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Bumpy road for features and new DP's ahead.


Adam Frisch FSF

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What's his secret? No one knows for sure? But he's very good at the "hustle" and he doesn't sit around waiting for his phone to ring. I think all young DOPs could take a page out of Steve's playbook. One thing he does not do is complain about a lack of work!

 

 

Hope that wasn't directed at me, I'm not complaining at all about a lack of work. I'm simply agreeing that there is a misconception among certain types in this business that one can praise and move up a director who did an excellent short or indie film but one had better drop their DP like a sack of potatoes cause they can't handle a bigger budget.

 

I also spoke with Kevin Smith about this during a Q n A of Clerks 2. He had the same problem. Dave Klein shot everything up to Chasing Amy. Then he was dropped on Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back cause the budget was too big. Kevin vowed never again and fought hard to get him back on Clerks 2. Now I think he's in the ASC.

 

It's just an unnecessary barrier of entry to getting past Tier 1 that all DP's must face. Someone has to take a chance on them. Talent and determination and people skills are a given to success. But even all that will only go so far in the film world. There is a huge component of luck and timing. Unfortunately, even when that comes together, others must make that leap of faith if they see it that way or just use common sense and realize it's a smart move to pair a new director with their DP who helped get them the opportunity in the first place.

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What's his secret? No one knows for sure? But he's very good at the "hustle" and he doesn't sit around waiting for his phone to ring. I think all young DOPs could take a page out of Steve's playbook. One thing he does not do is complain about a lack of work!

 

 

Hope that wasn't directed at me, I'm not complaining at all about a lack of work.

 

No not at all, DOPs and film crew people in general. People do spend a lot of time on here bemoaning the difficulties in finding work. And then there's Steve....working non-stop. And I'm not exaggerating. Plus he's a young guy and not an ASC member or anything like that. He's doing commercials, TV, and independent features, all at the same time. Take a look at his credits.

 

Like I said, I don't know what his secret is? He defies what people like Phil Rhodes say about working in film. And he's not based in LA either, Toronto.

 

R,

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Toronto, and Canada is 1/10th the size of the USA and half the size of the UK.

 

Well Phil as a UK citizen you can travel and work freely throughout the EU, so there are some other options, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Prague. I met a number of UK film people in Prague when I was there last Summer.

 

R,

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And as soon as I speak French, German, Italian and Czech, I'm sure they'll all be pleased to have me.

 

The universal work permit part of the european union is a catastrophic disaster for workers in the more attractive parts of the union in which to work (of which the UK is, unaccountably, one). This is so obvious it hardly bears repeating. It is particularly problematic for English-speaking people because the only countries which widely speak English (principally Australia, New Zealand, the US, and Canada) are not part of the EU and have immigration policies that effectively forbid British people from working there, but where the opposite is not true. The number of people in London on ancestry visas from these places is vast, but the history of the countries concerned makes it unlikely that any given brit will have an Australian aunt.

 

The amount of this taking places has shelved off during the economic collapse, but it's still a factor and presumably will pick up again later. Native Brits are being utterly screwed by this situation.

 

And please, let's not have any criticism of English-speaking people as being unwilling to learn languages. This is the oldest plaint in the book and it's hard to agree with: I have heard it - in my recent memory - from an Austrian, several French people, Spaniards, Dutch, people from Japan, China, Thailand and the Czech Republic. They say "Oh well, you English, you never learn languages," by which they actually mean "you didn't learn my native language". To make all those people happy I'd have to have learned eight languages, in a couple of instances very complicated languages, whereas they all learned a single moderately simple one.

 

What's more, if you grow up in a non-English-speaking country and recognised that English is very widely used in the developed world, it is a fairly obvious choice to learn English. If you grew up already knowing English, it is very much not obvious what the best thing to learn is. One would be required to accurately predict which languages will be of use later - which is impossible, as a five-year-old child whose interests are not yet formed - and then learn a language in complete isolation from the country where it is spoken, which is almost impossible. Dutch people learn English because their popular culture is saturated with it. I was forced to attend French and Spanish lessons at school with the suspicion that as a teenager I would never need them, that I would never use them, and therefore never learn them to a useful degree, and I was absolutely right. Determination to learn a language is not enough; daily exposure and reason to use it is necessary, and in an English-speaking country, that exposure is not going to exist because it is not necessary.

