Budgeting films for what they are, not for how much change you can shake out of people’s pockets

The given wisdom in indie filmmaking circles is that your film budget should be roughly as much money as you can possibly get… with a little bit more added on top that you’ll worry about later. If you have a meeting with a potential investor, your filmmaker friends and filmmaking teachers will all advise you to ask for as much money as you possibly can… after all, the more you spend on your film the better it will be, right?

This is all great advice if your chief aim is to separate suckers from their money, which certainly is the primary goal of many film producers–and who am I to criticize? But that philosophy is also a relic from a previous generation where you packed as much production value as you could into a film (usually an artsy, feel good film about the triumph of the human spirit) so you could flip it for a huge return-on-investment at a film festival… and we’ve already exhaustively discussed how badly that turns out for 99.9% of films and filmmakers. It’s barely even an option on the table anymore, so why not get with the cool kids on the next big thing… spending money wisely (even Other People’s Money) so you can turn a reasonable profit and re-invest in more productions, grow your body of work, expand your audience over time, and increase your budgets as the size of your audience allows. Sure, this isn’t the sexiest business model in the world especially for a pastime as narcissistic as filmmaking… but you could do a lot worse than to spend money wisely these days.

The reason this topic is on my mind is because of a few comments I’ve seen popping up around the blogiverse after we posted the trailer for our upcoming illustrated film Godkiller. Many people seem to be asking the question of whether we devised the illustrated film format because we think it’d be a cool form of filmmaking or if we devised it because we couldn’t get the money to make a completely animated movie.

It’s a weird question because it presumes that every filmmaking decision isn’t a mix of creative and economic choices. Movies are really expensive to make and really risky, you can’t make a creative decision without weighing the economic impact on the film.

According to IMDb, the budget for The Hangover was $35M. Well, why wasn’t it $200M like the budget for Transformers 2? Is Warner Brothers a bunch of pussies because they could only come up with $35M for The Hangover while Dreamworks shelled out $200M for Transformers 2? Maybe, but probably not… it’s probably a little more complicated than that.

On the one hand, it would cost us millions to make Godkiller as a fully animated feature film. So the short answer is, no we didn’t have a few mill laying around to make Godkiller look like Final Fantasy VII. But as business-people who have to justify the money we spend and actually earn it back on the films themselves since we can’t sell air conditioners and Blu-ray player to make up our shortfalls, I wouldn’t want to spend millions on Godkiller even if I could. Why not? Don’t I believe in it? Sure, I believe that it’s a totally rad movie for its audience. But it’s not a totally rad movie for everybody in the world. And I don’t want it to be. Godkiller is really fucking weird and it’s made for weirdos. When I write for studio production companies, Development Hell consists of rewrite after rewrite removing any element that won’t work for the widest possible audience. That’s fine because those movies will cost tens of millions if not hundreds of millions and the studios need to sell them to everybody on the planet in order to make their money back. I don’t want to have that problem when producing for Halo-8… the great part about creative control is having the right to create for my audience, not for everybody I hate plus my audience. We take on so many risks at Halo-8 that it’s only worth it to us if we can make weird movies for weird people. And in order to do that effectively and continue doing it, we have to keep our budgets low. After all, our audience is more likely to download our movies on Pirate Bay than haul ass out to a store and buy the DVD, so just how irresponsible do you expect us to be?

All of that equivocating and over-justifying does not in any way diminish how much I creatively adore the illustrated film format, nor does it diminish the brutal amount of backbreaking work we put into producing these things. It’s great to love a storytelling format you’ve developed, and it’s even better to love a storytelling format you can afford to take creative risks with. If we’re going to be creatively daring, experimental, controversial, confrontational, and subversive for a long time into the future we also have to be smart with our money… it’s no coincidence that the same Wall Street firms who’ve been financing ridiculously expensive independent films for the past ten years are choking to death on debt. Tinseltown has always been about separating suckers from their money, we think there’s a better way.