Latest / Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast / IFH 751: How to Turn Your Movie Script into a Money-Maker with Mark Toia

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IFH 751: How to Turn Your Movie Script into a Money-Maker with Mark Toia · Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast

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  You are listening to the ifh podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
• 0:08
  podcasts, just go to ifhpodcastnetwork dot com. Welcome to the Indie Film Hustle
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  Podcast, Episode number seven fifty one. The Riches are in the Niches.
• 0:19
  Alex Ferrari broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood. It's the Indie Film Hustle
• 0:25
  Podcast, where we show you how to survive and thrive as an indie filmmaker
• 0:30
  in the jungles of the film biz. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari.
• 0:36
  Welcome, Welcome to another episode of the Indie Film Hustle Podcast. I
• 0:39
  am your humble host, Alex Ferrari. Today's show is sponsored by Rise of
• 0:43
  the Film Entrepreneur How to turn your independent film into a profitable business. It's
• 0:48
  harder today than ever before for independent filmmakers to make money with their films from
• 0:52
  predatory film distributors ripping them off to huckster film aggregators who prey upon them.
• 0:57
  The odds are stacked against the indie filmmaker. The old distribution model of making
• 1:00
  money with your film is broken and there needs to be a change. The
• 1:04
  future of independent filmmaking is the entrepreneurial filmmaker or the film entrepreneur. In Rise
• 1:11
  of the Film Entrepreneur, I break down how to actually make money with your
• 1:15
  film projects and show you how to turn your indie film into a profitable business.
• 1:19
  With case studies examining successes and failures. This book shows you the step
• 1:25
  by step method to turn your passion into a profitable career. If you're making
• 1:29
  a feature film, series, or any other kind of video content, the
• 1:33
  Film Entrepreneur method will set you up for success. The book is available in
• 1:38
  paperback, ebook, and of course audiobook. If you want to order it,
• 1:42
  just head over to www dot filmbiz book dot com. That's film bizbook
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  dot com. Well, guys, today on the show we have a tread
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  for you. We have returning champion, Mark Toya. And Mark is the
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  director and the riot of the hit indie film Monsters of Man. And if
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  you go to episode four seven of the podcast where Mark decided to do something
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  that I thought was absolutely nuts, but he wanted to do it and it
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  was a really interesting experiment. He was going to use the film entrepreneur method
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  and self distribute his film Monsters of Man, which by the way, cost
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  a million dollars, and I asked him, would you come back on the
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  show after you've done this experiment and tell us how it succeeded or failed?
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  And boy, did it ever succeed Mark and I go into the weeds on
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  how he was able to make millions of dollars using the ideas and methods taught
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  in my book Rise of the Film Entrepreneur, How to turn your movie into
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  a money making business. This is a masterclass on how to release a film.
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  We talk about marketing, we talk about everything he did, how he
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  was able to get TV on and make a lot of money in transactional where
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  without an audience, without a dedicated audience that he had cultivated, how he
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  was able to do it with social media, social media ads, Facebook,
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  Instagram, YouTube techniques that he used, and a lot of the let's say,
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  hiccups and pitfalls that he walked into going through this method. But he
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  has been extremely successful and continues to generate a good amount of money off of
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  this film every single month. And we also talk about the future and what
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  he has planned for Monsters of Man. So this is an epic episode.
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  So without any further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Mark Toya. I
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  like to welcome back to the show returning champion Mark Toya. Hey you Mark,
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  how are you doing? My friend? Be a good good. Thank
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  you so much. Thanks to Bussed for coming back on the show Man your
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  episode episode four oh seven. That has been a while. We're over six
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  hundred now, so it's been a it's been a it's been a few years
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  since we've spoken on you've been on the show. We've been talking on and
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  off all that time. Uh but you you came on and and uh well,
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  let let's just start from the beginning. Can you just recap everybody and
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  let everybody know how you got into the business really quickly, what you do
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  for a living a day to day what we had all got into the business
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  hobby complete hobby that went crazy day was I was a baller micer, you
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  know, a young ball of micer. And people don't know what a baller
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  micer is, but pretty much people that make anything out of steel, you
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  know, whether it's skyscrapers or a steel box for someone back to someone's car,
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  you know who knows it. Also, anything might have steal, So
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  that's I used to do as a trade. But I was a child artist
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  when I was young. I could paint real life oils when I was like
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  thirteen years old, so I had did have a bit of a gifted hand
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  when I was a young fellow, and I could draw anything, and I
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  could do my own storyboards if I want all that sort of stuff. So
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  I had to me the anyway, the hobby went crazy, picked up a
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  Stills camera this is cool, had a bit of fun with that, and
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  sent a photograph off to a magazine company, not thinking they ever paid you.
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  I had no idea that they paid you, but they sent me a
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  check for fifty dollars, and my mind exploded. I literally stared at that
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  check at day all day, going holy fuck, they pay you or sorry
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  to Minnesquere. And then I thought, I'm going to do more of this,
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  and I sent some more photographs off to more magazines, and about I
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  think two hundred dollars turned up the next month, and I went, oh,
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  my goodness, it's almost paid my week's wages. It just happed having
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  fun doing that cool, you know what I mean. And then I went
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  completely psycho photographer, didn't know what I was doing, and went into the
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  magazine world learnt all the hassles, tripped over on my face a few times,
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  went nuts, and all of a sudden night a career in photography that
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  was so fast. It wasn't funny because back in those days shooting film,
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  you know, maybe it was a bit harder running around like an idiot with
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  big lenses was harder, I don't know, or easier, I have no
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  idea, But anyway, it took off, and a ton of magazines chasing
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  me, and then I worked for a company called Routers. Were not work
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  but more is what they call a stringer, and that was good doing the
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  former ones and the bike Grand Prix and World Gymnastics and the next to us
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  doing news events and all that. Anyway, I was started to get bored
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  of that, and I got into advertising photography, which was a complete loss
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  of income because because I had no idea what the hell I was doing in
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  the advertising world, no one wanted to hire me because I was a complete
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  nobody. It was a very very hard industry to get into. And you
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  know, a couple of people gave me a couple of jobs that were a
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  bit more action focused, which I was pretty good at at the time,
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  doing a lot of sport, you know, for the newspapers and the magazines.
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  And then someone else noticed, and someone else noticed, and after a
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  lot of persistence and a lot of walk around town knocking on doors, I
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  managed to get my advertising career going. That I built this big, obnoxious
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  studio like massive, you pack trucks in it. And then that everyone said
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  I was crazy and I was going to lose all my money, and anyway,
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  the other way took off and I was the busiest photographer in town during
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  that. One of my clients say coming in winging about a TV commercial he
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  had made, and he showed me that it was pretty basic and he had
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  paid three hundred thousand dollars for it. This is I'm talking probably twenty five
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  years ago, twenty eight years ago, and you know, three hundred grand
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  back then there's a lot of a lot of money, right And anyway,
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  he was not happy. And I said I'd love to do a TV ad
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  one day. And he looked at me and he says, you know,
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  have you ever done one? And I said, well, I did this
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  little video for a friend of mine that it was very it was like a
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  helicopter one. He loved it. He says, well, I got,
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  you know, like I think it was twenty five grand left over. He
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  said the honor, go for it, just have fun with it. See
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  if you can do better than this thing. And anyway, we did and
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  put it together in the most naive way possible, completely completely naive. I
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  mean, I couldn't believe how naive. I wasn't how unknowledgeable was in making
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  TV commercials. Anyway, we did it. We went through a company good
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  you know, like postails could focus. I think it was cutting Age or
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  something, and then it was back in the early days, and they helped
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  me edit it together and put together anyway, I won. I went.
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  I entered it in the local industry awards, and I want best Director and
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  Best in Phatographer and as rest as they say, is history. You've done
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  okay for yourself as as a commercial director. You've made if you know,
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  you just went to your site right before this conversation, I just let me
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  check about what, like, oh, is that Kobe? Yeah, that's
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  Kobe. Yeah, so he's you've done okay for yourself as a commercial director.