 

So more power to right-brain people who have the ability to learn languages in adulthood, but they are, sadly, the only people in the UK really assisted by the EU. It's certainly of no use whatsoever to me. Working on a very big show where there's enough money being saved that it's worth having flocks of translators hanging around is one thing; the low end crap most people round here do will not be able to do this.

 

Anyway, this is a huge digression. Back to the topic, eh, folks?

 

P

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Like I said, I don't know what his secret is? He defies what people like Phil Rhodes say about working in film. And he's not based in LA either, Toronto.

 

 

erm, have I got the wrong end of the stick? I thought Toronto was the major movie city in Canada full of fly away productions from the states and with a major film festival and everything? Probably it's fairly easy to pop over the border to LA if need be to but I'm sure there are restrictions on doing work there.

 

Like I said before, I'm sure he has great sales ability. It's the key ability in most things.

 

Freya

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To give an idea of the state of things, David Lynch tried to make things work with Inland empire by shooting on PD-150's and making it cheap. Sadly this wasn't a winning formula which made me very sad as I really hoped it might mean he could continue to make a lot more movies. In a way he might have been better to go the other way and make some huge extravaganza, but where would the money for that come from? That was waaaaaay back in 2006, getting on for 10 years now and David Lynch hasn't made a movie since, even going as far as to remove any mention of movies from his website. Instead he has focused on selling coffee and making other forms of art and music.

 

"It's a very depressing picture. With alternative cinema – any sort of cinema that isn't mainstream – you're fresh out of luck in terms of getting theatre space and having people come to see it. Even if I had a big idea, the world is different now. Unfortunately, my ideas are not what you'd call commercial, and money really drives the boat these days. So I don't know what my future is. I don't have a clue what I'm going to be able to do in the world of cinema."

 

 

I've heard rumours he might be looking to try and make another stab at it soon but we will have to wait and see. Maybe by then everyone will be crying out for something a bit different.

 

Freya

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And as soon as I speak French, German, Italian and Czech, I'm sure they'll all be pleased to have me.

 

And yet....Canadian Steve Whitehead is in Romania shooting a feature right now. His second in under 12 mos. He's also shot many times in Germany over the last five years as well. Again....somehow he does it, and people living in these areas have difficulty. I dunno? It's a mystery.

 

R,

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Probably it's fairly easy to pop over the border to LA if need be to but I'm sure there are restrictions on doing work there.

 

That's right very tough. Canadians have no special privilege to work in the USA. It's very easy to get work permits for Americans to work in Canada in film, so long as they are above the line people. No chance a Canadian can easily get a temp work permit to work on a film in the USA.

 

R,

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And yet....Canadian Steve Whitehead is in Romania shooting a feature right now. His second in under 12 mos. He's also shot many times in Germany over the last five years as well. Again....somehow he does it, and people living in these areas have difficulty. I dunno? It's a mystery.

 

No, he's a director of photography and probably rarely has to interact with anyone who doesn't speak English, and when he does, translators (costing hundreds a day, not unreasonably) laid on by the production.

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Not correct at all Phil. There have been zero translators on the sets he's worked on. The language of the set has been English and everyone speaks it. I had zero issues in Prague last summer, everyone I dealt with spoke perfect English. I don't know where you come up with this stuff?

 

Steve is younger than you BTW Phil. But he has a good attitude, unlike some people I know.

 

R,

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Er, that's, um, exactly what I said.

 

He's probably better looking than me, too, but of course everyone can name a rock star (I'm sure I've explained the Rodriguez Gambit to you before). Youth doesn't actually help directors of photography much, anyway - often quite the opposite. When I was looking for that sort of work it certainly didn't. Not only was I not viewed as old enough to do the job, I also wasn't old enough to know how unutterably miserable the whole situation was.

