by Vachon’s definition, Swanberg did make commercial films. The feature films he made before Drinking Buddies, cost very little and recouped one way or another. But the real moment he could jump scale, and reach out to a bigger audience was when he got recognisable faces, and I love his point about stars being gate keepers quality. And that’s where Vachon’s point joins Swanberg’s in that Todd Haynes needed big stars to take Carol to the next level and thus to a viable level.

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I talk about this point in the latest Film Log’s episode , but what seems clear to me is that unless you are either shooting Mumblecore style and/or you are going for a niche genre such as horror, that will bring its own fanbase, an indie film will need a quality casting to not only be commercial (i.e. recoup) but also to push the filmmaker’s career to the next level.

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There are some examples that will contradict that, and again, I’ll recommend watching either the Film Log (for the short version) or listening to Christine Vachon’s talk (for the longer one) to understand why in some instances it makes sense not to have ‘recognisable faces’, but think Derek Ciafrance’s Blue Valentine, (Ryan Gosling & Michelle Williams), Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (Scarlett Johansson), Cary Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nations (Idris Elba), would those movies, even if they had retained the same quality, have had garnered the same attention from the press echoing it to the public if they didn’t have the faces attached? We will never know, of course, but it’s safe to say it didn’t hurt them.

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Unless your film kills it in the high level festival circuits, of course. And then… it might not matter at all.

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Food for thoughts.