The panel comprised:

Jeffrey Goodman: I lived in Los Angeles from ’98 to early ’05. I never went to film school. I decided late in the game I wanted to be a filmmaker and the thought of going back to school wasn’t that compelling. So I decided to make short films, make bad short films that didn’t cost much money and cut my teeth on those and learn and grow, each time upping the ante, adding a little more complexity until I thought I was ready to make a feature. So in the course of those seven years in LA I made six short films while also working in production.

Working in production really doesn’t help. If I wanted to be a director I just needed to make movies. One of my favorite pieces of advice anyone ever told me in the film industry was in my first few weeks in LA a guy told me, “Look, when I first moved out here 25 years ago I wanted to be a director but I thought in order to direct I had to be a master of every other domain so I could direct properly. Twenty-five years later I’ve been a grip, an electrician, in the art department and an AD, and I am no closer to being a director than when I started. If you want to be a director, direct, and get talented people that are masters in their craft and trust them.”

After the sixth short film which was 19 minutes long, shot in 16mm in the snow at night, I thought that it doesn’t get much more involved than this for a short film and I was ready to do a feature. The writer of that short asked me about extending that short into a feature.

Over the course of those years [in LA] my mom kept sending me emails about production in Louisiana. I honestly thought it was just a mother’s effort to get her son back home and I ignored the emails for the most part. Finally I cam back to Louisiana in 2004 and talked to some people that had made a feature in Louisiana and decided to move back to Shreveport and raise the money. I moved back and spent about six months putting together a business plan. My plan was to raise 40 units of $50,000, raise all the money in Shreveport, and shoot there as well. Fortunately, I was able to generate some momentum and raise the money. All the money was raised by early 2006, it took me about another year to put the team together, we shot in early 2007 and now we are doing the festival circuit.

Steve Esteb: It’s all about money. I feel like I’ve been raising money every day of my life. I’ve been making movies since ’92 and find myself feeling like a stockbroker most times rather than a filmmaker. There’s a thousand ways to do it. I went the same route as Jeffrey, making shorts at first.

The main thing is that if you have a good script you can attract investors, talented technicians and actors. So if you’re going to make an indie film make sure you have a great script. If you have a great script, it’s easy to raise money. It makes it easier to get named talent attached to the script and once you have one name, even if it’s a has-been name, suddenly investors recognize that name and money starts coming at you. If your film has your friends in it then it feels like an amateur production even if it’s not. Suddenly you add one name and people think, “OK, it’s a real movie” and things start happening. But that’s the hardest thing to do because their agents are designed to keep you away. If you are talking about doing a low-budget movie the actors are not going to be making their usual $2 million salary, which the agent gets 10 percent. So the agents don’t want you to have their client in some low-budget movie where the actor is making scale because then they only get a couple hundred bucks.

But once you have a great script that all changes. They all chase you. For Dirty Politics it was originally budgeted for $400,000 and I hired an LA casting director. Once your film is funded, even if it is low, they’ll put your script up on a Web site where all the agents can read it. They are always trolling for great roles for their clients. Once they see that you start getting attention. In the case of Dirty Politics we started getting a lot of attention and we had to up the budget. Getting that first bit of talent is key but it always is tied to the script, so spend a lot of time on the writing.

Dawn Logsdon: Financing for documentaries is a different ballgame than that for narratives. For the most part docs are funded through grants and television contracts. There are a few surprising things I found along the way with grants. There are a lot of grants available for local people. Louisiana has grants specifically for local filmmakers. It is tricky to get into that loop because while they say they want to help local filmmakers they also want to see someone with national track records. What we found was best to attach a nationally known executive producer. We didn’t have a lot of experience but we attached a known executive producer and it helped convince people that someone would be there to navigate through the pitfalls.

The bad news is that a lot of the little grants you can get locally require a tremendous amount of work. I don’t know how to advise around this because you have to obtain those smaller grants to move up to the larger grants. All I can tell you is there were a couple years where all we were really doing is managing grants. In the end we spent way more money in terms of labor than the grants were worth. So think about the size of he grant, how much work it will take to get it and what you’ll get out of it.

Jeffrey Goodman: It’s funny, when I started making movies I thought I could be a filmmaker and just sit in my room, not talk to anyone, get my film out there, be rich and famous while being anti-social. That was the ideal when I started out. But being a filmmaker forces you to sell and be out there probably as much as a politician. I sold furniture and home security syestems for four years and in many ways that might have been more helpful than going to film school.

Literally, you sell at every stage of the process. You sell to raise the money, you sell to convince actors, you sell to convince crew members, you sell to bands to try and get music clearance, once it is done you sell you film festivals trying to gain acceptance and then you sell to try to get distribution. So the process of selling is endless. Part of you has to be a salesperson to sustain as a filmmaker. It’s probably not what a lot of you want to hear but for those that are considering this path you should be aware of it.

Alexis Fish: SAG recognizes not everyone is going to be making $30 million movies so they put there low budget contracts in place for anything under about $2.5 million so you could use any SAG actor. For a film under $267,000 you could pay an actor about $100 a day. I don’t know if Brad Pitt is going to accept that but you can make that offer and SAG would allow it. So there are contracts that are very pliable for low budget films.

Steve Esteb: Everyone. I know a lot of people worry about showing their script around because the idea may get stolen. That’s valid in some ways but generally I take pride in my writing and I don’t think someone could copy it so easily. So I let everyone read it from people who know nothing about screenwriting to experienced producers. What you look for more than anything in the feedback is a repeat note that pops up in every conversation. This is also true when you are editing your film. If everyone hates the same thing over and over, well then they are probably right and you are probably wrong. If one person points out something, well they may be wrong, but if that comment keeps coming up you have to take it seriously. Sometimes they are not right, but you didn’t do a good enough job of setting up that beat. A lot of writing comes down to set up and a lot of it is to make one thing payoff ‘ the ending. So I let everyone read it and I am looking for those repeat notes that bother everyone.