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  And and then you had this insane idea like I'm gonna go make a
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  movie and you made his little many many years later, or we're fast forwarding
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  a lot. But many years later, you decided to make a little independent
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  film called Monsters of Man And and if I'm not mistaken, the budget was
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  a million dollars or so, and you decided to finance that yourself. Is
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  that correct. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and
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  now back to the show. Yeah, well it might have been a touch
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  less with the current fluctuation of the US to Australian dollar, but yes,
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  give or take something like that. So so, and that movie came out
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  when you reached out to me, the movie had already I think, was
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  already done, and you were trying to figure out this whole how do I
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  make money with this thing concept? And how did you come across my book
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  rise of the film entrepreneur? Well, with what I remember, I'd just
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  literally broken three ribs speeding, and I was and I decided I was because
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  I was gonna We've shot the movie and I was editing it with under pain.
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  What filmmakers do, by the way, we all edit under pain.
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  I was sitting there and I I'm not doing anything now, I've got three
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  broken ribs. I just sat there, just started editing the movie, and
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  I wasn't going to I was actually going to give it to an editor friend
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  of mine. But this was a little bit of therapy. While I just
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  was stuck up in the up in the snowy mountains doing nothing. I couldn't
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  scire, just looked out the window crying every day. So start editing the
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  movie. And I got into it so fast. I mean, I love
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  editing anyway, It's just the thing I do. I've been doing it for
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  twenty years. I just didn't feel like editing a movie and I'd never done
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  one before. And yeah, that's right. I was sitting there and I
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  was scaring the internet. Oh so no, so sorry, it's a couple
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  of years ago, Alex, I've got to get to get my No,
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  it wasn't sorry, No, we're we're we were in the middle of the
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  whole selling the movie thing. That's right. It was no. Actually it
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  was just before that anyway, It was in that time. It was in
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  that time. And yes, I stumbled over your podcasts and your then your
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  video is un stand watching this thing. This guy seems pretty much I disruptor
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  of the world and a bit of a trouble This type of guy, I
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  wonder who this Alex Frarius. So anyway, that's why I reached out to
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  you. Yes, and I sent you the trailer of a movie that was
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  sort of being finished at the time, right, And when you sent me
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  the trailer, and by the way, I get sent trailers daily by filmmakers
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  from around the world wanted to either come on the show or talk to me
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  or get a consulted consultation. And when your trailer came in, I was
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  like, oh when I saw the review, like the description you're like a
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  bunch of robots get thrown in a jungle. Oh, this is gonna be
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  horrendous, Like who's gonna what a horrible because you just think, you're like
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  the graphics are going to be horrible, the the effects are not going to
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  be good. And I turned this trailer on, and this trailer turns on
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  and I'm like, my mouth is on the floor. The visual effects are
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  as good, if not better than Marvel films, and the actions really going
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  like who the hell is Mark Taya? Like who the hell are It's like
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  I like reached right back out to You're like, yeah, let's get on
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  a call, man. I want to talk to you, Like how the
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  hell did this get done? And that's when the conversation started. And I'm
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  not sure did you read the book at that point prior or after that conversation,
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  but I know one of those things I did. I didn't know that
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  the book existed until you until we spoke and you said you were doing this
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  book, and I'm reading it all right, so you picked it up right
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  away. I booked it, sorry, because I don't like reading audiobook.
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  I think your audiobook I read script sense a bit. All I read it,
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  but I audio booked it. And uh yeah, I've got a little
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  coffee shop there the right, so I literally just it just was in my
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  ear and it was fantastic. I mean, it was so fantastic, and
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  you know you and you were banging too, like you know, you were
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  making sure no one forgot the message right, get back and ripped off.
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  Do this, don't do that, don't do that? You know three chapters
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  lady, like I fucking remember do this you drum hard? Yeah that's fine,
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  I'm in the drum beating, you know. I do it to my
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  kids. And then I so I had all this poison in my brain that
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  you poisoned me with some real world ship, you know, and then I'm
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  at the moment and at that time, we were shuffling our film through a
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  traditional sales pipeline. You know, it was going through C I A and
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  other people whatever, and you know, and it wasn't working, and the
• 14:43
  contracts that were coming through were were questionable and question but your serious offers though
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  you have like million dollars, you know, it was fine. There was
• 14:56
  a millionaire and a million over there that you know, it was all.
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  It was all happening. But I just thought, I thought it wasn't so
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  much a bit of the said of the movie because my wife and I thought,
• 15:09
  if we throw them the million dollars in the bin, whatever it's going
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  to be, we'll use it as a calling card, which is and that's
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  another story off the back of this, which we can talk about later,
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  but we'll just use it as a bit of a marketing tool. For me.
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  There's like a show real to sell myself into Hollywood. If we if
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  we don't make any money on it, We're not going to lose sleep over
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  it, right, because I've been working very hard the last twenty years in
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  this game. My wife's a very avid property a woman, and she and
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  between her and I we do okay, you know what I mean, we
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  did quite much, so I'm not going to say it was the ultimate experiment,
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  really great. And then you're caught by the way that to show your
• 15:52
  mates might have to talk about my mind sided that conversation. So then you
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  know we're going back and forth over over escape at the time. So we're
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  going back and forth, and then you say, I think I'm just gonna
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  I mean, I read your book, man, it's great. I love
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  it. You gave me all sorts of ideas. I think I'm just going
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  to release this myself, and I'm going to use a lot of the things
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  in the book to help me do it. And I'm like, you're gonna
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  release a million dollar You're gonna self distribute a million dollar Now, anybody else,
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  anybody else that would have told me that, I would, I would
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  advise the gainst because to self distribute a million dollar product is you got to
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  know you got to hit that target not once, not twice, but like
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  forty or fifty times bullseye to break even. That's from my experience, because
• 16:40
  it depends on the kind of product. But then I saw, but I
• 16:41
  so you've got a different kind of movie. You have an anomaly of a
• 16:45
  movie because there's movie your movie Mans's a man doesn't come along. I've seen
• 16:49
  it once in my life, a film like that at that level of quality.
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  And then you're marketing savvy, your understanding of that, you're this whole
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  situation is so lottery ticket ask is an example of It's just it's an anomaly,
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  without question. But then I'm like, if you're willing to do it,
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  would you want to come on the show and talk about it? And
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  you're like, come on the show. So you came on the show,
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  we talked about it. I'm like, you're going to do a million dollar
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  experiment, and when you're done in a couple of years, come back on
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  and tell us how it goes. He goes, and you said, here
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  we are, And you said, I'll come on if I make money or
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  if I don't make money. I want everybody to know what happened. So
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  that was fair. That was fair, and I wanted to I wanted people
• 17:30
  to either learn by my mistakes, and I made some mistakes during the process,
• 17:38
  whether it was going to be the traditional method or the or the Maverick
• 17:45
  fucking crazy man direction. There's mistakes in both right, and that's what we're
• 17:52
  here today. Let's let's talk about that stuff and just say why it worked,
• 17:57
  how it could have worked even better and how And you know now that
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  the future is now that two years have lapsed since we released it, what
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  could I have done better? And now this is the valuable lessons that only
• 18:12
  doing what I did has taught me. If I just dumped it on the
• 18:15
  in the distribute, with the distributor and I'll let them go, I would
• 18:18
  learn nothing, all right, and you would and you would to pray mean
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  nothing. Now, look, I would have got you know that people were
• 18:26
  still dumping money on me. I would have still made money, but I
• 18:29
  wouldn't have made as pubby as much. But I've been doing a lot of
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  work as well. So and the thing is, distributors that sell your movie
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  do a lot of work. They should get paid. So it's not like
• 18:41
  the supplying a ripoff service. They're not. They're doing what your lazy ass
• 18:48
  ain't gonna do, you know. And by the way, in the book,
• 18:52
  in the book, I say that, like what I'm talking about in
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  this book is work like I never wanted it, and I did it a
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  lot of it, Alex, Right, that's way never crazy. But it's
• 19:06
  fun. It's fun. I said, this is really fucking good fun.
