The Most Expensive Advice I Ever Took as an Indie Producer

Does Name Talent Actually Matter in Indie Film?

People love giving advice in filmmaking. Usually for free and often with absolute confidence. Some of that advice is genuinely useful but some takes years to realise it wasn’t meant for your situation at all.

One of the most expensive lessons I learned as a producer came from trying to make an indie film feel more legitimate through a bigger budget and recognisable cast. It is a film called Choir Girl, one I produced years ago while still living in Australia.

When I first developed the budget with the director, the thinking was relatively simple: keep it lean, make something intimate and character-driven, budget no more than 300K. 

But then we got some advice from old hand producers who had been doing this much longer than I had at that point. If we were going to do this properly, we should structure the production to qualify for the Australian Producer Offset. We should cast names. We should release the film in cinemas.

For those unfamiliar, the Producer Offset is an Australian government incentive designed to support Australian screen production. It can be incredibly valuable, returning up to 40% of qualifying Australian production expenditure (QAPE) for feature films that receive a theatrical release. Part of the qualifying requirements was a minimum spend threshold of 500k in Australia. 

We considered it and eventually decided to give it a crack. 

Suddenly, we were working with a much bigger budget on a much bigger production. Everything was union rates (another qualifying requirement), the crew grew much larger than originally planned, we moved into the renowned Docklands Studios to build our sets and establish a production base, and instead of being on set day in and day out like I was used to, I spent most of the production locked in an office dealing with permits, unions, budgets, payroll, tax and superannuation alongside the production accountant. Not a lot of fun.

But before that, we went in search of that name talent that would attract Australian distributors willing to release the film in cinemas. Yet each talent we approached (often through their agents) would end up saying no, even if there was initial interest. The cast we ended up with were somewhat known in Australia (and perhaps the UK) through their starring roles in television soaps. They were all super talented and a delight to work with. But they were not the type of names to significantly increase sales.

In the end, each Australian distributor said no to a theatrical release. We eventually released the film on streaming through American aggregator Bitmax (allowing us to qualify for a 20% rebate instead) but were the extra costs associated with pursuing legitimacy worth it?

Today, I make films in the budget range of 15k to 30k. Choir Girl did reasonably well on streaming, but I also have a few micro-budget titles that also do reasonably well. So I cannot honestly say that massive budget spend was worth it.

Years later, I came across an industry analysis by Naomi McDougall Jones and Liz Manashil based on financial data submitted by over 100 independent films released since 2018. It wasn’t an academic study and shouldn’t be treated as definitive, but one finding caught my attention.

The analysis looked at independent film financial budgets and outcomes and used IMDb STARmeter as a rough proxy for actor recognition. They found profitability tended to cluster at two extremes. Either films cast genuinely famous actors that were in the IMDB top 100 – names that unlock financing, press, pre-sales, distributor attention and actual audience awareness – or they cast largely unknown actors and kept costs low enough that recoupment remained achievable.

The difficult place appeared to be somewhere in the middle. Actors recognisable enough to increase costs but not recognisable enough to fundamentally change audience behaviour. Reading that, I immediately thought of Choir Girl.

Did we accidentally lock ourselves into a strange no man's land? Too expensive to function like a true indie? Not commercial enough to function like a mainstream release? After all, this was still a black-and-white arthouse thriller about an underage prostitution ring. We hadn't exactly chosen the easiest film in the world to market, and now we had a much steeper hill to climb if we wanted to recoup.

It’s funny, because even today when you pitch films to distributors one of the first questions they ask is who is in the cast. Many still operate on the assumption a somewhat recognisable name is better than no name (and maybe it is for them) but the numbers suggest it is not necessarily better for a producer trying to build a sustainable filmmaking career.

I’ve become much more suspicious of the phrase: “This will make the film easier to sell.” Because what I’ve learned is that sometimes people really mean: “This will make the film feel more legitimate.” And those are not the same thing.

There are exceptions, of course.

Genuinely bankable actors can still unlock financing, distribution and audience awareness but I think that list of who is genuinely bankable gets shorter every year. 

Even then, I sometimes wonder whether the industry puts more emphasis on cast than audiences do. Horror is a good example. Many of the genre's biggest success stories weren't sold on actors at all. They were sold on a killer trailer, a memorable villain, a clever premise, or word of mouth. Films like Terrifier and the recent breakout hit Obsession became events because audiences wanted to experience them, not because of who was in the cast.

I’m also not anti-paying people fairly. I just think independent filmmakers sometimes overestimate how much audiences care who is in a film and underestimate how much budgets change the economics.

So today I ask a different question. Not will this actor improve the film? But will this actor improve the film enough to justify increasing the budget and the amount of money the film needs to earn?

And while I don’t regret Choir Girl, if someone gave me the same advice about budget, legitimacy and name talent today, I’d ask a lot more questions before saying yes.

References

Producer Data: The Numbers Don’t Lie (The Truth about Independent Film Revenue)

Written by Ivan Malekin