 

P

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Exactly, my point is that he is quite a young guy, and that does not stop him. He works non-stop anyway.

 

If he took your attitude, "I also wasn't old enough to know how unutterably miserable the whole situation was." Then he would never work on anything.

 

R,

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If he took your attitude, "I also wasn't old enough to know how unutterably miserable the whole situation was." Then he would never work on anything.

 

Well, he wouldn't, would he. Not being old enough. And neither does anyone else, at that age, including me.

 

Again, I don't understand why what you're saying has much to do with what I'm saying.

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My point is that he is a young non ASC DOP who defies everything you say about working in the business as a DOP. He never has trouble finding any work. Including the non-existent work in Europe. :rolleyes:

 

R,

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I have had occasions where there's several years of back to back projects that happened mostly through networking on set. When you work for 4 to 6 weeks on a film you meet a lot of people in the business so it's easier to stay busy once you are busy. Every film has the potential to lead to more. A good co-ordinator can get one a lot of work. I used to get really nervous when I had no work on the way.

 

I only recently learned to enjoy the downtime from paid projects and spend it writing, shooting short films of my own, spec commercials, etc. I never work for free for others, but I no longer define my own work by whether there's a paycheck at the end of the final cut. It's what I do and I find the outside work comes in easier when I keep busy with my own commercial and narrative projects. There's a freedom to learn, risk failure and find new inspiration when you work on stuff that's entirely your own. So downtime can be a great way to gain new perspective and recharge your creativity.

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My point is that he is a young non ASC DOP who defies everything you say about working in the business as a DOP.

 

Yes, and as I've repeatedly tried to tell you - Robert Rodriguez's career path is not a realistic way for most people to make a living.

 

I can come up with counterexamples too, but for every man like your friend, there are quite literally a couple of hundred thousand more normal experiences. I think you know that's true.

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Yes, and as I've repeatedly tried to tell you - Robert Rodriguez's career path is not a realistic way for most people to make a living.

 

I can come up with counterexamples too, but for every man like your friend, there are quite literally a couple of hundred thousand more normal experiences. I think you know that's true.

 

Yes, to a degree, which is why I kept saying, "no one knows what his secret is?"

 

My point is that maybe his secret is simply that he keeps a positive attitude, he hustles, and he doesn't make any excuses for himself.

 

R,

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Yeah, and maybe he was just lucky. I certainly don't choose to work with people who "hustle." I don't want "hustle" in response to questions like "is this lighting rig safe" or "will this camera system be reliable." I want facts, competence and knowledge. People who "hustle" are often an absolute liability, in both the personal, professional, and strict legal sense.

 

"Hustle" is one of a group of terms which are the modern pushy bastard's excuse for being vain, conceited and arrogant. Now, we know that it's possible to hustle your way to success without much by way of facts, competence or knowledge, but personally I'm willing to play the disadvantage of not doing it, because it's wrong.

 

I would have hoped that not being known for pretention and swagger would have been good for one's reputation, but I guess that's yet another crushing disappointment I'm just going to have to live with.

 

P

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Richard, If you don't recognise Phil's avatar, look up "Marvin the Paranoid Android". It might help.

Quote:

“Night’s falling,” he said. “Look, robot, the stars are coming out.”
The robot obediently looked at them, then looked back.
“I know,” he said. “Wretched, isn’t it?”
“But that sunset! I’ve never seen anything anything like it in my wildest dreams …the two suns! It was like mountains of fire boiling into space.”
“I’ve seen it,” said Marvin. “It’s rubbish.”

(Douglas Adams, 1979)

Edited by Mark Dunn
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Ah thanks, makes perfect sense now. As for the definition of "hustle", what I see with Steve is it just means he is always on the look out for new opportunities and isn't shy about asking people if he can be part of a project that is ramping up. If you refuse to self promote yourself Phil, who do you expect is going to do it?

 

You'll only get so far with your infectious positive outlook on life.

