October 22, 2025 • 26 mins
In this episode, Jeff Deverett reminds indie filmmakers that the most important part of filmmaking isn’t the festivals, streamers, or distributors — it’s the audience. He talks honestly about how rejection is a normal part of the business, whether it’s from distributors ghosting your emails or festivals passing on your film. But none of that means your film doesn’t have value. What really matters is getting it in front of people who will watch and enjoy it.
Jeff shares why filmmakers need to think beyond the traditional gatekeepers and learn how to market directly to their audience. He explains how platforms don’t actually “own” viewers — and how filmmakers can still build their own path to connect with fans. This episode is a practical, encouraging look at taking control of your film’s destiny and finding the people who truly want to see your work.
Jeff shares why filmmakers need to think beyond the traditional gatekeepers and learn how to market directly to their audience. He explains how platforms don’t actually “own” viewers — and how filmmakers can still build their own path to connect with fans. This episode is a practical, encouraging look at taking control of your film’s destiny and finding the people who truly want to see your work.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
At the end of the day, the only people that
really matter about your movie are the people who are
going to watch it, otherwise known as the audience. A
lot of distributors are going to not be interested, they're
going to reject you, they're going to ghost you. A
lot of agents aren't going to talk to you, even
a lot of filmmakers. But don't worry about it, because
if you can get the attention of the audience, that's
(00:23):
what matters. And that's what we're going to talk about today.
If you want to be a successful indie filmmaker, you
need to know a lot about not just the production
of movies, but the business. We are going to tell
you the truth and reality of what really happens in
the indie film business. Welcome back to Indie Filmmaking, Truth
(00:49):
and Reality. I'm your host, Jeff Deverett, and I'm very
excited to talk to you today about audience because at
the end of the day, audience is really who you're after.
It's the people who are going to watch, hopefully enjoy,
and hopefully pay for your film. But that's what this
is all about. Filmmaking is all about trying to attract
(01:12):
an audience who is going to enjoy your film and hopefully,
like I say, pay for it. This is all tied
to distribution, and you know, I do a lot of
I talk a lot about distribution and marketing, which is
distribution is releasing your movie to make it accessible to audiences,
and marketing is creating audience awareness, getting the attention of
people who hopefully will watch your movie. That's what distribution
(01:34):
marketing is. So I talk a lot about that in
a lot of episodes because you know, I always say,
you know, it's important to make an unbelievably great, entertaining film.
But if you make the greatest film in the world
and you can't get an audience, then you've kind of
wasted your time. You're going to enjoy your film, your
mother's going to enjoy your film, but nobody else is
going to see it. So getting an audience is super important.
(01:54):
But I want to focus specifically on the concept of
audience because here's what happens with a lot of indie filmmakers.
It's tough to make the film, but it's a huge
struggle to get the film properly distributed and marketed to audiences.
To release the movie, it's a big struggle A lot
of indie filmmakers they just don't know how to navigate
that process, and when they do, it's aggravating. They end
(02:17):
up signing with the bad distributors sometimes or not getting
released properly, not getting marketed at all, not making any
money with their films, and even worse, nobody even seeing
their movies. So sometimes a filmmaker would say, okay, what
I like to make money? Of course I would, but
at the very least, I'm hoping that a lot of
people at least watch my film so that you know
they're enjoyed and entertained by it, because that's the point
(02:39):
of making it. So here's the thing. When you go
through this distribution process, you are going to be up
against a lot of rejection. When you go to find
a distributor, most of them might not even talk to
you or ghost you. Like you're going to send your
film to them. You're going to say, hey, I just
made this great film, and a lot of them aren't
going to react to you. Gonna you know, you'll probably
(03:01):
do it buy email, or maybe if you go to
a film market you'll meet with them in person. They'll
say yeah, yeah, we'll look at it. And then most
of them don't bother looking at it or don't get
back to you, and they don't follow up, and you think,
wait a second, aren't you in the business of finding
and releasing good films? Why would you not want to
(03:22):
take a look at my film and get back to
me and follow up with me. And sometimes you wonder
because if they ghost you, meaning they don't even return
your email or your meeting or anything like that, it
means you're not even sure number one, if they even
watched your movie, and number two, whether or not they
liked it. If they watched it, you have no feedback
at all. So that's a form of rejection. If you
(03:43):
take it as rejection, it can be demoralizing having worked
so hard on making your film sending it to something
they don't even take the time to watch it, and
they're a distributor, So that's demoralizing. I agree, but don't
feel too rejected because it's kind of par for the course.
I mean, it's sad that I'm even saying this, but
it's sort of what happens in this industry. A lot
(04:05):
of distributors who should be on the lookout for new entertainment,
new high quality films, or whatever entertaining films, and they
don't have to be big budget, they just have to
be entertaining. And I'm assuming your film is entertaining. They
don't even bother responding to you. They ghost you, so
right away you think, oh, is my film good? What's
(04:26):
the problem. Maybe it's me, Maybe it's my movie, maybe
it's the industry, and you get kind of demoralized. All right,
that's sort of step number one, which is the first
step of rejection. And this episode is not about rejection.
This episode is about audience. But I got to set
the stage first. Level two would be streaming platforms. Now,
in order to get onto a major streaming platform, you're
(04:48):
going to need a distributor or an agent, somebody who's connected,
because they're not going to take your product directly. I mean,
there was a time when you could send your movie
to a streamer directly, like a Netflix even or Whulu
or HBO Max, any of these places used to accept submissions,
but they don't anymore. You have to go through a
legitimate distributor. So I just said, often you can't even
(05:10):
get the attention of a legitimate distributor. But even if
you were, even if you weren't able to get it,
and then they send it through and then the streamers
they're not even looking for content anymore. Their business, they're
in the business of providing entertaining content to their audiences.
Since they're subscribers and I'm talking subscription video on demand streamers,
(05:32):
that's their business, right. Their actual business is getting more subscribers.
