I’m putting together the finance plan for a feature I’m co-producing, Circus of the Dead, and I keep coming back to a line that isn’t on the spreadsheet. The audience.
I think distributors are asking themselves the wrong question. For decades, the job has come down to one thing: which completed films should we buy? A film premieres at a
Over the past twelve months, I’ve spent more time talking to private film investors than I have sitting with cinema audiences. That wasn’t intentional. It’s just what happens when you’re
Next month I’ll be pitching a feature film to private investors. It’s a very different room to the ones most Australian producers were trained for. I’ve learned that there’s a
A few days ago, I went to set up a Letterboxd page for Wolf Creek Legacy. Except, someone had already done it. At first, I assumed it had come through
For a long time, documentaries sat just outside the main game. They were respected, occasionally celebrated, but rarely treated as central to how the industry built value. Scripted projects carried
Most indie films don’t fail creatively. They fail because they don’t pay. You feel it in rooms now. Projects don’t stall on story or casting. They stall when someone asks
Creators are starting to decide what gets made. Not entirely. Not in every case. But often enough that it’s changing how projects get financed, packaged and picked up. For a
For decades, the film industry has operated around a single moment. The greenlight. A script is developed. Talent is attached. A package is built. Then it goes into a room
Why standalone films are becoming structurally fragile