• 19:08
  I'm really enjoying it. And I'm doing, you know, all our testing
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  on our trailers or our marketing profiles, all of our online medium advertising.
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  And mind you, I'm from an advertising agency. I'm not an agency.
• 19:22
  I don't own an agency. Sorry, but I worked with thousands of our
• 19:25
  agencies around the world. I've worked with the best of the best of the
• 19:27
  best of the best, right, so, they, without realizing it,
• 19:32
  taught me so much about advertising, right you know. I mean you've been
• 19:34
  doing commercially level right down to the little tiny social media type ship. I
• 19:38
  mean you pick up things. I mean, I addited, I mean hundreds
• 19:44
  of commercials and promos over the course of my career. And I picked up
• 19:48
  a couple of things along the way. Working with you can do it.
• 19:51
  You just you just start picking up a couple of things here and there.
• 19:53
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to
• 20:00
  the show. All right, So, but the one thing did you did
• 20:06
  get offered? You got multimillion dollar offers from real studios that Mickey Mouse studios,
• 20:12
  Real studios and yeah, you decided to just walk away from them because
• 20:17
  you're just like, you know, these deals, I mean, it's gonna
• 20:18
  take me forever to get paid. It's shady. There's a lot of outs
• 20:22
  and ins, and it looks like I'm like, yeah, well yeah,
• 20:26
  look the deals were it ben open book. One deal was just a million
• 20:33
  bucks, you know what I mean. But that like right now, they're
• 20:37
  not going to just write your check right now for it, Oh right,
• 20:38
  I know you would have been jumping hurdles and fucking you know, some guy
• 20:44
  in their office would go, there's a guy that's one hundred and fifty feet
• 20:48
  down the street. We need his release form or we're not gonna pay you.
• 20:51
  You know, right, well this is that. Or you know,
• 20:53
  there'd be some everyone I know that have gone through a lot of these deals
• 20:59
  with these big distributors are jumping hoops for twelve months and then and I still
• 21:04
  talk to them now. One guy be still waiting two years. You know,
• 21:07
  the movie's been out, the movie is out, and they go,
• 21:11
  oh, no, we still need all this paperwork done because it's in the
• 21:14
  contract. We still need all this this little thing done here. And it's
• 21:17
  so many or no one gives us ship. Yeah, it's just a way
• 21:19
  for them to hold on. But they're using it as a loophole to not
• 21:22
  pay them, and they probably will pay them, but that's just the machine.
• 21:26
  It could be five years, it could be five years donely, I've
• 21:30
  heard these stories. It's ridiculous, all right. When you do those sales,
• 21:34
  you are literally handing your baby over. You will never see it again.
• 21:40
  Oh you'll see it in ten or fifteen years time when the contract's done,
• 21:42
  and it'll be the raped of everything that it is Jesus. All right.
• 21:48
  So what was the first So from my remember for my recollection, the
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  first thing you did is started to do your own there, like you're on
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  theatrical in Australia. I wasn't really intrical. Well we released during COVID and
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  everyone said, Mark, you're mad, you're crazy, you don't do it.
• 22:07
  You know it or never made. But you had it. But you
• 22:08
  had a screening. You had a screen I remember you had a big screening.
• 22:11
  You know. I thought, you know, I've got a lot of
• 22:14
  friends here in town, and and we just sent everyone email, do you
• 22:18
  want to come and check out the movie? And everyone's curious. So five
• 22:21
  hundred people planned that. But the one thing you ever did it in Imax
• 22:25
  because I do everything, as you know, on red cameras. So we've
• 22:29
  got a four K movie, So let's go to the Imax theater and let's
• 22:32
  do it properly. And the theater was massive. It was like, John,
• 22:37
  So, this is the thing that I love about what you did.
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  You did it was a free screening, by the way, right, it
• 22:42
  was a free screen in France, right, Okay. So the brilliance of
• 22:45
  what you did is that you filmed everyone's reactions coming out, so it made
• 22:52
  the film look like it had a theatrical release. You were in a real
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  theater with like posters in the background, and you filmed all this and then
• 23:00
  that's what you used in your ad and it was so powerful in your marketing.
• 23:03
  So even though you might have not made money on that screening, you
• 23:07
  got so much free marketing materials to be able to sell your movie on TV
• 23:14
  sy and about Is that? Is that a fair statement? Yeah? But
• 23:17
  we weren't even going to do it. There was a young young guy said,
• 23:21
  hey, are you going to do like behind this? You know,
• 23:22
  like a are you going to film the movie? I went and I just
• 23:26
  want everyone to enjoy it, and he goes, oh, I'll get me
• 23:27
  and my friends. We'll come and we'll shoot it and go nuts, you
• 23:32
  know what I mean? That manyway signal the stuff. And I went,
• 23:34
  actually, I could probably use this for a bit of PR, you know
• 23:37
  what I mean? And yeah, it was strong PR and honestly was the
• 23:41
  last thing on my mind to it was serendipitous. It was a look,
• 23:48
  so I can't you're not taking credit for it. I'm trying to give you
• 23:51
  credit for it. You're not taking credit for it. But it is what
• 23:55
  it is. It is what is. You were able to get it.
• 23:56
  So sometimes, you know, sometimes the muse, sometimes the uni verse just
• 24:00
  gives you a little bit of a helping hand. And that was that was
• 24:03
  one of them, because I remember when I saw it was a good advertising,
• 24:07
  and I remember when I was seeing your ads, I'm like, man,
• 24:08
  those ads are powerful at help man, because anytime you've got testimonials like
• 24:12
  the ones you had, man, they're very, very very power, especially
• 24:17
  coming from a movie without any major giant, you know, massive bankable stars
• 24:21
  in it. You know, Noil mccona is wonderful, but he's not Tom
• 24:23
  Cruise so you don't have that coming from a first time filmmaker quote unquote.
• 24:29
  Uh, they really added a lot of value to it, all right,
• 24:32
  So what was the release? So how did you release this the first time?
• 24:34
  You want TV on first right transaction? Yeah, yeah, we just
• 24:40
  went full t vog and yeah we dropped it on Apple, Amazon, all
• 24:47
  the normal dudes, and uh but actually I think let's let's get a little
• 24:55
  bit more data out for your for your listeners, viewers. The movie is
• 25:00
  done, right, We've made the movie, and I'm getting a lot of
• 25:03
  people ringing me up going and it's too fucking long and it's too you know
• 25:07
  that, the too long thing, And I go, you know what,
• 25:11
  fuck it, I'm leaving it. It's only two hours, right, It's
• 25:12
  not like it's not a three Another thing, too, is people will sit
• 25:19
  there and binge watch fucking ten hours of shit on Netflix, a completely padded
• 25:26
  out show without dropping a dropping a single. None of them will winch about
• 25:34
  it. But I've got nothing. I'm not And you know what I did
• 25:38
  A ninety minute cup I did and it was it was it was not you
• 25:45
  know, it was over too quick. Everyone I showed. They go,
• 25:49
  oh, well, it's sort of like you know, the robot start attacking
• 25:53
  them, and then they're at the river and they're out, you know,
• 25:55
  I mean they're escape because you had to get rid of a lot of stuff
• 25:59
  thirty minutes. There's a lot of very exciting material. So that's why I
• 26:04
  went to screw it. I don't care about ninety minutes. I'm not.
• 26:07
  I'm not really that worried about making money or not. It's nice to get
• 26:11
  your money back, which is great, but I had bigger agenda with the
• 26:15
  film. And the bigger agenda wasn't so much making money of the movie.
