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one in a million
American filmmaker Gary Winick boasted he could make ten new films for $1m. At the cusp of the DV revolution, he’s well on course. Anwar Brett reports.
Look up the word “indigent” in a dictionary and the defini- tion will read “needy” or “poor”. Yet this only mischievous- ly hints at the philosophy behind an independent American pro- duction company that may be about to revolutionise the way films are made.
InDigEnt – the name stands for Independent Digital Entertainment – is the brainchild of filmmaker Gary Winick who established the company three years ago in partnership with John Sloss, as well as Jonathan Sehring and Caroline Kaplan of IFC Films.
The idea that drove the estab- lishment of InDigEnt was both sim- ple and audacious: to create an infrastructure for filmmakers to shoot low budget digital features free from the burden of massive financial commitments and edi- torial interference.
“I was really inspired by the Dogme movement,” says Winick, “with films like Festen, just seeing what they were able to do. I also wondered how someone like John Cassavetes used to work and how he would have embraced DV. It felt like we were on to something.
“And because I’m an inde- pendent New York filmmaker there’s a close knit theatre com- munity there and we all kind of know each other. So I felt there was an opportunity for us to make these films and all own a piece of the film and all get paid the same amount.”
Though inspired by European Dogme filmmakers, Winick did not want to be overly prescriptive in the style that filmmakers signing up to his own radical ‘manifesto’ should adopt.
“I wanted the sound and the light and music to be heightened
as much as possible,” he adds, “because there are tools that the filmmaker has that we should be able to use.”
The bottom line with InDigEnt, the masterstroke in its philosophy, is in raising its finance from a company like IFC – the Independent Film Channel – which stands to gain from the deal, though not in the most obvious ways.
IFC benefits from any reflect- ed kudos earned by InDigEnt’s output, as well as acquiring con- tent for its channel relatively cheaply. This does not necessarily mean on a first run, a film will maximise its earning potential, benefiting everyone involved, before returning home to IFC.
“I said I could do ten films for a million bucks,” Winick conti- nues, “a hundred thousand each. I don’t think they really believed it. But for this to work you have to have a company willing to finance the endeav- our, that includes the overhead as well, and not ask for their money but be willing to accept a percentage.
“I’m not saying you can’t do it another way, but part of the InDigEnt philosophy is to keep these budgets down and to own a piece of the film from dollar one. That makes it different to a normal low budget film.”
With nine films already com- pleted, the plan is working out very nicely, with nine films shot, seven of which are showing a profit while the other two are in post production.
Winick himself is more than just a slick suited executive with aneyeforadeal.Heisapro- ducer and director who also teaches film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His own con- tribution to InDigEnt’s slate,