It's very difficult to raise money, especially in the United States, for independent movies.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Every film is hard to fund.
It's becoming increasingly harder and harder; there's no such thing as independent film anymore. There aren't any, they don't exist. In the old days you could go and get a certain amount of the budget with foreign sales, now everybody wants a marketable angle.
It is extremely difficult to get movies that cost more than $40 million to be made these days.
I think the situation in Toronto is such that there are funding organizations which make it easy for a film to raise more money than it needs and very often that works against a film.
You can get money and make a really cheap movie. You can, from independent financers who are just giving you money to support artists. This is what was happening in the '90s, and I was very fortunate to be a part of that.
I could not finance a movie on my own. Frankly, I could not even afford to take a year off. I, like most people in America, need to keep making money.
Movies are an expensive business.
When you make a movie independently, you raise the money beforehand, and then you make the movie kind of by yourself.
Ironically, it's easier to raise the money to make the film than it is to have the film find wide distribution.
You can spend an extraordinary amount of time raising independent money to do a movie for very little means. I've done it with 'Pawn Sacrifice.'