• 26:18
  It was just getting my name out there. I just remember that going in
• 26:22
  part of the experiment was exactly what it's doing now. So I'm going to
• 26:27
  get all my I'm going to get even more money back by doing all these
• 26:30
  other big movies that these people are telling me. I'm going to get you
• 26:34
  know, we'll get to that and we'll get into another story again. We'll
• 26:38
  get to that leader anyway. So then I decided, after the after I've
• 26:45
  turned down these offers, you know, from the traditional means, and literally
• 26:52
  that's when everyone thought, this guy that owns this movie is a fucking complete
• 26:56
  looney, you know what I mean. All the sales guys were just might
• 27:02
  look to be like you were greasy. I thought you were Everyone thought I
• 27:10
  was crazy, you know, you know, because it's part of the experiment.
• 27:14
  The experiment was knowledge, and I just wanted to know how the distribution
• 27:18
  process worked. I wanted to know how you get your movies into transactional video
• 27:22
  demand sites. I wanted to know how SPoD worked. I wanted to know
• 27:26
  how AVOD worked. I want to know how the theatrical machine worked. That
• 27:30
  you know, the business of making money in these four different areas, and
• 27:38
  they are four completely different areas, theatrical especially. You know, you might
• 27:45
  have, oh, the movies made ten million dollars, but really what comes
• 27:51
  back to the filmmaker. This guy here is sitting here right by the time
• 27:56
  the cinema takes half, by the time the agents take half, the delivery
• 27:59
  guys, the sales guys, everything, you know, you might end up
• 28:02
  with that much, do you know what I mean. It's just that there's
• 28:04
  a lot of work and then hang on, and then there's the advertising that
• 28:08
  might be a tax to your movie that's going to have to be reimbursed in
• 28:11
  there's all this shit that is that goes with it his. For an example,
• 28:17
  friend of mine has made a movie over here in Australia. It did
• 28:19
  really well around the world I think about He said it grossed like twenty five
• 28:23
  million dollars. He's still yet to see a single cent four years later.
• 28:30
  Wow, do you know what I mean? It's going to come to him.
• 28:34
  Something's going to come to him like he can. He brings me up
• 28:40
  and he's in tears, you know. But he goes, should have listened
• 28:44
  to you, mate, And I said, no, no, you shouldn't
• 28:45
  have listened to me. I'm doing something very stupid usual the group way.
• 28:52
  It just happened to work differently for me. But but I but you've got
• 28:57
  to understand what about stuff I've put in place to make sure that works.
• 29:02
  Anyway, we go and do the whole Teavot thing through an aggregator. Because
• 29:07
  the thing that sucks about the Amazon's of the world and all these sort of
• 29:11
  guys, it's very hard for you as an individual to get your movie up
• 29:15
  on these sites. Amazon You could probably do it with a lot of dances
• 29:18
  dicking around, but they all of them now are very pretty much critiquing movies
• 29:25
  You can't just throw your movie up on all of those tea lots, you
• 29:30
  know, because they will just go and that's a sticker pile of shit.
• 29:33
  Now you're out stick you know. So you just made a movie. But
• 29:36
  then you realize I can't unloaded anywhere because Amazon doesn't like it. Apple doesn't
• 29:41
  like it, you know, Microsoft doesn't like it, IBM doesn't like a
• 29:45
  Fandanga don't like it. All these whoever these there's a fucking list them.
• 29:49
  As long as you know, you still got to get it through all these
• 29:53
  people to get into like your movie enough to put it on their platforms.
• 30:00
  Will be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the
• 30:07
  show. And that's got to, unfortunately, go through an aggregator, which
• 30:14
  is another fucking annoying word for distributor. Right, so there's always there's going
• 30:18
  to be someone in your way, which is fine. And I don't know
• 30:22
  why Apple do it. Apple should be you know, the best movie uploads
• 30:27
  site in the world is Vimeo on demand. But no one fucking watches it,
• 30:33
  no one uses it, no one uses it. But it is the
• 30:37
  best of the best of the best. But the reason is you could upload
• 30:40
  your movie in four K, e K glorious beautiful viewing. It's looks stunning
• 30:48
  on whatever you put it on. You can upload your movie or subtitles,
• 30:52
  you can decide what countries you want to sell on everything, and probably under
• 30:56
  five minutes, know one in your way and they take ten. Thank you.
• 31:04
  Mark. It's so fucking simple. So when everyone wants to see my
• 31:08
  movie, now go mate, just go go to Vimeo. It's going to
• 31:11
  be easier and I'll actually make ninety percent break instead of the other way,
• 31:17
  which is, you know, like everyone else takes half and then other people
• 31:22
  and then there's the aggregator fee, and there's blah blah blah. So anyway,
• 31:26
  I'm just going to I think Vimeo have actually got a great thing there.
• 31:30
  But they have no fucking idea because Vimeo are just useless with their marketing
• 31:36
  and the way they've done things. That company is still doing what it's doing.
• 31:41
  It's obviously living off business, you know, sharing. I don't have
• 31:45
  an idea, but from a movie perspective, they if they invested in that
• 31:49
  properly before indie filmmakers, they would just own that whole space. Well they
• 31:55
  are. They bought va Jacks back in the day Va Jackson was that all
• 32:00
  that software, all that technology was VHX. They bought it, rebranded it
• 32:05
  under Vimeo Pro or from Vimeo Movies or whatever it is, but they didn't
• 32:09
  do anything with it, and they never really market it and it and there's
• 32:14
  you're asking. Anytime you're asking someone to put a credit card in, it's
• 32:19
  a layer of resistance for them to pay. But if you're on Amazon,
• 32:24
  if they set up a PayPal and Apple pay or whatever through Amazon, I
• 32:28
  would be just click click right. But if it's Amazon, you click.
• 32:31
  If it's Apple TV, you click because you already have your information there.
• 32:36
  Yeah, but you know Vimeo can set up those pay systems through there if
• 32:40
  they really, if they really wanted to. Anyway, thinking about them,
• 32:44
  I'm not doing an AEDG for Vimeo. This is exactly. I mean,
• 32:46
  that's that's the best platform to put up a TV on a your video,
• 32:52
  but every other one there's a bit of pain in the ass. So anyway
• 32:55
  we get accepted, you know, Apple say we'll put it on Amazon,
• 33:00
  but you know that still takes two to three months for that process to happen.
• 33:04
  And then you've got there's a date that you want to do a release
• 33:07
  and you're trying to sync up everyone all at the same time to release on
• 33:09
  the special December eighth, and everyone's telling me, oh, I no,
• 33:14
  your mad. Market's too close to Christmas. The amount of times everyone told
• 33:17
  me I was mad anyways, So okay, now go back a bit.
• 33:24
  This is where your book comes in. You got to sell it. No
• 33:29
  one knows that movie is going to be sitting on Apple TV or sitting on
• 33:31
  Amazon if you don't tell the world it's that. Now, this is my
• 33:36
  big fundamental mistake I made. I was I got well, how am I
• 33:45
  say this? Where I screwed up was I didn't spend enough in advertising.
• 33:54
  I should have spent a lot more and the movie would have got right out
• 33:59
  there. Because you know, when you sell a movie on t vote or
• 34:01
  Pivot, whatever you want to call it, there's a spike. It's a
• 34:06
  new movie, it's out, you know, So you've got to create as
• 34:07
  much hype as you do it. The studios do it well, they might
• 34:10
  make a movie for three hundred million dollars or two und million dollars or whatever,
• 34:14
  they're going to spend the same amount again flogging it. I spent a
• 34:19
  million dollars in my movie, I should have spent a million dollars in advertising.
• 34:22
  Wow, that would have been a hell of a risk. No,
• 34:25
  no, it wouldn't have been. Because you can see all the stats and
• 34:29
  a little just everything that comes to you, and you add analy analytics on
• 34:34
  your sales. This is a lot of stuff that distributors don't show you because
• 34:37
  they just give you the little email saying, hey, you made twelve dollars
• 34:40
  today. But the reality is you get a lot of information right about who
• 34:45
  buys it, where buys, the time they buy, the you know,
• 34:51
  the who's buying it, as well as when you do a lot of your
• 34:54
  digital marketing with your analytics, you can dig so deep into the analytics you
• 35:00
  can you know, female fourteen, red car Luzion, Minnesota, whatever,
• 35:06
  you know, you can really nail down on your target market. So that
• 35:08
  means you're not wasting your money selling. You know, like on your phone,
• 35:15
  monster's a man's not turning up and some sixty four year old grandmother's phone.
