Step 5: Take DIY to the extreme.

Though Swanberg attended film school, he decided to ignore all of the traditional means of production that he was taught were necessary for a career in filmmaking, rejecting what had largely been a permission-based system that required outside money to fund every project. And luckily, Swanberg began working when digital cameras became cheap and available, enabling him to pursue his own avenue of filmmaking.

Swanberg: "We're living in a time right now where it's really very much possible for anybody to make a movie, and I think that ends up being advantageous for the kinds of artists who aren't perfectionists. It's always very easy to talk yourself out of doing something ... I've had to force myself into being the kind of filmmaker that would rather make the movies than make the perfect version of the movie. And what you discover is that they're always better and more interesting and different than what you thought they'd be anyway."

Making films independently goes beyond budgetary concerns, as well; Swanberg is often not just the writer-director of his films, but the cinematographer and editor too.

Swanberg: "I have a very hard time separating all of the different jobs in my head. It's a lot easier for me to move quickly when I'm the editor because I know when we've got something that we're going to use, and same with being the cinematographer. In the kind of circumstance where it's just a few actors and maybe a sound person ... I can just set the camera up on a tripod and frame it, or I could try and explain to somebody standing next to me how I would want them to set the camera up on a tripod. There aren't enough moving parts to involve another person.

"Adam Wingard shot a few of my movies that were that small. That was a situation where I really specifically wanted his eye taking the shots. But with All the Light in the Sky, it was a movie that I knew so well in my head, it was really just the natural choice for me to shoot it as well."

Adams: "When we started shooting Silver Bullets, we were just shooting in my apartment. Joe would show up with a backpack on his back that had all the equipment he was going to use, and holding the camera in his hand. And he would just shoot stuff, and kneel in the hallway of my studio apartment with his laptop and just edit right there. That was his training."

Swanberg: "I can understand why David Fincher doesn't want to hold the camera in his own hand and kneel in the hallway editing his own movie, but for everybody else, it's a great way to learn the craft and learn about yourself and start to build a body of work. I mostly have retained those habits, even when I'm working on slightly bigger movies ... They're going to be techniques that I use for the rest of my career, no matter what the movie is."

The appeal of shooting digitally is largely how much cheaper it is than shooting on film, where every second of every take is captured forever on very expensive film stock; it is ironic then that one of Swanberg's signature traits — doing only one or two takes — doesn't necessarily take advantage of that.

At the same time, the fact that he shoots only minimal takes does make shooting on film ultimately feasible. His next movie, Happy Christmas — which stars Kendrick, Lena Dunham, Melanie Lynskey, and Mark Webber — marked the first time he shot on film stock since his film school days.

Swanberg: "I've done it enough now [that] going in, I do have a good sense of how much I'm going to shoot. The math sort of made sense in a way that I knew I wasn't going to spend a small fortune. And actually, the cost of the film stock and processing and stuff wasn't an insurmountable obstacle, knowing that I was only going to do two takes of everything. And the other reason is the fact that it's not going to be an option for very much longer, that it's going away. And I wanted to make sure that I did that one more time before it was impossible."

Happy Christmas will be Swanberg's second big-name feature in the last two years. His first, Drinking Buddies, helped his unique style gain mainstream recognition and an A-list cast. Many hailed it as a big step for the director, but to Swanberg's collaborators, that's dismissive of his other work.

Takal: "Joe forced them to take his process more seriously by putting people in the movie that 'legitimized' his work to a large swath of the population. I think critics were calling it a 'big breakthrough' for him for that reason — he was working on a larger platform and succeeded at bringing his style and his process to more established actors. But I wouldn't ascribe a value judgment to the work as 'better' (or 'worse') than his previous films.

If I'm being perfectly honest, I don't know that the actual content of the film is better or more accessible than, say Nights and Weekends [Swanberg's 2008 film with Greta Gerwig]. I think people are responding to the celebrities in the film. They can't dismiss it as 'a guy making movies with his friends with a cheap camera.'"