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Breaking into the movies


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I think the best way to do this is to make a horror movie in the woods with a 4K Sony camcorder, before you laugh, I want you to consider Alex Ross Perry who made IMPOLEX with no money and a few friends, and he found a way to get a career. Here’s a clip of his feature.


I think I can pull of a little 70-80minute horror movie. I just have no confidence, I hate being Hispanic, I want to be something better, like a German or French filmmaker, most directors are good -looking, except for Billy Wilder, he kind of looked like Yoda. But when you think about Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Christopher Nolan, they all look like GQ models, how is it that most ugly people are untalented. I live in Texas, the sun is so harsh, but when I saw IMPOLEX, I figured I could do something similar. There’s just so many rich boys throwing money at their films, they’re able to hire cinematographers who know what they’re doing, I just feel so desperate and depressed. And being Hispanic isn’t helping either, if I were on a set they’d probably mistake me for a day laborer. 

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Am I the only one who feels so restless? Rachel Morrison shot The Sound of My Voice (2011) with a Canon 7D, it’s all coming back to me, all the amazing films I saw that were made for very little money. I’m thinking a night scene in the woods could be lit with a fire, car headlights and some fluorescent lanterns. I’m thinking of writing a script about a young couple who are vloggers  and take a road trip to a remote cabin where an unsolved murder occurred, and they slowly unravel clues to a nearby cult who perpetrated the murders, or something of that nature, I think I could make something like that for about 5k dollars. I think Lena Dunham shot Creative Non Fiction for $7k.... it’s like a curse, these thoughts plague my brain. I just need to stay until I make a feature length movie. 

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8 minutes ago, Phil Rhodes said:

Jesus, Nolan? He's got a face like a sackful of dented bells.

He has been photographed by some good people, of course...

No, Chris Nolan is quite handsome, he looks like he has the bloodline of British royalty running through his veins. I actually saw Tenet around 7x, I was amazed the theaters opened and I went there all month long. I quite enjoyed Tenet, I feel the story is true, we never really hear about the bomb that didn’t go off. There are unnatural forces in the world that are being kept secret, things that ordinary people know nothing about. Mankind is born into slavery, if you don’t find your purpose in life and make enough money you end up in a gutter or with a self inflicted gun shot wound to the head. Capitalism is such an unforgiving, vicious machine, it’s time for socialism in America. AOC for president. 

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But in all seriousness, I think it’s really about the idea. I was watching a Jean Luc Godard short film Une Femme Coquette, and it felt like films that could be done with very little money, it’s all voice over and a good story. The more I look at Lena Dunham’s earlier work the more I like it, especially her webseries Delusional Downtown Divas, I guess the real issue doesn’t come from money, but in the ideas that you film. I think if I stick to filmmaking this time I might make something decent several years down the line. But money is important too if you have a bigger idea... 

Edited by Josh Gallegos
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5 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

I'm 6'3 and skinny, nobody makes clothes that fit me.

Well, you have the ability to change one of those things. ?

I’m 5’8” with a pot belly and small shoulders. Off the rack doesn’t work well for me either. 

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On 10/4/2020 at 4:30 PM, Josh Gallegos said:

 I guess the real issue doesn’t come from money, but in the ideas that you film

technically the real issue is marketing the end product... especially if you want to secure some budget to make the movie in the first place.

I think the real problem is not that people are untalented or unable to make great movies but that people are not able to sell very good movies and people are just not willing to watch them so they are difficult to finance and distribute (which results in the very good movies being generally pretty low budget so that they don't need to please a huge worldwide audience and they can thus manage with a smaller target audience and less compromises in everything). If strawberries would be the "beef" of a good movie you are generally ending up with a strawberry cake which has a total of 2 strawberries in it and everything else is just filler to sell it better and to make it easier to swallow if the audience is lazy ?  so you will have blockbuster movies which have lots of stuff in them but very little of that stuff is interesting or memorable. Just a paper thin script which is made to look big by adding tons of unimportant filling like running around and car chases and explosions and over the top music. maybe a limited amount of "intelligent" dialog to make the movie look more matured than it really is so that the persons who are feeling themselves being more intelligent than others can still watch the movie and like it (for example Nolan movies)

Mainstream filmmaking is like pop music... it can't be very original or intelligent or have very high artistic value. It would not sell then and then it would not be popular. The most talented artists have always been in the classical music scene (very high skills are valued over everything else) and indie/underground (very original and fresh ideas and new POVs are valued over everything else) . The pop artists on the other hand have very talented marketing teams and the persons actually writing the songs may be pretty handy as well (very good marketing valued over everything else) 

so one pretty much has to choose if one wants to be technically and artistically on very high level but the target audience is very limited (classical. for the limited audience which value high skills and talent. the "talented ones" are the ones with very high level skillset and lots of experience). Or one can have totally original and fresh ideas and experiment with new point of views and techniques (indie/underground. small audience which want to see something new. Difficult to make any money to pay the bills. The "talented ones" are the ones who have the most original and fresh ideas no matter what their actual skills or experience levels are). OR one can choose to have very large target audience which inevitably limits what one can actually do artistically and one will need to concentrate on only the ideas which sell well and which work for any person in the world . This limits one's skillset to mainly marketing and producing because those are the skills actually needed to distribute the end product globally to get huge revenue ( the "talented ones" are the ones who have best marketing teams behind them. the product itself can be mediocre but it is so well marketed that people value it anyway)

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 10/4/2020 at 2:43 PM, Satsuki Murashige said:

Well, you have the ability to change one of those things. ?

I’m 5’8” with a pot belly and small shoulders. Off the rack doesn’t work well for me either. 

The tall community wants to lift their arms without their potbelly showing

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