• 35:21
  Right, you are literally once you start getting all this stuff, there's
• 35:23
  information and we did some test trailers that we threw out there so we can
• 35:28
  see those test results and then we then we just we We did a little
• 35:34
  Indiegogo campaign, not so much to make money from it, but more so
• 35:39
  sell our movie through that porthole. This is already remember. So what I
• 35:46
  did. I thought, well, let's do an Indiegogo campaign and say,
• 35:50
  if everyone helps us with the advertising of our movie, everyone gets the movie
• 35:53
  free and odds and ends and all the extras and behind the scenes and blah
• 35:58
  blah blah blah blah and yeah, and I think about twenty five thirty thousand
• 36:01
  dollars turned up, which I thought, oh, that's great. Now we
• 36:05
  already had like a quarter million dollars allocated for advertising. I just used that
• 36:10
  twenty five thousand dollars on Indigogo. We did all our marketing pro the movie,
• 36:16
  and we can see all our trailer data spiking so much that people were
• 36:21
  watching it all the way through, which is super uncommon. Now I'm in
• 36:24
  because I'm in the advertising game. I hear I see all the data from
• 36:29
  a lot of my advertisers, you know what I mean, And because they
• 36:31
  share it with me, they want me to know so they can help then
• 36:34
  make better commercials. And I'm looking at these and how long people are staying
• 36:38
  on my ads and who is not staying on it? So I can see
• 36:45
  that there's this type of this group of people that drive black cars and move
• 36:49
  over here. And there's another age. They're only watching it for seven seconds,
• 36:52
  right, and these people are watching it for thirty seconds. These poeple
• 36:57
  are watching it, you know. So I could really start getting my targeting
• 37:00
  right down. So we spent twenty five grand on institute, Facebook, YouTube,
• 37:05
  all that sort of stuff, and just pumped it out there and we
• 37:07
  worked out in that monthly on so that two weeks leading towards the release of
• 37:15
  our film, we had over fifty million people had seen our trailer Wow for
• 37:22
  twenty five thousand bucks twenty five grand, yeah, twenty five grand. So
• 37:25
  our advertising worked. And mind you, I edited forty trailers, different trailers,
• 37:30
  which we did A and B testing four weeks beforehand, right, so
• 37:35
  we we did a real study in what's going to work, what's not going
• 37:37
  to work, you know what I mean. So the trailer that got put
• 37:39
  out was it the trailer I liked, but it was the trailer that masss
• 37:44
  locked, you know what I mean. So you've got to stop. You
• 37:45
  don't make trailers for you. You make trailers for everyone else, you know,
• 37:49
  and the one we did the testimonials really worked hard, the one with
• 37:52
  Neil mcdonnad jumping up, you know, saying, you know, watch our
• 37:55
  movie. You know there's a few key, key little sh shortest a couple
• 38:00
  of short spots that really resonated with the with our research anyway, So I
• 38:07
  thought, fifty million people in our trailer, all I need is a dollar
• 38:10
  for one of them. I just need a dollar them, like ten percent
• 38:15
  of these ten cents. Ten cents would have been good. Fuck it,
• 38:22
  I'm not going to spend my spare quarter million dollars I got put aside for
• 38:27
  advertising. We've done it. We've we've hit advertising gold. And this is
• 38:31
  where I'm start to smell my own farts, and they're all smelling the roses.
• 38:37
  Yea, And and anyway, if it went, it released, and
• 38:45
  it did great, it did great. But I knew a year later,
• 38:52
  if I spent that quarter million dollars, or if I spent a million dollars
• 38:55
  advertising, I've got it out wider. Because it's amazing how many people don't
• 39:00
  even know my movie exists. Twenty five grand, fifty million views is nothing.
• 39:07
  I realized that our base of interest needs to be upwards of five hundred
• 39:15
  million people to make a decent dent on sales. Right, So that's a
• 39:21
  lot of advertising. So let me ask you a question. What was your
• 39:23
  ROI on the advertising money you made? So, like, for every dollar
• 39:28
  you spent in marketing, how much money did you make back, give or
• 39:31
  take? Well, twenty five on the twenty five Yeah, let's say on
• 39:35
  the twenty Okay, twenty five grand. I know we've made a million dollars.
• 39:37
  It worked, right, So it's not about So it's not about so
• 39:40
  it's not right. So I just want I just want to kind of stuff
• 39:47
  you from So that's in the first that's in the first three months. Right,
• 39:52
  we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. Now back to
• 40:00
  the show. Yeah, now the movie's still making money now, it's it's
• 40:06
  still ticking away nicely. It's like a it's like an apartment building in the
• 40:09
  corner, just ticking away. Rent. So the reason I want to stop
• 40:13
  you here for a second, so I want to just kind of highlight a
• 40:15
  couple of things you said, because you're throwing out a lot of gold nuggets
• 40:17
  here. You off of twenty five grand you were able to generate your budget
• 40:22
  back comfortably within three months. That's unheard of in marketing, in market it's
• 40:29
  unheard of. But if you would have put in just a quarter of a
• 40:35
  million, you might have been able to make three four, five, six
• 40:39
  seven million dollars possible off of those three months. Would that work or do
• 40:45
  you think not? Look, the more people that know about your movie and
• 40:50
  the more hype you can build on about it, what do you think MAVI
• 40:52
  will do it this way? All right? What do you do? What
• 40:55
  do you think all the big movies as spending so much money on advertising?
• 41:00
  Awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness right end of the day with my fifty
• 41:07
  million people is really only one city in China. It's like, it's like
• 41:15
  not much right in the grand scheme of things, and it's and it's saying
• 41:23
  that million dollars and three months. You know that million dollars slowly comes in
• 41:27
  over twelve months, but that you can see that, you see the money
• 41:30
  being made, including all our international sales, which we'll talk about later anyway,
• 41:36
  So we're were we with you through me? You're advertising advertising, advertising.
• 41:40
  I can't preach harder about that, actually, And that's where I think
• 41:44
  I made that that that that big mistake. I go, well, you
• 41:46
  know, we're in a very very noisy world, right, it's a massively
• 41:50
  noisy world. There's so much shit on your phones now it's hard to get
• 41:54
  cut through, right Will. I could still spend a million dollars and you
• 42:00
  might see my ad. Mean you might if you're lucky. I mean,
• 42:04
  you're in the film industry, you know me, you'll probably get it.
• 42:07
  You'll probably get hit by it. But your neighbor, who is probably in
• 42:09
  the sci fi films, how the fuck do you target him to? You
• 42:14
  know what I mean? So you're trusting that the Facebook machine, the instant
• 42:19
  machine, the TikTok machine, the YouTube, the YouTube machine are going to
• 42:24
  maybe get near that individual for you a million dollars. So you need to
• 42:30
  really think about your advertising, your pr you know, or your little news
• 42:37
  shit that goes out. Everything's going to be very well thought out. Now,
• 42:40
  that's a lot of work. Again, if you're going to get a
• 42:44
  distributor to do this for you, who are going to say you're mad?
• 42:46
  Right? But if they were going to do it, by the way,
• 42:49
  they would never work this hard. They would never work unless they need it,
• 42:52
  unless they're making tons of catch. Yeah, look, no they wouldn't.
