The 2025 awards season was a triumph for indie filmmakers. Indie stalwarts Sean Baker’s “Anora” and Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” dominated the Oscars, combining for 16 nominations and 8 wins, sweeping the night’s biggest categories. And it’s to Baker and Corbet’s credit score that whereas underneath the months-long highlight of awards, they every selected to spotlight the way it’s tough to make a dwelling — even on the pinnacle of indie film.
“I’ve spoken to many filmmakers with films nominated this year who can’t pay their rent,” Corbet said on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast whereas discussing how filmmakers should not paid to advertise their movies, together with throughout awards. “Both my partner [Mona Fastvold] and I made zero dollars on the last two films we made. Yes, actually zero. So we had to just live off of a paycheck from three years ago.”
For his half, Baker spent an excessive amount of time on the marketing campaign path discussing the headwinds confronted by indie filmmakers. In his Indie Spirits speech, referring to the time it takes to make a movie, he requested a rhetorical query: “How do you support yourself with little or no income for 3 years?”
We posed that query to producer Alex Saks on this week’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast as we explored the problem of why even essentially the most profitable indie filmmakers are unable to make a dwelling. Saks is an indie producer, with 24 producing credit that embrace Baker’s “A Florida Project” and “Red Rocket.” Prior to producing she was a movie finance agent at ICM, the place she structured indie movie offers and helped director purchasers get their movies off the bottom.
“Sean said at his Indie Spirit Awards speech, ‘I’m able to do this because I don’t have kids, I don’t have a family,’ and it’s objectively not sustainable otherwise,” stated Saks on the podcast. “He’s done it because of sheer passion and force of will, and probably because he can’t possibly see himself doing anything else, but that is such a rarity on multiple levels. It is a big point to how is this sustainable, and I think the answer is it’s not.”
While on the podcast, Saks bought into the explanations that is the case, together with a breaking down the maths concerned with fairness funding, which is how a majority of how the movies premiering on the greater festivals get financed. Using the rosy (some would say dream) situation of a movie costing $5 million and promoting for $7 million, Saks defined how little cash truly reaches the inventive staff.
Under this scheme, the fairness investor floated money stream to make the film. They would recoup their $5 million funding, plus a 20 % premium — so, $6 million goes to the investor. The gross sales agent would additionally take a ten % payment from the sale; that’s $700,000. From the $7 million sale, that leaves $300,000 to separate between the investor and the filmmakers. That means simply $150,000 for the inventive staff, which might embrace the producers, author, director, and crew members. The splits range from challenge to challenge, and are individually negotiated.
Under this identical $5 million hypothetical price range, the director drew a wage for his or her companies throughout manufacturing. However, if a movie takes three years to make, it may quantity to lower than minimal wage.
“Depending on what they need to accomplish on a $5 million budget, [the director’s pay] could be anywhere from $75,000 to a few hundred thousand dollars, but a few hundred thousand would [only go to] somebody who probably made a bunch of movies — they’re gonna do this smaller project and maybe they could command that fee,” stated Saks. “Otherwise, you’re probably in low, low six figures. And then who knows how long the movie took to get put together.”
In different phrases, that director would want to stay on $75,000-plus for the three years spent getting the challenge written, off the bottom, prepped, shot, and thru post-production. Often, administrators put a part of their payment again into the movie’s price range to cowl the assets wanted to see their imaginative and prescient come to life. And bear in mind, that is all on a $5 million price range. For comparisons’ sake, “Anora,” was Baker’s eighth function and his largest price range by far at $6 million, and that got here solely after the important success of “Tangerine,” “Red Rocket,” and “A Florida Project.”
Saks additionally mentioned how Hollywood’s dramatic swing towards to subscription streaming companies has more and more shut out independents from a serious income stream. Few unbiased distributors have SVOD output offers — like A24 has with Max, or NEON has with Hulu – and main platforms have turn out to be far much less inclined to buy the streaming rights of indies they don’t buy outright.
“The other distributors that are independent distributors, if they don’t have those [output] deals, from what I’m hearing, it’s become incredibly challenging for them to get an SVOD deal to get those [dollars] from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu,” stated Saks.
Saks additionally talked about how unbiased movies have gotten tougher and costlier to make within the United States. For instance, Saks mentioned how “Red Rocket” was made with 10 individuals in 2020, through the first 12 months of COVID, and in a manner that’s unlikely to be repeated in 2025.
To hear Alex Saks’s full interview concerning the state of indie financing, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favourite podcast platform.
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