But the way they do that is to provide them
with entertaining content. So you say, like, why would you
not be interested in watching some new content. I just
made this great new movie, it's available, I'm sending it
to you. Why not have a look at it. If
you don't like it, I get it, but at least
(05:53):
give it a shot, like, at least try, right? Not interested? Why?
Because these days most of them are just making their
own content like Netflix originals that type of thing. Or
if it's not some big star driven, special effects driven
or you know, Academy Award winning movie, you're not gonna
(06:13):
hit their radar screen. They're just looking for this really
big stuff. For the most part. There's exceptions here or there,
but generally speaking, they're not out buying in the content anymore.
It's too bad. It's a problem. But again, so that's
another form of call it rejection. It's not really rejection,
it's just their business model. But it's demoralizing because here
(06:36):
you are, you want to be in front of their audiences,
and they're not interested in even looking at it. Number three,
how about film festivals? You're gonna send your film submitted?
I don't know, twenty twenty five festivals, maybe more, maybe less,
but you know, on average, that's what filmmakers do. They're
very excited about their films. They go through the whole process.
There's thousands of film festivals. I think last time I
(06:57):
checked on Film Freeway there was I don't know, well
over ten thousand festivals, and if you add in the
writing competitions all this kind of stuff, probably fourteen or
fifteen thousand. So there's no shortage of festivals. So you
want to submit, You do all your homework, you try
to figure out which ones are best. You know where
you want to go if you got accepted. That lots
of stuff that goes into festival submissions, and then you know,
(07:20):
unless your film is I don't know. I was going
to say exceptional, but I'm going to say most films
are exceptional. Lucky for some reason or something like that.
If you hit ten to fifteen percent acceptance rate, it's
the festivals you're doing well. So a lot of these
festivals are going to reject you right away just because
(07:40):
there's so many submissions and they have only so many slots,
so you're not going to get into every festival. So
you feel demoralized by that. It's like, hey, wait a second,
and they give you no feedback. It's not like, you know,
they give you the standard sort of rejection letter, which is, oh,
your film's fantastic, but we didn't have enough room and obviously,
which is true, you can't take If they get five
(08:01):
thousand submissions, they can only screen I don't know, two
or three hundred of them if on a big festival,
maybe one hundred on a small festival. So that's rejection too.
So all of a sudden, you're feeling demoralized. You can't
get into a distributor, you can't get into a streaming platform,
you can't get into a festival, and you're thinking, what
the heck, Like, I just called myself to make this great,
(08:22):
entertaining film, and I'm assuming, by the way, for the
sake of the conversation, that actually is a great entertaining film.
All right, some of your films aren't going to be
great and entertaining. We know that. But let's say you
actually have a great entertaining film. That's what I'm assuming
for the sake of this, and nobody wants to see it.
I mean, nobody's willing to even look at it. And
you're not even sure the festivals took a look at
(08:43):
it when they rejected it. Maybe they watched the first
five minutes if you're lucky, but you don't know. You
have no feedback. You have no feedback from the distributors,
none from the streamers. So you're thinking, wow, that's really demoralizing. Like,
I made this great film. I want people to see it.
I mean I would love to release it and monetize it,
(09:04):
but at the very least I would like people to
see it, you know, like at least at a film festival.
I want people to see it and enjoy it and
give me feedback on it. And yet you come up
short across the board on everything. So that that's not nice.
It's demoralizing, and you can feel very upset about that.
But here's the good news. Here's why. This is the
(09:24):
reason I'm doing this episode. The good news is, at
the end of the day, those things matter for some reasons,
but not for a lot. I'm gonna come back to
this why it matters for that, but it doesn't really matter.
What really matters is audience. Having people watch your movie. Now,
(09:45):
those are vehicles to get in front of audiences, all right.
Distributors are vehicles to get onto streaming platforms, and streaming
platforms have audiences. So you're hoping to connect with a
streaming platform so that they can put you in of
their audience. Festivals have audiences. They have people who watch
the movies at their festivals, so they have audience. So
(10:06):
that's why you're hoping to tap in to their audiences,
which would be really nice. I agree, all right, But
here's the thing about an audience. They don't own the audience.
The streaming platforms they don't own the audience. These are
just subscribers. They're allowed to watch outside of the streaming platform.
Whether they do or not is another story we'll talk
(10:28):
about in a few minutes. But festival goers they go
to lots of festivals, or they look at lots of
streaming platforms, or they access material lots of other places.
Festivals don't own the audience. They own it for the
day of the screening. The streamer owns the subscription to
their platform, but they don't own viewership. They don't own
(10:49):
the fact that people are looking for good quality entertainment.
And therefore, if you can figure out a way to
get in front of those people and create awareness with them,
then it's not about there. Nobody's ever going to say
I'm not going to watch this movie because it's not
on Netflix. Now people are probably saying, yes, they will.
(11:10):
Young people will because young people will say, Hey, I
spent fifteen or twenty dollars a month on my Netflix subscription,
and therefore that's all I'm going to watch, because why
would I spend some extra money when I've already got
a Netflix subscription. And the answer is, if you truly
actually want to watch something that is not on your
(11:32):
streaming platform, then you will probably watch it if you
really want to watch it. All right, why do you
think people have multiple subscriptions? I mean me, I subscribe
to almost all the platforms, not because I want to
pay a lot of money, is because I like a
lot of the programming. Apple's got stuff that Netflix doesn't
(11:52):
have that. Hulu's got stuff that Max doesn't have, and
Max got stuff. Everybody's got something good and if you
hear about it and you want to watch what they have,
then you need to go subscribe to to their platform.
Is it a pain in the button yeah? Is it expensive, Yeah,
because you know you got to have all these subscriptions.