• 42:57
  And they're not going to say to you, Haymark, we'll sell your
• 43:00
  film and we're going to put a million, We're going to invest a million
• 43:04
  dollars on advertising. Right because a lot of these guys, a lot of
• 43:08
  the distributors they know, right, they've been around the traps, they've sold
• 43:12
  there. They've probably got four hundred movies on their shelves, you know,
• 43:15
  rats and mice. That's how they make their money. They get their little
• 43:19
  percentage of each one of them little movies, and that's how they send the
• 43:22
  kids to college. Right. But a huge advertising campaign like that off the
• 43:28
  back of one of these little indie films, that they would fucking shut you
• 43:31
  down and say, you're praising, but you do need the right product for
• 43:35
  it too. So if it's just a couple of people running around fucking Detroit
• 43:42
  shooting each other and raping their girlfriends and bragging you own shooting police, and
• 43:45
  you know, just an action drama or whatever with no name actors, you'd
• 43:51
  never spend a million dollars because it's they already know that it's never going to
• 43:57
  do any better than probably pick up a few hundred grand in the trenches,
• 44:01
  you know what I mean, if they're lucky with their little six thousand dollars
• 44:07
  advertising budget attached to it that they booby allocated to it. But my movie
• 44:13
  was, Okay, let's go back a bit. A friend of mine from
• 44:20
  a company that has a big red logo, he gave me some data about
• 44:30
  what their AI robot says is hot right now, and in it it said
• 44:38
  explosions. You know, make sure this many people die, blah blah blah.
• 44:42
  But you know, it was literally a formula movie of just information that
• 44:46
  was coming into their business that would so they could understand research, they can
• 44:55
  understand who's watching and who's demanding what to watch. So I saw these ten
• 45:01
  key points action movie, so far, this, that, and it literally
• 45:06
  had all this detail about what should be in a movie and what people are
• 45:09
  watching. Now I went, well, that's fucking interesting. Let's go make
• 45:15
  a robot movie right and have some explosions and we'll do this and we'll do
• 45:19
  that. So the movie wasn't like a brainchild movie of mine, which I've
• 45:23
  been sitting on that script for ten years and I'm fifty drafts in. It's
• 45:30
  a one or two draft film, which I was going to polish as we
• 45:35
  were going with the actors, because I know actors bring a lot to the
• 45:37
  table and with all the special effects and all that sort of stuff. I
• 45:44
  mean, we're going to talk about that later to about how we did that.
• 45:49
  But the knowing that my movie was going to tick a lot of boxes
• 45:53
  when it came to sales. Yeah, I had a sort of a name
• 45:58
  actor in there with Neil. Right, he's enough to give the movie street
• 46:01
  cred. Everyone loves that. Everyone knows his face, everybody, everyone knows
• 46:07
  them. Everyone loves him. He's a top guy. He's great for putting
• 46:10
  in your film, right, But he's not going to make you any money.
• 46:14
  He's just gonna but he's going to help you sell the movie. Like
• 46:16
  when you go to do all your sales internationally and all that sort of stuff,
• 46:21
  they go, oh, I know that guy, what's his name?
• 46:22
  You know what I mean? So and next thing, it helps you get
• 46:28
  it over the line. So it's not like Nils. Nil's not no a
• 46:31
  list by any stretch, but he gives the movie street cred. I wish
• 46:35
  I put a couple of more Nails in there as well. Right, just
• 46:37
  a few more and I'm thinking about doing a movie shortly, just another fun
• 46:43
  movie like this. Choose this christ I've got. I wanted to have a
• 46:46
  massive ensemble cast in there. I've liked that and we just had fun with
• 46:50
  it, you know, And anyway, that's another thing. So so then
• 46:54
  me, we're just jumping off track here. Actually you know, we're branching
• 46:59
  off a little were branching off a little things. But no, what you
• 47:01
  said is pull me back in line, Alex, I'll bring you back.
• 47:05
  I'll bring you back in sir. So you're ta voting, you're sending things
• 47:08
  out, you're marketing like crazy. How many months do you go through transactional
• 47:14
  before you decide to go to U s fod or Prime. Okay, mistake
• 47:20
  number two, mistake number two, fuck s fod S pod can go and
• 47:29
  eat ship all day every day. By the way, you did get an
• 47:32
  offer from from that big, that big streamer that hasn't been as well,
• 47:37
  right, it's all, but you decided not to go with them. Yeah,
• 47:44
  I don't. I don't. Streaming is a very it's streaming is the
• 47:47
  cancer of indie film, as you know. Oh yeah, yeah right,
• 47:52
  and the agreed, agreed. I decided my movie's doing so well on t
• 47:57
  vot it's sort of fit. The curve is up and down. Right,
• 48:01
  But stated my advertising too, I probably could have kept it propped up longer.
• 48:07
  I've got convinced the game. Put it on Prime. Put on Prime,
• 48:08
  to screaming for this. You know they want it, they want to
• 48:10
  Prime, Amazon, Oh we want it, we want it. It goes
• 48:14
  under Prime. I am top five in America for four weeks on Prime.
• 48:22
  It's getting smashed. Millions of people have watched my movie. Now in America.
• 48:32
  I see one or two or three cents perfect per view. I might
• 48:38
  as well have just fucking given it to them, right. It is a
• 48:43
  total waste of time. There is no economic sense to put your movie on
• 48:47
  Prime, no economic sense at all. Don't put it on Prime, don't
• 48:52
  put it near any streaming network. You see pennies, pennies. But you're
• 48:59
  saying, one hundred two hundred grand millions of people watch my movie, and
• 49:04
  I might a cup hunder grande done nothing. But now you're saying Now you're
• 49:07
  saying that, and I want I want to kind of put things into perspective
• 49:10
  here. You're also making a good amount of money and transactional where most independent
• 49:15
  filmmakers are. They don't even know they can't make money and transactional because they
• 49:20
  don't know how to drive traffic. So the only thing that they have is
• 49:23
  the potential of a prime and AVOD, which we're going to get to in
• 49:28
  a minute. But hopefully with this conversation, people will try to give transactional
• 49:32
  again. Again, it has to be the right product. You add the
• 49:35
  right product. I mean, it's an easy sell. Let's kill a robots
• 49:38
  that look as good as anything the studio put out with great action explosions and
• 49:44
  things like that. People are gonna watch that. But you're absolutely right,
• 49:47
  it's spot and Amazon Prime in those kind of places is and that, by
• 49:53
  the way, is not a vot and we're going to get into advertising.
• 49:57
  This is scriptscription based stuff. We'll be right back after a word from our
• 50:02
  sponsor, and now back to the show. It is not that it's it's
• 50:12
  horrible. It's horrible. I wanted to know those numbers because I know you
• 50:15
  had it on there and you're like, yeah, I made a couple under
• 50:16
  grand off of top five on Amazon, like top five period beating studios.
• 50:23
  They were sitting there forever my friends were ringing me for America. I think
• 50:27
  it's still there, and you're like, you must be making tons. No,
• 50:31
  you weren't making it, I thought. I thought, in fact,
• 50:35
  this is it new buys my fun feel legit, feel jit, you know,
• 50:40
  PJ. It was the way anyway, you know. Okay, So
• 50:47
  that's fine, that's streat as far as I'm concerned. Subscription based movies of
• 50:54
  what have devalued the world's movies Because now for seven bucks a month you can
• 51:01
  go and watch one hundred movies a week. You know it made, you're
• 51:05
  good to smash yourself with it. And you know, subscription company make a
• 51:09
  fortune because all they need is subscribe it, paying seven dollars each millions of
• 51:15
  those boom. They make money. But the actual people that own those movies
• 51:20
  and make those movies make nothing, make nothing. Is avoid spot, you
• 51:29
  know. And you might get the random you might get Netflix or someone ringing
• 51:32
  up and saying, hey, well we'll buy it off you for a term,
• 51:37
  but the amount they offer you is nothing. That quite happy to go
• 51:39
  and spend kope amounts of money making that film for themselves if they owned it.
• 51:45
  But now that it's made, it's not. It's worthless. Now they
• 51:51
  feel that like, well it's already made, You've already made the film.