Jeffrey Goodman: I didn’t write the script but we did get some coverage on it. You hear a lot when you are casting. Part of me doesn’t listen to people. I find that listening to too many people along the way can be very stunting. You want to be open to ideas but you have you have a lot of conviction in what you are doing. If you listen to too many people during the process you’re never going to be able to make a movie.

Dawn Logsdon: Having worked as an editor for 15 years before directing this feature, I think it’s a lot like the relationship between a therapist and patient. What you are trying to do is get inside a director’s head and bring forth their ideas, which frequently haven’t been articulated. It becomes a very intimate part of filmmaking because it is the only time when you are together, alone in a room day after day, week after week. It can become about power. Sometimes you have to persuade a director you are right. I find when there is an impasse between a director and editor it’s best to bring in other people to weigh in.

In terms of who you bring in, you have to be careful doing this at vulnerable stages of the edit. It’s fine to get feedback from the general public at a rough cut but when it comes to structural problems or how to fix it, choose your people wisely. I have a core of five people that I turn. They are people that I am intimidated by, people I think who are more talented filmmakers and whose work I really respect. Fortunately in the documentary world that tends to be reciprocal where people do it for each other and don’t expect to be paid for it. So building those relationships are very important.

Jeffrey Goodman: I remember when we were looking for an editor for The Last Lullaby we interviewed an editor that had great credits, that had films that were nominated for Academy Awards. But when I got on the phone with him we just aren’t clicking, there was no connection. We eventually hung up and my producer is talking about how great this editor is and how we should hire him. I have to explain that I will end up strangling this guy if he’s the editor. There’s no way I can sit in a dark room with this guy for 15 weeks, six days a week. So it’s very important that you connect with your editor. You can have differences of opinion, you don’t want to have yes-men, but you have to have a connection with that person.

Steve Esteb: You’re in a foxhole with the editor. In some ways it’s the most intimate way you can be with a person.

Once you decide to make a film, that is your filter, and everything has to be looked at through that filter. You want people that can see that filter. When people join up with your film they are doing so because of your vision, your vision is your filter. So when you are hiring someone do it with that filter in mind.

With the editor I never shut off an idea. If they have an idea I’ll fully support it and follow it through to the end. But then we’ll take my idea and follow through with it and then we will compare it and see which is working. Of course I’m the director so if there is a tie, I win.

Dawn Logsdon: The worse thing you can do is hire a yes-man as an editor. You want someone who is committed to helping you realize your vision and at the same time, not be afraid of conflict and willing to argue over every single edit if necessary. So it’s a real balancing act. The editor needs to push the director, but push them to find their vision and not their own vision of what they think the film should be.

Also, and this seems self-evident but it keeps coming up, watch the films of the editors you are considering. You can see within a couple films the way their films look and you can start to see a style for anyone that has edited more than two movies. If you have a film that you want to look a certain way and you don’t see it in an editor’s work, they probably don’t do that work, no matter how much they are pushing and saying they can.

Alexis Fish: Work with good people and when you feel something going bad, just walk away. You can feel when a producer is corrupt. Just walk away before things get into a legal realm.

John Murphy: I agree with that in terms of the larger view of projects and getting into legal matters but for someone who is working on a film and it’s a bad situation you just do your job that you agreed to do and see it through. When they call you again for the next job just tell them you are booked for those dates. Don’t tell them they are horrible people or anything. The production community is a small world and you never want to burn bridges or get a bad rep.

My thing of what I wish someone told me is to just get busy. So much time is spent sitting around debating whether to do this project or get involved with that project. Just get busy. Just work. You think you have the rest of your life in front of you, well maybe not. Get that script down, get that reel out. Just get busy.

Jeffrey Goodman: I wish someone had told me I was going to be 35, poor, unmarried, with no guarantee of any future professional career. It probably wouldn’t have changed anything but it may have given me pause.

Jeffrey Goodman: I wish someone had told me not to be intimidated buy the equipment.

Sharon Badal: I wish someone had told me to be prepared for the ups and downs of your career. Sometimes there are going to be really bad times. If it is who you are, you stick it out. I thought it was going to be one wild ride. It was darker than I expected at times.

Steve Esteb: I was at a panel like this years ago when I was 23 years-old and there were all these industry professionals, big dogs in LA, and I raised my hand and asked “Hey do you have any advice for a young screenwriter just starting out?” This lady, who is very famous, looks at me and replies “Quit now.”

I was so pissed off at the time and then I saw the same thing happen at another panel. I thought how awful to just piss on people’s dreams. But now that I am 50 and I’ve made five films and written dozens of screenplays and gone through development hell and all that, I totally get what their point was. If you have a plan B, take it. If you have a day job that you like pretty good, take it, because this is not for the weak. This has got to be in your blood. This is not a job, it is who you are. If my wife asked me to quit the film business I would tell her, “why not just take my leg,” because it’s part of me. I’m not something else, it is who I am. But don’t do this unless it is a matter of life and death. If you have to do it then you’re in the right place.

John Murphy: I think it should be said that it is a lot more interesting than selling insurance. Yeah there are ups and downs and sometimes you don’t know when your going to work next, but it’s a really interesting life. There’s a constant input of creative ideas and different situations. You’re not going to get rich but if you want to make money be a lawyer. But it can be a really interesting way to spend your life.