(12:13):
But at the end of the day, if you're an
audience person, which I am. I'm you know, a typical
audience person who's looking seeking out good quality entertainment, then
when I find it or I hear about it, then
I'm willing to pay for it. Is everybody, No, some
people have limited budgets and they're not willing to go
and have multiple subscriptions, or maybe won't want to do
(12:35):
say transactional video on demand to say just download one
movie to watch it. Some people, So let's say I'm
going to just make up a statistic. Let's say that
what I just said of people who are willing to
watch have multiple subscriptions and watch what they want to
watch when they want to watch it on demand and
are willing to pay for it, Let's say that that
(12:57):
is ten percent of people. I'm going to cut out
ninety percent of the viewing audience. Let's just take I
don't know Netflix's audience, and just for easy numbers, let's
call Netflix's audience two hundred million subscribers worldwide. Let's say
ninety percent of them are not willing to watch anything
off of Netflix, which is, by the way, not true
(13:18):
at all. We know that. Okay, I just want to
demonstrate a point. Let's say it's only ten percent. That's
twenty million people, folks. That's twenty million people who are
willing to say, if I find something else that I
want to watch, I'm prepared to watch it and hopefully
pay for it. You, as an indie filmmaker who have
completely been rejected by the festivals, by the distributors, by
(13:41):
the streamers, maybe you can tap in to that other
ten percent of viewers who are looking for something to watch.
But the question is how do you get their attention?
How do you let them know that you have something
that they want to watch, and where do you make
it avail for them to watch it? So that's distribution
(14:02):
of marketing, all right. So you're gonna have to create
some type of You're gonna have to put it up
onto some platform that makes it accessible. But what I'm
talking about is, let's just talk about transactional video on demand.
And I know a lot of people listening to this
or saying, oh, Jeff, you're crazy. It's dead. It's never
gonna be alive again. Nobody's gonna everybody's just subscription or
(14:24):
avod advertising, free watching with ads. Transactional is dead. And
I say, no, I don't believe that. I do not
believe it's dead. For something that somebody wants to watch
and it's exclusively only available on transactional. Now, I teach
a lot of young people, students. Students always say to me,
I can't afford five dollars to watch a movie. Let's
(14:44):
say you make this great movie, you put it onto
a transactional platform, and you charge five dollars, and we'll
talk about marketing in a second, how to get their
awareness to send them to that platform. And that's the
only place this is available. And ninety percent of the
world isn't going to care, they're not going to pay attention.
That maybe ten percent will one out of ten might
even be one percent, all right, but let's use ten
(15:05):
percent to discuss this, all right, So you're gonna send
them there five dollars. So all my students say, I'm
not paying five dollars. Just spend twenty dollars a month
on Netflix and I'm getting way way more content. This
is one thing for five dollars. And I say, what's
in your hand right there that looks like a cup
of Starbucks coffee? Oh? That's that's a chilate skinny chilatte
(15:27):
that cost you six dollars or seven dollars, depending on
if it's got a flavor or something in it. You
had no problem doing that, and guess what you do
that every single day? You might do it twice a day.
How come all of a sudden you could spend five
dollars on a cup of coffee, but you can't spend
it on a feature film that is really good, really entertaining,
(15:48):
and cost an act of a lot more than to
make then a cup of coffee with a lot more
hard in it. So people can't afford it, all right?
They say they can't, and they say they wouldn't, but
they actually can. The question is how do you entice
them enough to want to spend the money? All right,
So I don't believe that they can't afford it. I look,
obviously there's some people in the world who can't afford it.
(16:10):
But how is it that you know, you can charge five, six,
seven dollars for a cup of coffee. Nobody has an
issue with it. Nobody expects anything of value to be
for free, other than the arts. It's amazing how that's happened.
I don't know how that happened. People think, Okay, I
got to pay five dollars for a cup of coffee,
(16:32):
and five dollars for this really good muffin, no problem,
because it's it's tangible, it's an item. But why don't
they say I got to pay five dollars for a
movie or for you know, a dollar for a song
or something like that. This is stuff that artists have,
you know, labored over, and it's not easy to do this.
But yet everybody struggles with that concept because the way
(16:53):
I don't know, the way we've moved distribution. I don't
agree with it. I think that that there's a lot
of value to especially to a movie, and it shouldn't
be a problem to pay five dollars. But I also
I'm smart enough and experience enough to know that a
lot of people won't do it. So that's why I'm saying,
let's say ten percent of people will do it if
they know about it, if they know about it and
(17:15):
they're excited about it and enticed enough to want to
do it, and you make it easy enough for them
to do it. So here's what I'm saying about audience.
This is who you're going after at the end of
the day. When you're making a movie, You've got to
be focused on the audience. You've got to be focused
on there's ten percent of the viewing audience out there
(17:36):
that might be willing to watch this movie and might
be willing to pay for it. You can't be demoralized
by the fact that you're not going to get onto Netflix.
You can't be demoralized when you get rejected by a
bunch of film festivals or when distributors goes to I
know it's demoralizing, but try not to be demoralized about that.
