Getting Back on the Horse

A lot of first-time filmmakers don't realize how draining the process of making a feature film can be.

When Mike and I started to make our first feature in the Summer of 2005, we were both only 22, both fresh out of film school. We had no idea about the sheer gargantuan nature of what we were taking on. Form an LLC? Prepare early for deliverables? What? Nobody had ever taught us the business end of making a film, and I think that's a common thought that most recently graduated film students experience when they set out to do what we did.

What we didn't realize at the time was that the entire process of making our first feature (from the formation of the LLC and the writing of the script all the way through to seeing the film released in foreign countries like Russia and Japan) was nearly a 3 year process. Even to this day, some 4 years later, parts of the process still drag on. I still have to close the LLC from that film before the year's end.

It was incredibly emotionally draining for both of us. At one point during post-production, we stepped away from the edit completely for 6 weeks. We were just burned out, plain and simple. And once the film achieved distribution and we were finding it in places like Wal-Mart and Best Buy, it was easy to sit back and ride the coattails of that success for a long time.

But you can't milk the success of one film forever, and the creative juices always come rushing back. When you've made a $20,000 film, there are inevitably many things that make you say "Man, next time around, when we have more money, I'm going to do X, Y and Z so much better."

But making a new film is a great risk...financially, legally, emotionally, when you make a film, you open yourself up for a lot of hurt. Especially now, when the economy ain't that great, the pressures are amplified.

I've thought long and hard about how enticing the path of least resistance seems: hang it up after one film and walk around risk-free for the rest of my life saying, "Hey, when I was 22, I made a movie that was in Wal-Mart, that was on Netflix." But I think they call that living in the past.

And so here we are, getting back on the horse once more.

- K