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 eight wins, sweeping the evening’s greatest classes. And it’s to Baker and Corbet’s credit score that whereas beneath the months-long highlight of awards, they every selected to spotlight the way it’s tough to make a residing — even on the pinnacle of indie movie.
“I’ve spoken to many filmmakers with movies nominated this 12 months who can’t pay their hire,” Corbet mentioned on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast whereas discussing how filmmakers usually are not paid to advertise their movies, together with throughout awards. “Each my companion [Mona Fastvold] and I made zero {dollars} on the final two movies we made. Sure, really zero. So we needed to simply stay off of a paycheck from three years in the past.”
For his half, Baker spent a substantial 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 assist your self with little or no earnings for 3 years?”
We posed that query to producer Alex Saks on this week’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast as we explored the difficulty of why even essentially the most profitable indie filmmakers are unable to make a residing. Saks is an indie producer, with 24 producing credit that embrace Baker’s “A Florida Mission” and “Purple Rocket.” Previous to producing she was a movie finance agent at ICM, the place she structured indie movie offers and helped director shoppers get their movies off the bottom.
“Sean mentioned at his Indie Spirit Awards speech, ‘I’m in a position to do that as a result of I don’t have youngsters, I don’t have a household,’ and it’s objectively not sustainable in any other case,” mentioned Saks on the podcast. “He’s carried out it due to sheer ardour and pressure of will, and possibly as a result of he can’t probably see himself doing the rest, however that’s such a rarity on a number of ranges. It’s a large level to how is that this sustainable, and I believe the reply is it’s not.”
Whereas on the podcast, Saks acquired 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 larger festivals get financed. Utilizing the rosy (some would say dream) state of affairs of a movie costing $5 million and promoting for $7 million, Saks defined how little cash really reaches the inventive workforce.
Beneath this scheme, the fairness investor floated money stream to make the film. They’d recoup their $5 million funding, plus a 20 p.c premium — so, $6 million goes to the investor. The gross sales agent would additionally take a ten p.c charge from the sale; that’s $700,000. From the $7 million sale, that leaves $300,000 to separate between the investor and the filmmakers. Which means simply $150,000 for the inventive workforce, which might embrace the producers, author, director, and crew members. The splits fluctuate from mission to mission, and are individually negotiated.
Beneath this identical $5 million hypothetical price range, the director drew a wage for his or her companies throughout manufacturing. Nonetheless, if a movie takes three years to make, it might quantity to lower than minimal wage.
“Relying on what they should accomplish on a $5 million price range, [the director’s pay] might be wherever from $75,000 to some hundred thousand {dollars}, however a couple of hundred thousand would [only go to] any individual who most likely made a bunch of flicks — they’re gonna do that smaller mission and possibly they may command that charge,” mentioned Saks. “In any other case, you’re most likely in low, low six figures. After which who is aware of how lengthy the film took to get put collectively.”
In different phrases, that director would wish to stay on $75,000-plus for the three years spent getting the mission written, off the bottom, prepped, shot, and thru post-production. Typically, administrators put a part of their charge again into the movie’s price range to cowl the assets wanted to see their imaginative and prescient come to life. And keep in mind, that is all on a $5 million price range. For comparisons’ sake, “Anora,” was Baker’s eighth characteristic and his greatest price range by far at $6 million, and that got here solely after the vital success of “Tangerine,” “Purple Rocket,” and “A Florida Mission.”
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 impartial distributors have SVOD output offers — like A24 has with Max, or NEON has with Hulu – and main platforms have grow to be far much less inclined to buy the streaming rights of indies they don’t buy outright.
“The opposite distributors which might be impartial distributors, in the event that they don’t have these [output] offers, from what I’m listening to, it’s grow to be extremely difficult for them to get an SVOD deal to get these [dollars] from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu,” mentioned Saks.
Saks additionally talked about how impartial movies have gotten more durable and costlier to make in the US. For instance, Saks mentioned how “Purple Rocket” was made with 10 individuals in 2020, throughout the first 12 months of COVID, and in a means that’s unlikely to be repeated in 2025.
To listen to 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.