(17:57):
I'll tell you when you should be demoralized, and you
shouldn't even be for this is when people who watch
the movie say they don't like it or they're not
going to recommend it to somebody else. And again, it's
not demoralizing. Everybody's got an opinion. But if you can
get your movie in front of people and hopefully paying people,
and they say they like it and willing to tell
(18:18):
other people, that's the core of distribution at the end
of the day. And as they said, streamers and festivals
don't own audiences, they just have access to them because
they're offering a lot of content in an organized way,
which I think is wonderful. But it's not precluding you
from going to those people and having them watch your
(18:40):
movie for five dollars and again I'm using that number arbitrarily,
but you got to make them aware of it, which
is marketing. And so the biggest disconnect in the film business,
which in the indie film business, which I talk about
all the time, is that a filmmaker will spend lots
and lots of time, energy, money, and passion on creating
their film and nothing on marketing it. They just don't
(19:03):
want to talk about marketing or putting it in front
of audiences. So I'm saying to you filmmakers, look, once
you get to that point where you're all demoralized about
having all this rejection, always remember that there are people
out there who actually would be excited to watch your
film and probably would pay to watch it if you
did a good marketing campaign to let them know that
(19:24):
the film's available and put your film, I don't know
onny any type of transactional platform. You can always get
it onto a transactional platform. You can even get it
on your own website if you have to, at very least,
like at the very worst case scenario, just create a website,
put your film on. I've known filmmakers who have done this,
(19:44):
all right, and you can drive the audience there, you know,
and use like a standard payment like stripe or something
like that as a standard payment module. That's the very
worst case scenario. But the tough part is driving the
audience there to see it, all right. It's creating awareness
and enticing them to want to see your movie. If
(20:06):
you're demoralized about everybody rejecting your movie, take a step back,
look in the mirror and realize that the reason you
got there is because you weren't willing to do what
it takes to actually get the audience, which is market
to them. Now, if you look at all these other places, okay,
film festivals, you know, well established festivals, they don't need
(20:26):
to do much marketing anymore Toronto, Can you know sun Dance?
These festivals are iconic, they've been around, But all these
other little festivals they come and go. If they don't
do marketing, they don't let filmmakers know about them, They
come and go, they disappear. Streaming platforms. Yeah, the big ones,
it didn't start automatically. They had to build over years
(20:47):
and years and years. Audiences. Studios had to build audiences
over years. I mean it happened, you know, a century
ago when they first started, but it didn't. You don't
snap your fingers and the audience comes. You have to build.
You have to market, to create audience awareness that you
still have to advertise. Those people still do advertising and
when they spend a lot on big shows in order
(21:08):
to attract audiences. That's what it's all about. So you're
a little guy, you got one movie, it's good. How
do you get the audience attention? It's super super super difficult,
all right. But if you don't have a marketing campaign
and you don't think about one who your audience is,
how you're going to attract them and give it a
(21:28):
real shot the way you did making the movie, then
you almost have no chance. I mean, that's the problem.
That's the disconnect, is that it's almost impossible, like you'd
have to have some stroke of lightning, lucky event going
viral or something like that to get you over the top,
because you haven't put any effort into creating the attention
(21:50):
of the audience. And I'm telling you, when we started
this episode, I said, it's about audience. Don't worry about
the fact that you don't control and own that audience.
Nobody does about how you're gonna connect with that audience.
And I know as filmmakers, you don't want to think
about it. You don't want to talk about it. You
just want to talk about making the movie. And the
attraction of getting it on a big streaming platform, obviously
(22:10):
is you don't have to do any marketing. They have
the audience already. The attraction of getting in the festival,
they already have the audience, obviously, that's the attraction. That's
why you try for it to get distributors, That's why
you try to get streaming platforms. That's why you try
for it because they have the audience that you want.
But if they say no, sorry, we're not letting you
in the door. It doesn't mean it's over. It means
(22:33):
now you're just gonna have to try a little harder
and you're gonna have to try to tap into that
audience yourself. Now, it's really, really, really difficult to do that.
I know, I do it all the time. It's what
we call self distribution, all right, releasing the movie yourself,
marketing the movie yourself. But I am telling you more
and more these days, that is the direction that distribution
(22:56):
has gone in, and unfortunately, for better worse, the distribution
system is failing a lot of indie filmmakers. They're just
not getting their films in front of audiences the way
they should, and audiences don't know about it. So part
of being an indie filmmaker now is kind of being
aware and understanding that you're going to have to probably
(23:17):
go it alone on the marketing side. Now, I'm going
to do a little pitch for my platform because and
I didn't do this episode for this reason, but I
just want to let you know doing that is really
tough for three reasons. One is, you generally don't even
know how to do it, Like, even if you wanted
to do it, you don't know how to do it.
Because it takes skills to figure out how to do marketing. Two,
(23:38):
you generally don't want to do it. You're a filmmaker
and you didn't sign up to do marketing. You signed
up to do filmmaking. So even if you knew how
to do it, you actually have no desire to do it.
And number three, you probably have no resources to do it.
You haven't raised any money because marketing costs money. You
might be doing this paid social media campaign, maybe some advertising,
paid social media influence, something like that. It's not free,
(24:03):
just the way filmmaking is not free. So for those
three reasons, you might be stuck. All right. The third
reason the money. You're gonna need to access some money
in order to create awareness. I mean, there's only so
much you can do for free, say on social media
and publicity. All right, you can work it hard and
hard and hard, but it helps when you have a
budget to work with. Right. The other two things, you
(24:25):
got to find people who maybe are better at it
than you are, maybe know what they're doing and can
help you out. And that's what they do for a living.
They don't make films, They market films. When I say
I'm gonna plug the Indie film community. That's what we do.
We help filmmakers do the things they don't want to do.
All the business stuff like in the making the films
and all the distribution of marketing. They just don't want
(24:48):
to do it, and even if they did want to
do it, they kind of don't know how to do it.
And there's no scale, so you know, doing one marketing
campaign is way more expensive than doing say one hundred.
So what the Indie Film own community is basically that distribution,
marketing and business department the way a film studio would
have it for indie filmmakers. That's all it is. It's
(25:10):
basically saying, hey, indie filmmakers, you're a one time, you know,
one off film, so you can't afford to have a
legal department, you can't afford to have a marketing department,
you can't afford to have an accounting department in finance.
But we have this department that we're supporting lots of filmmakers,
so we can help you with that, or if you're conscientious,
you should do it yourself. But the bottom line is this,
(25:32):
and here's why I wanted to do this episode. If
somebody says to you, sorry, I'm not going to accept
your film to a festival, or I'm not going to
put you on the streaming platform, or I'm not gonna
watch your film as a distributor, and it's over for you.
