“When people come together as fellow human beings for the love of the work and not as wolf and sheep, they are generally good to one another.”

In between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I worked an incredibly boring warehouse job for slightly more than minimum wage. It was a thankless gig made bearable by amiable co-workers. One of them, a gentleman several years my senior, was waiting to hear back from NYU’s prestigious film school. We became fast friends, and since our job was easy, we had plenty of time to shoot the breeze regarding all things cinema. I was an eager novice at the time and he was happy to have a sounding board. Not only did he introduce me to a heavy dosage of foreign, independent, cult classic, or otherwise off-the-beaten-path films, he also let me peek behind the curtain at the mockumentary he was in the process of making. I didn’t know what to make of his little project at the time, but I realize now that he was engaging in what Cody Clarke calls “truly independent filmmaking.” (He’s since graduated from NYU and is developing a feature at the moment.)

Maybe my cultural exploration would have trended in the direction of cinema anyway, but I think a lot of it is due to that brief friendship. I ended up collecting a minor in film studies while getting my engineering degree, and I’ve since dreamed up too many half-stories and hazily constructed scenes in my head while plugging away at my desk job.

But actually making a film always seemed like a pipe dream and I’ve subconsciously steered myself away from getting in too deep. I haven’t seriously tried to psychoanalyze myself, but it’s probably a mixture of fear of failure and what others will think, plus a creeping doom sort of feeling that I’d spend years on something and be forced by life circumstances to leave it unfinished. I wrote a few partial drafts of a script, started taking photographs to get a feel for shot composition. But there was too much outside of my own purview that I would either need to outsource or learn. Except I couldn’t afford to outsource and I wasn’t willing to subject others to my learning process. Actors, cameramen, editors, sound guys, and on and on and on—I’ve watched enough behind-the-scenes documentaries to know that dozens if not hundreds of people are involved in the making of almost every film. Who was going to trust me to be the orchestrator of all that? So I just shoved the whole dream into the darkest corner of my mind.

In the meantime, I picked up film criticism. That kind of scratches the itch, but kind of makes it worse too. I’ve recorded some music (using a guitar sold to me secondhand by the NYU friend). Those are healthy outlets. It’s much easier to finish a song or a film review than to actually make a film. But the desire is still there to do a film. And maybe avoiding it is worse than the worst of the alternatives.

It may be that I just need encouragement. Not the “follow your dreams” kind, but the “hey, man, it’s been two months and you haven’t added a single word to your script, what’s up?” kind.

On the good old twitter—a hellscape with occasional goodness mixed in—I followed a swell gentleman named Thomas J. Bevan (until he got banned). He’s one of the good guys. He offers real writing advice (as opposed to thousands of posers who just spew repetitious platitudes) and gives excellent recommendations on literature and film. In late 2020 he posted a review of a book called Kill The Lion by Cody Clarke. I sent in a question and got a reply from the author, who it turns out is an incredibly considerate person with an undying passion for filmmaking. Like me, he had a dream of making films. But he actually had the audacity to pick up a camera and shoot one. Just like that. His first film, Shredder, came out in 2011. He’s since made seven more features, including one that was filmed with a $0 production budget during the 2020 COVID lockdown.

The question that I asked on twitter was basically along the lines of “Even if I can do everything myself on the technical end (I can’t, yet), if I want to make a film with more than one person in it, how do I convince other people to do it with me, considering I have an empty portfolio?” His answer was to tell me that “truly independent filmmaking” is to Hollywood as consensual sex is to prostitution—that making an independent feature is done for love, not money.

Now, it’s probably unfair to say that every funded film is created by such a profane act, but it is true that the Hollywood system is heavily profit-driven. That’s a good motive if you’re manufacturing toasters but not if you’re trying to produce art. Every now and then a gem will slip through the cracks, but by and large the undiscerning consumer is faced with endless streams of utter garbage. We are, at the moment, stuck in a vicious cycle—dumb content leads to dulled taste, which leads to dumber content, which leads a further narrowing of the acceptable taste range, &c. At this point, the vast majority of popular content is half-baked, repackaged nothingness that people watch simply because it came up on an algorithm or someone they follow on social media was paid to promote it.

