But he also nudges filmmakers the other way, a little further from the mainstream. Even the indie-est directors, he said, may internalize the demands of the industry and find themselves trying to make the movie they think a studio would want them to make. “There’s so much pressure now, and they get to a point in the proc­ess where they start playing defense, worrying too much about trying to be commercial,” he said. “So I find I’m constantly telling our filmmakers that it’s my pressure, not theirs. Relax, play offense and go make your movie. I have my notes and ideas, and yes, we need movies we can sell, but we need good movies to sell, and fear isn’t conducive to good filmmaking.”

Playing offense artistically often means letting a film violate some Hollywood expectations, letting it be a little slower or more abstract or bookish or otherwise alien-seeming than what’s in the multiplex — in short, weirder. “Weird” is one of his keywords, a crucial element of his business model.

Of course, Focus movies aren’t high-art provocations like “Gertrud” or the kind of avant-garde films that Schamus shows in class: Ernie Gehr’s “Serene Velocity,” Stan Brakhage’s “Window Water Baby Moving.” The indie formula, which can be as narrow as the action-movie formula, calls for just enough weirdness to distinguish a movie from standard Hollywood fare but not so much that it slides out of the realm of commercial cinema and into the margins shared by the art film and mutant bottom-feeding forms of pulp cinema too bizarre to reach a mass audience.

David Bordwell, the distinguished film scholar, says of Schamus: “He’s very good at figuring out the sweet spot, that middle range where independent cinema has to be. Ideally you have some stars, strong content, often from good books, and it needs to be offbeat enough to seem fresh, but it has to be still recognizably part of a familiar cinematic tradition, something challenging but not too challenging.”

The moderate weirdness that puts a Focus movie in the sweet spot bespeaks an ethos as well as a bottom-line strategy. “There’s a certain subversiveness at work in Schamus,” Eugene Hernandez, a founder of Indiewire.com, says. “With ‘Brokeback’ and ‘Milk,’ for instance, there’s more to it than an acclaimed film that has Oscar potential.” In each case, Focus got the most out of a committed gay audience while marketing the film as a widely accessible story with a universal theme. While scrupulously avoiding displays of righteousness, Schamus clearly enjoyed doing great box office and winning awards while putting homosexual characters center stage in otherwise traditional renditions of the Western and the biopic.

Schamus, who is forthright about his lefty politics, discounts any crude ideological intent in making queer movies, or in, say, distributing a road movie about the young Che Guevara (“The Motorcycle Diaries”). Rather, he says, he is drawn — and audiences who think of themselves as outside the mainstream are drawn — to stories of outsiders. “The story of America, of Western culture, is often the story of queer culture, of being Jewish” — Schamus is Jewish — “of being outsiders and refugees who find a place that is the not-place.” His personal experience, he says, reinforces his taste for such stories. “I grew up basically covered with psoriasis,” he said, “and I skipped grades, so I do tend to gravitate to the kid in the corner, who, incidentally, is most likely to grow up to be one of our directors.”