Don't be a filmmaker, because it's going to happen, all right.
It's going to be really upsetting and demoralizing, but it's
going to happen. So you need to know that when
(25:54):
that happens, it's not over. It's just beginning. Because they
don't own the audience. The audience is there. You're just
going to have to do more work to connect to it.
But if you got something that the audience wants to
see and you let them know about it properly, then
hopefully you will be able to bypass all of that
BS and all of that demoralization and get to the audience.
(26:17):
It's just going to be a heck of a lot
of work, So good luck, see you next time.
At the end of the day, the only people that
really matter about your movie are the people who are
going to watch it, otherwise known as the audience. A
lot of distributors are going to not be interested, they're
going to reject you, they're going to ghost you. A
lot of agents aren't going to talk to you, even
a lot of filmmakers. But don't worry about it, because
if you can get the attention of the audience, that's
(00:23):
what matters. And that's what we're going to talk about today.
If you want to be a successful indie filmmaker, you
need to know a lot about not just the production
of movies, but the business. We are going to tell
you the truth and reality of what really happens in
the indie film business. Welcome back to Indie Filmmaking, Truth
(00:49):
and Reality. I'm your host, Jeff Deverett, and I'm very
excited to talk to you today about audience because at
the end of the day, audience is really who you're after.
It's the people who are going to watch, hopefully enjoy,
and hopefully pay for your film. But that's what this
is all about. Filmmaking is all about trying to attract
(01:12):
an audience who is going to enjoy your film and hopefully,
like I say, pay for it. This is all tied
to distribution, and you know, I do a lot of
I talk a lot about distribution and marketing, which is
distribution is releasing your movie to make it accessible to audiences,
and marketing is creating audience awareness, getting the attention of
people who hopefully will watch your movie. That's what distribution
(01:34):
marketing is. So I talk a lot about that in
a lot of episodes because you know, I always say,
you know, it's important to make an unbelievably great, entertaining film.
But if you make the greatest film in the world
and you can't get an audience, then you've kind of
wasted your time. You're going to enjoy your film, your
mother's going to enjoy your film, but nobody else is
going to see it. So getting an audience is super important.
(01:54):
But I want to focus specifically on the concept of
audience because here's what happens with a lot of indie filmmakers.
It's tough to make the film, but it's a huge
struggle to get the film properly distributed and marketed to audiences.
To release the movie, it's a big struggle A lot
of indie filmmakers they just don't know how to navigate
that process, and when they do, it's aggravating. They end
(02:17):
up signing with the bad distributors sometimes or not getting
released properly, not getting marketed at all, not making any
money with their films, and even worse, nobody even seeing
their movies. So sometimes a filmmaker would say, okay, what
I like to make money? Of course I would, but
at the very least, I'm hoping that a lot of
people at least watch my film so that you know
they're enjoyed and entertained by it, because that's the point
(02:39):
of making it. So here's the thing. When you go
through this distribution process, you are going to be up
against a lot of rejection. When you go to find
a distributor, most of them might not even talk to
you or ghost you. Like you're going to send your
film to them. You're going to say, hey, I just
made this great film, and a lot of them aren't
going to react to you. Gonna you know, you'll probably
(03:01):
do it buy email, or maybe if you go to
a film market you'll meet with them in person. They'll
say yeah, yeah, we'll look at it. And then most
of them don't bother looking at it or don't get
back to you, and they don't follow up, and you think,
wait a second, aren't you in the business of finding
and releasing good films? Why would you not want to
(03:22):
take a look at my film and get back to
me and follow up with me. And sometimes you wonder
because if they ghost you, meaning they don't even return
your email or your meeting or anything like that, it
means you're not even sure number one, if they even
watched your movie, and number two, whether or not they
liked it. If they watched it, you have no feedback
at all. So that's a form of rejection. If you
(03:43):
take it as rejection, it can be demoralizing having worked
so hard on making your film sending it to something
they don't even take the time to watch it, and
they're a distributor, So that's demoralizing. I agree, but don't
feel too rejected because it's kind of par for the course.
I mean, it's sad that I'm even saying this, but
it's sort of what happens in this industry. A lot
(04:05):
of distributors who should be on the lookout for new entertainment,
new high quality films, or whatever entertaining films, and they
don't have to be big budget, they just have to
be entertaining. And I'm assuming your film is entertaining. They
don't even bother responding to you. They ghost you, so
right away you think, oh, is my film good? What's
(04:26):
the problem. Maybe it's me, Maybe it's my movie, maybe
it's the industry, and you get kind of demoralized. All right,
that's sort of step number one, which is the first
step of rejection. And this episode is not about rejection.
This episode is about audience. But I got to set
the stage first. Level two would be streaming platforms. Now,
in order to get onto a major streaming platform, you're
(04:48):
going to need a distributor or an agent, somebody who's connected,
because they're not going to take your product directly. I mean,
there was a time when you could send your movie
to a streamer directly, like a Netflix even or Whulu
or HBO Max, any of these places used to accept submissions,
but they don't anymore. You have to go through a
legitimate distributor. So I just said, often you can't even
(05:10):
get the attention of a legitimate distributor. But even if
you were, even if you weren't able to get it,
and then they send it through and then the streamers
they're not even looking for content anymore. Their business, they're
in the business of providing entertaining content to their audiences.
Since they're subscribers and I'm talking subscription video on demand streamers,
(05:32):
that's their business, right. Their actual business is getting more subscribers.
But the way they do that is to provide them
with entertaining content. So you say, like, why would you
not be interested in watching some new content. I just
made this great new movie, it's available, I'm sending it
to you. Why not have a look at it. If
you don't like it, I get it, but at least
(05:53):
give it a shot, like, at least try, right? Not interested? Why?