 

R,

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Sometimes you're the filmmaker of the moment. You make the right film at the right time. El Mariachi was the beginning of the emergence of independent cinema, and was produced at a time where people didn't just go out and make feature films without hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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Sometimes you're the filmmaker of the moment. You make the right film at the right time. El Mariachi was the beginning of the emergence of independent cinema, and was produced at a time where people didn't just go out and make feature films without hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 

Yikes!

 

I think you should start by checking out the Tim Burton movie "Ed Wood".

Also worth looking into the work of John Cassavetes and Orson Welles. That's just for the American side of Narrative independent cinema.

 

Movies you need to see:

 

Eraserhead, Down by Law, Stranger in Paradise (in fact anything by Jim Jarmusch), Slacker, anything by John Waters, She's Gotta have it (Spike Lee), Night of the living dead by George Romero, Blood Simple (Cohen Brothers), sex lies and videotape (Steven Soderbergh), Evil Dead, Drugstore cowboy (Gus Van Sant), Matewan (John Sayles), Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story & Poison (Todd Haynes), THX1138, Easy Rider, Killer of Sheep, Two Lane Blacktop, Dark Star and Halloween (John Carpenter), Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Anything by Roger Corman

 

I'm sure I've missed tons of stuff off that list and there is of course a whole world of indie cinema outside of the independent American scene too.

 

Theres been a long continuum of indie cinema and certainly there were also people making movies without hundreds of thousands of dollars long before El Mariachi. El Mariachi was probably the first one to be marketed on the basis of its low budget however. It was a quirk of history that shortly after the movie, digital cameras became commonplace and it was possible for anyone to make a movie for the kind of money that El Mariachi was made on, but it was an achievement to make such a movie on 16mm at the time. A big part of his being able to keep the budget down was that he edited digitally too. This is something people forget, editing digitally gave him a huge cost saving because it was suddenly just down to the cost of the film, processing and transfer.

 

However I think most people would more see this as the END of independent cinema. It was part of the little blip that was the sundance era, soon to be followed by the fake indie movies pumped out by Hollywood movies. Lower budgets have become a real problem for indie cinema too (as we are talking about in this thread!). It's no longer a big deal if you make a movie for $7000 so you can't really market it on that basis as people will just think it's a cheaply made movie. Also marketing it in that way means you will get a very low offer for your movie unless there is some kind of bidding war or something. At the same time the money being offered for movies is less because the companies are aware that movies can be made on very low budgets so you get very low offers generally and it's a big push for people to even try and recoup the costs on anything of quality.

 

Robert seems to oddly want to take responsibility for a lot of things that people might see as quite bad for cinema. 3d, digital shooting, the drive to lower budgets etc. In reality tho it's not entirely his fault, as a lot of this stuff could just as easily have happened anyway.

 

I could say a lot about all this but... there just isn't the time, but I'm always surprised, that even now there still seems to be people obsessed with the long gone sundance era.

 

Freya

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Yikes!

 

I think you should start by checking out the Tim Burton movie "Ed Wood".

Also worth looking into the work of John Cassavetes and Orson Welles. That's just for the American side of Narrative independent cinema.

 

I guess it depends how you define independent cinema. I should have been more specific. I've seen every film you mention. Ed Wood had a budget of 18 million dollars. Robert Rodriguez had a budget of $8,000. It's interesting that you point, Freya, to Orson Welles as an independent filmmaker... Perhaps given the time period, and his refusal throughout his career to work with producers for fear of losing his vision in the process, he might be considered an independent filmmaker. But Citizen Kane had a budget of $700,000, which, accounting for inflation is a 13.2 million dollar budget. Shall I go on? Almost all of the films you hail as independent cinema had budgets at least twice as big as El Mariachi if not many times more. It's not say that they don't represent independent cinema, but only that I was referring I suppose, to a small niche of independent cinema-- the minimal budget independent cinema. So you might say we're both right. You are looking at the broader picture of the industry over a 60 year period. I was focused on a 5 year period in the early 90's-- given the conversation had shifted to Robert Rodriguez's specific impact on the industry-- which is undeniable, regardless of whether or not one thinks El Mariachi is in fact, a great film.

 

It's most interesting however to observe how notions of independent cinema have changed over the years. :)

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