But Clarke is optimistic. Consider that you, the person reading this, likely have a video camera in your pocket. If not, you know someone who does. You probably also have access to a computer and free software that would allow you to edit a video file. If you’re tired of superhero movies and buff celebrities and green screen and generic plots or whatever, it is entirely within the realm of possibility for you to go make the film you want to see. Hollywood, the historical gatekeepers of film, don’t have the power to gatekeep that they once did. Sure, they still have exponentially more money than the average joe who’s doing this as a hobby, but their predisposition toward profit has steered the ship so far off course, artistically speaking, that there is a dearth of art in cinema. Heck, if you ask Scorsese, he’d say most popular movies today don’t count as “cinema” at all! It is this void that Clarke and a handful of other “folk filmmakers” are seeking to fill with truly independent films.

Clarke goes so far as to say that cinema is in its infancy. The claim seems bold at first glance, but there’s truth to it. At its purest, filmmaking should be like any other artform—a painter with his brush and palette, a writer with his pencil and paper, a musician and his instrument. But that’s never been how filmmaking has worked, historically. The tools were cost-prohibitive, allowing studios to be gatekeepers, and by virtue of that they also controlled the direction of the films to a large degree. When they became available, consumer cameras were viable for home videos, but not for feature length films that you wanted to present to a paying audience.

But it’s no longer correct to view that system as the only one capable of producing a legitimate form of cinema. Now that the “pencil and paper” of cinema are cheap and ubiquitous enough that we all own them, anyone can make a film. You don’t need a $50k camera and a $10k lens and expensive film. You can shoot digital on a relatively inexpensive camera and edit through trial and error with unlimited undos. Clarke recommends buying quality equipment (and claims to still use most of the gear he bought for his first feature to this day) but such equipment can be had for a fraction of what it used to cost. (And in case anyone is curious about the legitimacy of the claim that you can make a film on your smart phone, check out Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane.)

Now, it’s highly unlikely that you or I are going to spend one weekend brainstorming and then go make Reservoir Dogs the next. The point isn’t that we are now all capable of being hotshot once-in-a-generation directors. The point is that there is no longer a barrier to entry. In fact, we are encouraged to forsake the system and all its baggage entirely. Just like countless amateur authors can upload their ebook to Amazon because the means of creation and distribution are so cheap, so the truly independent filmmaker can now work in the medium without asking for permission. Viewed from this angle, almost all of my fears are rendered irrelevant. I can work with people who are on my team, making a film for the love of the game. I don’t need to think in terms of earning potential because I won’t spend a lot to make it. With the wool removed from my eyes, I feel the way that I imagine a domesticated tiger feels when it’s released into the wild. I have the fundamental tools and instincts to thrive but have never tried using them before. It’s a brave new world.

The book is split into two parts—the first is Clarke’s impassioned wake up call that details the corruption of Hollywood, the affordability of independent cinema, and the marketplace for such. That’s mostly what my review has been in response to. The second, longer part is a practical “how to” guide for everything that goes into making a film: brainstorming, adapting, writing, revising, casting, lighting, blocking, filming, editing, sound, promotion, distribution, &c. I won’t go into detail on that here, but should I attempt to make something of my own it will prove invaluable.

Clarke, to his credit, has never budged from his ‘truly independent’ mantra. His eight films have a combined budget of something like $5k. He leads by example (and now through this written manifesto) but ultimately encourages the reader to use the ubiquity of the means to find one’s own voice in the medium. Reading Kill The Lion and interacting with the author on Twitter has been like discovering that I have an enthusiastic cornerman on my squad who’s a veteran of the sport.