Because these days most of them are just making their
own content like Netflix originals that type of thing. Or
if it's not some big star driven, special effects driven
or you know, Academy Award winning movie, you're not gonna
(06:13):
hit their radar screen. They're just looking for this really
big stuff. For the most part. There's exceptions here or there,
but generally speaking, they're not out buying in the content anymore.
It's too bad. It's a problem. But again, so that's
another form of call it rejection. It's not really rejection,
it's just their business model. But it's demoralizing because here
(06:36):
you are, you want to be in front of their audiences,
and they're not interested in even looking at it. Number three,
how about film festivals? You're gonna send your film submitted?
I don't know, twenty twenty five festivals, maybe more, maybe less,
but you know, on average, that's what filmmakers do. They're
very excited about their films. They go through the whole process.
There's thousands of film festivals. I think last time I
(06:57):
checked on Film Freeway there was I don't know, well
over ten thousand festivals, and if you add in the
writing competitions all this kind of stuff, probably fourteen or
fifteen thousand. So there's no shortage of festivals. So you
want to submit, You do all your homework, you try
to figure out which ones are best. You know where
you want to go if you got accepted. That lots
of stuff that goes into festival submissions, and then you know,
(07:20):
unless your film is I don't know. I was going
to say exceptional, but I'm going to say most films
are exceptional. Lucky for some reason or something like that.
If you hit ten to fifteen percent acceptance rate, it's
the festivals you're doing well. So a lot of these
festivals are going to reject you right away just because
(07:40):
there's so many submissions and they have only so many slots,
so you're not going to get into every festival. So
you feel demoralized by that. It's like, hey, wait a second,
and they give you no feedback. It's not like, you know,
they give you the standard sort of rejection letter, which is, oh,
your film's fantastic, but we didn't have enough room and obviously,
which is true, you can't take If they get five
(08:01):
thousand submissions, they can only screen I don't know, two
or three hundred of them if on a big festival,
maybe one hundred on a small festival. So that's rejection too.
So all of a sudden, you're feeling demoralized. You can't
get into a distributor, you can't get into a streaming platform,
you can't get into a festival, and you're thinking, what
the heck, Like, I just called myself to make this great,
(08:22):
entertaining film, and I'm assuming, by the way, for the
sake of the conversation, that actually is a great entertaining film.
All right, some of your films aren't going to be
great and entertaining. We know that. But let's say you
actually have a great entertaining film. That's what I'm assuming
for the sake of this, and nobody wants to see it.
I mean, nobody's willing to even look at it. And
you're not even sure the festivals took a look at
(08:43):
it when they rejected it. Maybe they watched the first
five minutes if you're lucky, but you don't know. You
have no feedback. You have no feedback from the distributors,
none from the streamers. So you're thinking, wow, that's really demoralizing. Like,
I made this great film. I want people to see it.
I mean I would love to release it and monetize it,
(09:04):
but at the very least I would like people to
see it, you know, like at least at a film festival.
I want people to see it and enjoy it and
give me feedback on it. And yet you come up
short across the board on everything. So that that's not nice.
It's demoralizing, and you can feel very upset about that.
But here's the good news. Here's why. This is the
(09:24):
reason I'm doing this episode. The good news is, at
the end of the day, those things matter for some reasons,
but not for a lot. I'm gonna come back to
this why it matters for that, but it doesn't really matter.
What really matters is audience. Having people watch your movie. Now,
(09:45):
those are vehicles to get in front of audiences, all right.
Distributors are vehicles to get onto streaming platforms, and streaming
platforms have audiences. So you're hoping to connect with a
streaming platform so that they can put you in of
their audience. Festivals have audiences. They have people who watch
the movies at their festivals, so they have audience. So
(10:06):
that's why you're hoping to tap in to their audiences,
which would be really nice. I agree, all right, But
here's the thing about an audience. They don't own the audience.
The streaming platforms they don't own the audience. These are
just subscribers. They're allowed to watch outside of the streaming platform.
Whether they do or not is another story we'll talk
(10:28):
about in a few minutes. But festival goers they go
to lots of festivals, or they look at lots of
streaming platforms, or they access material lots of other places.
Festivals don't own the audience. They own it for the
day of the screening. The streamer owns the subscription to
their platform, but they don't own viewership. They don't own
(10:49):
the fact that people are looking for good quality entertainment.
And therefore, if you can figure out a way to
get in front of those people and create awareness with them,
then it's not about there. Nobody's ever going to say
I'm not going to watch this movie because it's not
on Netflix. Now people are probably saying, yes, they will.
(11:10):
Young people will because young people will say, Hey, I
spent fifteen or twenty dollars a month on my Netflix subscription,
and therefore that's all I'm going to watch, because why
would I spend some extra money when I've already got
a Netflix subscription. And the answer is, if you truly
actually want to watch something that is not on your
(11:32):
streaming platform, then you will probably watch it if you
really want to watch it. All right, why do you
think people have multiple subscriptions? I mean me, I subscribe
to almost all the platforms, not because I want to
pay a lot of money, is because I like a
lot of the programming. Apple's got stuff that Netflix doesn't
(11:52):
have that. Hulu's got stuff that Max doesn't have, and
Max got stuff. Everybody's got something good and if you
hear about it and you want to watch what they have,
then you need to go subscribe to to their platform.
Is it a pain in the button yeah? Is it expensive, Yeah,
because you know you got to have all these subscriptions.