• 51:53
  Well his structord Strander grand because look, to make it, they would they
• 51:58
  would have blown ten million dollars making the damn thing. You know what I
• 52:00
  mean, they would have made They would have spent ten million bucks to make
• 52:02
  Monsters of Man easily and they would have easily been spend ten if not more,
• 52:07
  to make a movie like that. But when you want something like that
• 52:09
  drops in their plate, they should be like, you know what, let's
• 52:12
  give you about it. Let's give you a couple of mil for this,
• 52:14
  because this is this is I won't even do the couple of bill mate,
• 52:17
  that those days are long gone. Yeah, you're say fucking three years ago,
• 52:23
  exactly, agreed? No, I agree, I agree with you.
• 52:25
  I understand Amazon doesn't pay anything. I mean Amazon, Netflix or Amazon,
• 52:30
  nobody pays anything anymore. Those days are those days are gone, all right?
• 52:34
  So you went to spot, but you still have transactional running. So
• 52:37
  people are still I'm leaving it there forever and I after you know, a
• 52:43
  couple of months and night as far I saw the numbers, like I got
• 52:45
  the I can jump, you know, the deggregator on it with allowed me
• 52:51
  passwords to see inside Amazon, so I can see every day. Great idea,
• 52:55
  by the way, every h everyone out there, if you just but
• 53:00
  is you want to be super transparent and then no one's gonna try embrace back.
• 53:05
  You know, they're not going to try and kill you in the street.
• 53:07
  Just ship share the real data and you'll be and you'll have some good
• 53:12
  trust there. Right. But anyway, I see all the information firsthand.
• 53:15
  I go through it every week still and I can see if I'm if I
• 53:19
  made twenty two cents or twenty thousand dollars whatever, It's just it's just all
• 53:22
  there. But anyway I saw the Prime data, I always like, holy
• 53:27
  shit, this is like pillaging and raping my movie, you know what I
• 53:31
  mean. It's like now all those potential teeth on people have now watched it
• 53:37
  for three cents for nothing, you know what I mean. So a big
• 53:40
  marketplace just got destroyed by Amazon Prime. Don't oh fuck it. You know
• 53:46
  that's the system they run. That's fine, that's their life. I mean
• 53:49
  I made the mistake of jumping on it, so you know, to pull
• 53:53
  it out, to pull it out, or you left it there. Oh
• 53:55
  yeah, like you get the buck ahead of the you know what I mean.
• 54:01
  The IMD TV is the all that sort of that we're going off the
• 54:05
  iPhone. Now that's fun. Sorry, but the transaction we'll still going.
• 54:08
  And you're still making money on transactional even during that time. Okay, so
• 54:13
  now yeah it's too much now, but my advertising has stopped. I'm about
• 54:20
  to re embark on relaunching the movie again, which is another thing, which
• 54:25
  yeah, because we're because look, the thing is, it's not like the
• 54:29
  olden days where a movie comes out big, big hoop, everybody knows about
• 54:34
  it, and everybody knows is released. Most people in this world do not
• 54:36
  know that your movie was ever released. It's brand new to them. So
• 54:39
  you can re remarket it, reput it out there and and see what happens.
• 54:45
  All right, So now you're still making money off of transaction already,
• 54:50
  by the way, and it's going to work exactly exactly. So then you
• 54:54
  go into the AVOD world, which is arguably the only place that independent film
• 55:00
  makers are truly making money in today's world. Unless you are unless you know
• 55:05
  how to drive traffic to a transactional and have an audience that's willing to pay
• 55:07
  for your product. Avod is honestly the only place that people are making money
• 55:13
  from my understanding, what's your experience? And not for long? M hmm
• 55:17
  is the bad news? Okay, tell me tell me tummy. Yeah AVO.
• 55:23
  We dropped outs on Schube and yeah it exploded, it went off.
• 55:30
  It's good, great Dan, goods and bads with Avod. The good thing
• 55:37
  with with Chewbe is it's small and growing fast. It's full of low weight
• 55:44
  indie films. And even though my my movie pokes its head at the top
• 55:49
  of the pooh, right, it's still it's still and it's still making money.
• 55:55
  What's happening now is the studios, with their massive banks of movies over
• 56:02
  the last forty years jumping under tube. So all of a sudden, all
• 56:07
  your indie films are going to be lost, right, You're going to be
• 56:12
  forced down the bottom of the pile. Again, It's still there. People
• 56:15
  can still watch it. You can still drive people to to me to search
• 56:19
  it. Oh, there are these once is man there it's you know,
• 56:24
  you know it's going to get getting buried right now, right now, it's
• 56:28
  getting buried to me. Can't put these these Hollywood movies on with Hollywood stars.
• 56:34
  They can't put that ship on quick enough right now, right because you've
• 56:37
  you've got like a ten year old Brad Pitt movie and actually will be like
• 56:40
  kill Me Softly or something like that, and you're seeing it and people are
• 56:45
  like, I don't forget about that movie. Let me watch that. That's
• 56:47
  going to be watched every day over an independent film. And it's so funny
• 56:52
  you say that because in TV indies were that's where money was made first DN
• 56:57
  s VIT indies, that's where the it was made for Netflix was buying.
• 57:00
  No, Netflix was buying if they were boring, No, no, they
• 57:07
  were buying independent projects, independent films, and they were spending money on Amazon
• 57:12
  was at Sundance and everybody. So the same thing happened, and the studio
• 57:15
  is like no, no, true and then deluded that then avod oh god,
• 57:20
  oh god, o god. And then now the studios are dumping that.
• 57:22
  In the next one is YouTube and the studios have yet to do that.
• 57:27
  And you in the YouTube world there they do clips and they're monetizing the
• 57:30
  clips off of their movies, but they're not putting their full movies up for
• 57:34
  free yet. But that's the next place I will because them now. So
• 57:39
  yeah, it's it's it's happening. But here's what's happening, right, here's
• 57:45
  what's happening with AVOD space. Like things evolved so quickly as you know,
• 57:50
  it's just nuts. You think you found you a little you think you found
• 57:53
  a little gold one, right, you think you found that You're in there
• 57:57
  and you're like, this is it? And then it gets everyone else finds
• 58:01
  the same golden line, like everyone piles into the same golden line. But
• 58:07
  you know, for instance, Netflix, I bet you know not a where
• 58:12
  of a lie I have not. They're they're going, They're going anybody.
• 58:15
  So there you go. There's no question in my mind that Netflix in the
• 58:20
  next two years will have an avid option like Hulu does. All of them
• 58:27
  will be Everyone will be Ava, and then to Be will be the little
• 58:31
  lonely kid in the corner that started the Huth fucking shits. They will be
• 58:36
  there, back with all their indies again and nobody's gonna want to go over
• 58:40
  there again. But but yeah, because now now, because now to Be
• 58:45
  is gonna have to fight Paramount Disney. All of them will eventually have a
• 58:52
  avad option. If you want to spend your money, You want to spend
• 58:55
  fifteen bucks a month or ten bucks a month, you could do it ad
• 58:59
  free. So they'll still have both revenues and they're going to be happy because
• 59:01
  imagine right now, if HBO goes advertising Ava, how many people who jump
• 59:08
  on watch HBO? How many people would watch Disney Plus more than they do
• 59:14
  now. It's I want people to understand how difficult it is to make money
• 59:21
  with a movie in today's marketplace. It's absolutely cutthroat, brutal. You know,
• 59:28
  I'm going to be speaking at AFM this year. I'll be there in
• 59:30
  November. I'm dying to see what everybody's talking about and what everyone's because from
• 59:37
  my experience going to the market, everybody's just like I don't know what I
• 59:40
  don't know. Maybe this, maybe that nobody knows. No distributor really knows
• 59:45
  what's going to happen the next four years. No, So that's why your
• 59:47
  case studies so interesting. Distrimus were distrimmers work list themselves on commodity. We'll
• 59:58
  be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the
• 1:00:05
  show, right great. They their business is not about selling movies. Their
• 1:00:14
  business is about collecting movies and absolutely so the more movies libraries, yeah they
• 1:00:21
  need. The more movies they have in their libraries, the more little rats
• 1:00:25
  of mind. You know that. It just sprinkles money on them, little
• 1:00:29
  bits of money, but it all adds up in the end of the day
• 1:00:31
  and we get it, you know. So if you're going to do that,
• 1:00:36
  get a distributor to help you heat number one transparency. Try and get
• 1:00:44
  that person for fifteen percent or less, and and flog the advertising yourself as
• 1:00:52
  hard as you can, even though they want to do it. They're going
• 1:00:53
  to charge you for it and probably spend a quarter of what they've told you
• 1:00:57
  they're going to spend. Bro which is then if you're going to spend the
• 1:01:00
  money on the advertising, then at the end of the day, why the
• 1:01:01
  hell are you gonna go with them? Maybe maybe you can make a deal
• 1:01:05
  to get into avad or something like that. I don't know, all right,
• 1:01:07
  Sorry, So one question I don't want to ask you about the TV
• 1:01:09
  on what is the platform that made you the most money? Apple? Amazon?
