The Catch 22

It is often said that to get money for your film you need to have names attached to it and to get names attached to your film you need to have money attached to it. The good ol' catch 22, right? Well maybe there is a way around that. In the preliminary stages of Bounty I learned a few things that I did not realize until after I had completed production. Budget, funds and attachments are often times suggestions before they are ever realizations.

For the next project I can say I will do quite a bit differently. First being with the budget. When creating your budget, don't undercut yourself - you don't have to be realistic when creating the 1st draft of the budget. Think of it like script writing, there will always be revisions. The budget is to help you determine how much money you will need, it is not necissarily saying how much money you have. I would suggest putting in the full price of everything when creating the budget, save the deal making for your prep month/week. Put your crews wages at union standards, locations at full amounts, every permit that you will need. You may even want to put your talent at around $5,000 a day - who knows you may get that A-list actor attached.

Once you have completed your preliminary budget start calling up the talent and crew you want to have involved. A good place to be able to get in contact with these people is by subscribing to the website, WhoRepresents.com, this will give you access to an exahustive database of talent and who they are represented by. Start calling up the agents and managers of the talent you want to work with. In the little bit of experience I have had, I would recommend talking with the managers as opposed to the agent - agents are looking at the dollar value while managers are more open to the project/idea. This is where your budget comes into play. Often times you will be asked what your budget is; now if you were realistic when creating your budget, believing you would only get $500,000, the response you may get is that it would be a waste of their time. Imagine the difference if you told them it was a $10mil budget. They would be more interested in the project, right? Well your first thing is to be able to send a script their way and you would only be able to do that if they let you.

So by making your budget with everything at full price you may be able to tap into that talent that you want to get attached. Once they have an expressed interest, turn around and start using that to raise funds. Go to the studios, go to distribution companies and tell them what you have. It worked for Snakes on a Plane, didn't it?

What's there to lose? I am in the proses of giving it a try so if it works I will deffinately share my experiences.