(12:13):
But at the end of the day, if you're an
audience person, which I am. I'm you know, a typical
audience person who's looking seeking out good quality entertainment, then
when I find it or I hear about it, then
I'm willing to pay for it. Is everybody, No, some
people have limited budgets and they're not willing to go
and have multiple subscriptions, or maybe won't want to do
(12:35):
say transactional video on demand to say just download one
movie to watch it. Some people, So let's say I'm
going to just make up a statistic. Let's say that
what I just said of people who are willing to
watch have multiple subscriptions and watch what they want to
watch when they want to watch it on demand and
are willing to pay for it, Let's say that that
(12:57):
is ten percent of people. I'm going to cut out
ninety percent of the viewing audience. Let's just take I
don't know Netflix's audience, and just for easy numbers, let's
call Netflix's audience two hundred million subscribers worldwide. Let's say
ninety percent of them are not willing to watch anything
off of Netflix, which is, by the way, not true
(13:18):
at all. We know that. Okay, I just want to
demonstrate a point. Let's say it's only ten percent. That's
twenty million people, folks. That's twenty million people who are
willing to say, if I find something else that I
want to watch, I'm prepared to watch it and hopefully
pay for it. You, as an indie filmmaker who have
completely been rejected by the festivals, by the distributors, by
(13:41):
the streamers, maybe you can tap in to that other
ten percent of viewers who are looking for something to watch.
But the question is how do you get their attention?
How do you let them know that you have something
that they want to watch, and where do you make
it avail for them to watch it? So that's distribution
(14:02):
of marketing, all right. So you're gonna have to create
some type of You're gonna have to put it up
onto some platform that makes it accessible. But what I'm
talking about is, let's just talk about transactional video on demand.
And I know a lot of people listening to this
or saying, oh, Jeff, you're crazy. It's dead. It's never
gonna be alive again. Nobody's gonna everybody's just subscription or
(14:24):
avod advertising, free watching with ads. Transactional is dead. And
I say, no, I don't believe that. I do not
believe it's dead. For something that somebody wants to watch
and it's exclusively only available on transactional. Now, I teach
a lot of young people, students. Students always say to me,
I can't afford five dollars to watch a movie. Let's
(14:44):
say you make this great movie, you put it onto
a transactional platform, and you charge five dollars, and we'll
talk about marketing in a second, how to get their
awareness to send them to that platform. And that's the
only place this is available. And ninety percent of the
world isn't going to care, they're not going to pay attention.
That maybe ten percent will one out of ten might
even be one percent, all right, but let's use ten
(15:05):
percent to discuss this, all right, So you're gonna send
them there five dollars. So all my students say, I'm
not paying five dollars. Just spend twenty dollars a month
on Netflix and I'm getting way way more content. This
is one thing for five dollars. And I say, what's
in your hand right there that looks like a cup
of Starbucks coffee? Oh? That's that's a chilate skinny chilatte
(15:27):
that cost you six dollars or seven dollars, depending on
if it's got a flavor or something in it. You
had no problem doing that, and guess what you do
that every single day? You might do it twice a day.
How come all of a sudden you could spend five
dollars on a cup of coffee, but you can't spend
it on a feature film that is really good, really entertaining,
(15:48):
and cost an act of a lot more than to
make then a cup of coffee with a lot more
hard in it. So people can't afford it, all right?
They say they can't, and they say they wouldn't, but
they actually can. The question is how do you entice
them enough to want to spend the money? All right,
So I don't believe that they can't afford it. I look,
obviously there's some people in the world who can't afford it.
(16:10):
But how is it that you know, you can charge five, six,
seven dollars for a cup of coffee. Nobody has an
issue with it. Nobody expects anything of value to be
for free, other than the arts. It's amazing how that's happened.
I don't know how that happened. People think, Okay, I
got to pay five dollars for a cup of coffee,
(16:32):
and five dollars for this really good muffin, no problem,
because it's it's tangible, it's an item. But why don't
they say I got to pay five dollars for a
movie or for you know, a dollar for a song
or something like that. This is stuff that artists have,
you know, labored over, and it's not easy to do this.
But yet everybody struggles with that concept because the way
(16:53):
I don't know, the way we've moved distribution. I don't
agree with it. I think that that there's a lot
of value to especially to a movie, and it shouldn't
be a problem to pay five dollars. But I also
I'm smart enough and experience enough to know that a
lot of people won't do it. So that's why I'm saying,
let's say ten percent of people will do it if
they know about it, if they know about it and
(17:15):
they're excited about it and enticed enough to want to
do it, and you make it easy enough for them
to do it. So here's what I'm saying about audience.
This is who you're going after at the end of
the day. When you're making a movie, You've got to
be focused on the audience. You've got to be focused
on there's ten percent of the viewing audience out there
(17:36):
that might be willing to watch this movie and might
be willing to pay for it. You can't be demoralized
by the fact that you're not going to get onto Netflix.
You can't be demoralized when you get rejected by a
bunch of film festivals or when distributors goes to I
know it's demoralizing, but try not to be demoralized about that.
(17:57):
I'll tell you when you should be demoralized, and you
shouldn't even be for this is when people who watch
the movie say they don't like it or they're not
going to recommend it to somebody else. And again, it's
not demoralizing. Everybody's got an opinion. But if you can
get your movie in front of people and hopefully paying people,
and they say they like it and willing to tell
(18:18):
other people, that's the core of distribution at the end
of the day. And as they said, streamers and festivals
don't own audiences, they just have access to them because
they're offering a lot of content in an organized way,
which I think is wonderful. But it's not precluding you
from going to those people and having them watch your
(18:40):
movie for five dollars and again I'm using that number arbitrarily,
but you got to make them aware of it, which
is marketing. And so the biggest disconnect in the film business,
which in the indie film business, which I talk about
all the time, is that a filmmaker will spend lots
and lots of time, energy, money, and passion on creating
their film and nothing on marketing it. They just don't
(19:03):
want to talk about marketing or putting it in front
of audiences. So I'm saying to you filmmakers, look, once
you get to that point where you're all demoralized about
having all this rejection, always remember that there are people
out there who actually would be excited to watch your
film and probably would pay to watch it if you
did a good marketing campaign to let them know that
(19:24):
the film's available and put your film, I don't know
onny any type of transactional platform. You can always get
it onto a transactional platform. You can even get it
on your own website if you have to, at very least,
like at the very worst case scenario, just create a website,
put your film on. I've known filmmakers who have done this,
(19:44):
all right, and you can drive the audience there, you know,
and use like a standard payment like stripe or something
like that as a standard payment module. That's the very
worst case scenario. But the tough part is driving the
audience there to see it, all right. It's creating awareness
and enticing them to want to see your movie. If
(20:06):
you're demoralized about everybody rejecting your movie, take a step back,
look in the mirror and realize that the reason you
got there is because you weren't willing to do what
it takes to actually get the audience, which is market
to them. Now, if you look at all these other places, okay,
film festivals, you know, well established festivals, they don't need
(20:26):
to do much marketing anymore Toronto, Can you know sun Dance?
