Last September, The Hollywood Reporter made waves when it reported that Christopher Nolan was getting $20 million upfront and 20 percent of the gross for Dunkirk, the beautiful war drama already deemed an Oscar contender by film critics. At the time, that staggering figure was enough to send film bloggers into overdrive, re-reporting the figure and declaring it the largest filmmaker payday since Peter Jackson’s Scrooge McDuck moment in the early-aughts, when he was reportedly paid the same for the same trio of duties (writer, producer, director) on 2005’s King Kong.

Though an eight-digit payday is the stuff struggling filmmakers’ dreams are made of, a source close to Dunkirk’s production told Vanity Fair this week that the filmmaker actually accepted next-to-nothing upfront in exchange for a sizable backend percentage. (As of now, Dunkirk is projected to make $40 million its opening weekend.) For further explanation, Vanity Fair reached out to a few salary wheelers and dealers in Hollywood, who broke down the complex economics of modern-day director paychecks. Ahead, the most surprising takeaways, including why the world’s best filmmakers are probably not getting paid the hefty chunk of change you thought—and why Michael Bay isn’t as hot of a hire as his $2 billion box-office career gross would have you believe.

The Legends

Even master filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola are dealing with the grim realities of today’s commercial, superhero-crazed Hollywood climate. Last year, Scorsese’s $40 million Paramount period drama Silence grossed a measly $7 million worldwide. Though 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street was a hit, his third and most-recent film, the inventive 3-D adventure Hugo, was such a production headache—its budget spiraling from $100 million to $156 million—that producer Graham King publicly took the blame and confessed that his attitude toward filmmaking had changed because of it. “Now when I read a script, I think—what does the audience want to see? In the past, I was only thinking about what I wanted to make. . . . I don’t want to live on the edge anymore.” Thankfully, the experience did not seem to sway Scorsese. Though he has recently ventured into more lucrative television waters—to executive produce Boardwalk Empire and co-create Vinyl—he did make the aforementioned Silence, a film about 17th-century Jesuit priests.

Coppola, meanwhile, essentially excused himself from studio filmmaking altogether, focusing his energy on his lifestyle brand (under which he sells wine, runs resorts, and operates cafés) and self-financing his movies when he does make them.

The way Coppola sees it, by minimizing risk, studios are handicapping themselves from evolving the art form of film.

“An essential element of any art is risk,” Coppola recently told 99u. “If you don’t take a risk, then how are you going to make something really beautiful that hasn’t been seen before? I always like to say that cinema without risk is like having no sex and expecting to have a baby. You have to take a risk.”

Tell that to the shareholders, though. Hollywood’s studios are owned by massive corporations, which don’t care what Oscar-winning auteur directed the film that put their budget in the red.

“At the shareholders meeting, they don’t care that David Fincher or Martin Scorsese directed the movie,” said a source. “All they see is a huge financial loss, which they cannot have.”

There is one master filmmaker still able to have his proverbial cake and eat it too—the massive paycheck and artistic breathing room—though.