These festivals are iconic, they've been around, But all these
other little festivals they come and go. If they don't
do marketing, they don't let filmmakers know about them, They
come and go, they disappear. Streaming platforms. Yeah, the big ones,
it didn't start automatically. They had to build over years
(20:47):
and years and years. Audiences. Studios had to build audiences
over years. I mean it happened, you know, a century
ago when they first started, but it didn't. You don't
snap your fingers and the audience comes. You have to build.
You have to market, to create audience awareness that you
still have to advertise. Those people still do advertising and
when they spend a lot on big shows in order
(21:08):
to attract audiences. That's what it's all about. So you're
a little guy, you got one movie, it's good. How
do you get the audience attention? It's super super super difficult,
all right. But if you don't have a marketing campaign
and you don't think about one who your audience is,
how you're going to attract them and give it a
(21:28):
real shot the way you did making the movie, then
you almost have no chance. I mean, that's the problem.
That's the disconnect, is that it's almost impossible, like you'd
have to have some stroke of lightning, lucky event going
viral or something like that to get you over the top,
because you haven't put any effort into creating the attention
(21:50):
of the audience. And I'm telling you, when we started
this episode, I said, it's about audience. Don't worry about
the fact that you don't control and own that audience.
Nobody does about how you're gonna connect with that audience.
And I know as filmmakers, you don't want to think
about it. You don't want to talk about it. You
just want to talk about making the movie. And the
attraction of getting it on a big streaming platform, obviously
(22:10):
is you don't have to do any marketing. They have
the audience already. The attraction of getting in the festival,
they already have the audience, obviously, that's the attraction. That's
why you try for it to get distributors, That's why
you try to get streaming platforms. That's why you try
for it because they have the audience that you want.
But if they say no, sorry, we're not letting you
in the door. It doesn't mean it's over. It means
(22:33):
now you're just gonna have to try a little harder
and you're gonna have to try to tap into that
audience yourself. Now, it's really, really, really difficult to do that.
I know, I do it all the time. It's what
we call self distribution, all right, releasing the movie yourself,
marketing the movie yourself. But I am telling you more
and more these days, that is the direction that distribution
(22:56):
has gone in, and unfortunately, for better worse, the distribution
system is failing a lot of indie filmmakers. They're just
not getting their films in front of audiences the way
they should, and audiences don't know about it. So part
of being an indie filmmaker now is kind of being
aware and understanding that you're going to have to probably
(23:17):
go it alone on the marketing side. Now, I'm going
to do a little pitch for my platform because and
I didn't do this episode for this reason, but I
just want to let you know doing that is really
tough for three reasons. One is, you generally don't even
know how to do it, Like, even if you wanted
to do it, you don't know how to do it.
Because it takes skills to figure out how to do marketing. Two,
(23:38):
you generally don't want to do it. You're a filmmaker
and you didn't sign up to do marketing. You signed
up to do filmmaking. So even if you knew how
to do it, you actually have no desire to do it.
And number three, you probably have no resources to do it.
You haven't raised any money because marketing costs money. You
might be doing this paid social media campaign, maybe some advertising,
paid social media influence, something like that. It's not free,
(24:03):
just the way filmmaking is not free. So for those
three reasons, you might be stuck. All right. The third
reason the money. You're gonna need to access some money
in order to create awareness. I mean, there's only so
much you can do for free, say on social media
and publicity. All right, you can work it hard and
hard and hard, but it helps when you have a
budget to work with. Right. The other two things, you
(24:25):
got to find people who maybe are better at it
than you are, maybe know what they're doing and can
help you out. And that's what they do for a living.
They don't make films, They market films. When I say
I'm gonna plug the Indie film community. That's what we do.
We help filmmakers do the things they don't want to do.
All the business stuff like in the making the films
and all the distribution of marketing. They just don't want
(24:48):
to do it, and even if they did want to
do it, they kind of don't know how to do it.
And there's no scale, so you know, doing one marketing
campaign is way more expensive than doing say one hundred.
So what the Indie Film own community is basically that distribution,
marketing and business department the way a film studio would
have it for indie filmmakers. That's all it is. It's
(25:10):
basically saying, hey, indie filmmakers, you're a one time, you know,
one off film, so you can't afford to have a
legal department, you can't afford to have a marketing department,
you can't afford to have an accounting department in finance.
But we have this department that we're supporting lots of filmmakers,
so we can help you with that, or if you're conscientious,
you should do it yourself. But the bottom line is this,
(25:32):
and here's why I wanted to do this episode. If
somebody says to you, sorry, I'm not going to accept
your film to a festival, or I'm not going to
put you on the streaming platform, or I'm not gonna
watch your film as a distributor, and it's over for you.
Don't be a filmmaker, because it's going to happen, all right.
It's going to be really upsetting and demoralizing, but it's
going to happen. So you need to know that when
(25:54):
that happens, it's not over. It's just beginning. Because they
don't own the audience. The audience is there. You're just
going to have to do more work to connect to it.
But if you got something that the audience wants to
see and you let them know about it properly, then
hopefully you will be able to bypass all of that
BS and all of that demoralization and get to the audience.
(26:17):
It's just going to be a heck of a lot
of work, So good luck, see you next time.
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