• 1:01:15
  Google? What was the platform that in order because a lot there's a
• 1:01:19
  lot of myths about Amazon, which one Amazon was probably seventy Wow, That's
• 1:01:27
  so valuable for people to understand because a lot of people still think that Apple
• 1:01:30
  and iTunes is the place to rent. That They're like, oh, I
• 1:01:32
  have to be on iTunes. iTunes at the beginning of the tevon revolution was
• 1:01:37
  the place to be. But Amazon's just everybody's on Amazon. I think.
• 1:01:43
  I think Amazon's just everyone's got an Amazon account buying shit online, Right's.
• 1:01:49
  A lot of people have Prime accounts. The prime accounts it just comes with
• 1:01:52
  when you subscribe. When you order your toilet paper online, you get here,
• 1:01:59
  you got for shipping, you You've got Amazon prep. Yeah, very
• 1:02:00
  clever, very very clever. Amazon. Amazon is a beast. You know.
• 1:02:06
  It makes good money. You know when you look at all your data
• 1:02:09
  that comes online through their through their portal, you get to see all your
• 1:02:15
  sales. You you can do it yourself. You can literally loaded up on
• 1:02:20
  Amazon yourself, hoping that they like it, you know what I mean.
• 1:02:22
  If it's just thinking they will just pull it off over time. Yeah,
• 1:02:28
  yeah, without warning, without warning, without warning, without warning to pull
• 1:02:32
  it off. That they'll just pull things off. It's not making money.
• 1:02:36
  I can I can see why, right, because data, data costs money
• 1:02:38
  and they just got so much stuff sting up online at the moment. Okay,
• 1:02:44
  so Apple TV, I got yeah, I got fleeced by Apple.
• 1:02:47
  Not so much by Apple, but they've got these recommended list of aggregators.
• 1:02:54
  I think the Dripper was one of those. Tripper was one of those ones
• 1:02:57
  a long time. Apple just seemed to hire all the fucking winners. I'm
• 1:03:04
  not high. Apple seemed to recommend all the schunks. You know. Anyway,
• 1:03:08
  this company sell name unnamed, and we're trying to sue them at the
• 1:03:13
  moment, but they literally stole most of our Apple profits. So they probably
• 1:03:20
  still ow us half a million dollars or more and maybe even more. I
• 1:03:22
  mean we literally physically had to take the movie down from Apple, wait three
• 1:03:28
  months, and then put it back up again. Like very disruptive from that
• 1:03:31
  angle. But Apple and a big Apple and a big earner as much as
• 1:03:38
  Amazon, Amazon is the machine. Apple is next, I believe it or
• 1:03:43
  not. Yeah, Google you Google play say Slash YouTube sales were very good
• 1:03:50
  as well, and Microsoft was amazing. It was you mean a police station
• 1:03:55
  yeah, and all that Xbox Yeah, the Xbox PlayStation whatever is that that
• 1:04:00
  not PlayStation near? Xbox out next one cool? What else. But that
• 1:04:04
  makes sense with your kind of all, you know, the Fandangos and the
• 1:04:08
  Voodoos and all that. Don't waste your fucking time, nobody. Yeah,
• 1:04:15
  I think we got like fourteen dollars, you know. Okay, that's really
• 1:04:20
  good. That's really good information for people listening out there, because a lot
• 1:04:24
  of times they'll spend all this money if with aggregators like I gotta have it
• 1:04:26
  on Fan Dang Go and on Voodoo and I'm like, no, no,
• 1:04:30
  I always tell them. I have always said, I've always consulted filmmakers to
• 1:04:33
  do Amazon. I go iTunes is vanity. That's a vanity play, just
• 1:04:36
  to say to people, I'm on it, but you're still making money there.
• 1:04:40
  And a lot of people are here in my house instance, we don't.
• 1:04:44
  We don't buy ship from Prime. I don't either. I use Apple
• 1:04:46
  TV. But those are the two ones that you could you really if you're
• 1:04:49
  gonna spend money Amazon, Apple, maybe Google, maybe Google Play, maybe
• 1:04:55
  Google. I'm finding myself now, I'm starting to buy more movie. I
• 1:05:00
  mean, I've got all the s bod's right, I've got the Primes,
• 1:05:02
  the this that they're all they're all a thumb print away uh huh, but
• 1:05:09
  it's all it's it's love. It's a crap, it's you know, maybe
• 1:05:14
  i'll watch too much and I've gone through all the good stuff. But you've
• 1:05:16
  you've you've reached the end of the internet. But now I go, look,
• 1:05:21
  he's the latest Elvis just turned up, you know, so I'll just
• 1:05:25
  I'll buy it twenty five bucks. Fucking what the hell is this? Bring
• 1:05:29
  me Elvis into my room? You know, I've got a really nice uh
• 1:05:31
  theater in our room in their house. So it's like I've seen, I've
• 1:05:34
  seen pictures of your theater, sir. It's it's embarrassing. So you should
• 1:05:38
  be you should be ashamed of yourself. Uh it is not that expensive to
• 1:05:42
  set up by that. By the way, they're they're not as much as
• 1:05:45
  they used to be, that's for sure. Now. Okay, So with
• 1:05:48
  a v so in in the AVA world, what are the rankings to B
• 1:05:53
  number one? And I know I m dB t V which is now free
• 1:05:57
  v uh is I heard that's doing really well? And so what and where
• 1:06:02
  are you making your money? It too be the AMDB IMDb TV in the
• 1:06:09
  UK is going great guns at the moment, which is to free v by
• 1:06:15
  the way, and I think that's changed. I think in the UK as
• 1:06:17
  well, what you know, whatever they were, Yeah, the rebranded it
• 1:06:23
  and then we're not on all the avods yet because I'm still I'm still up
• 1:06:32
  in the air. But at AVOD, I mean it's there and it's going
• 1:06:34
  to sit there for the next twenty years, bubbling away. But you're still
• 1:06:38
  got to drive traffic to it. But you can make more money still.
• 1:06:42
  I can get one sale on t VOD right, which is equates to fifty
• 1:06:49
  people watching my movie on avod. Does that make sense sense in the world?
• 1:06:55
  Yeah? Absolutely, that's but if you you got to find a customer
• 1:06:59
  that's willing to pay for it, either rented or so, and you can't
• 1:07:02
  obviously, well I'm going to I'm going to spend that money. I'm going
• 1:07:05
  I'm going to get I'm going to do a new advertising campaign and you know,
• 1:07:09
  on a three thousands at it and it's going to be because I know
• 1:07:13
  every time we have put advertising in we see massive spikes in sales. But
• 1:07:18
  the other day I just did one as a bit of a muck around,
• 1:07:21
  just to play thing, right, I put one thousand dollars in and we've
• 1:07:25
  got like seven eight brands with the sales extra sales. How much did you
• 1:07:28
  put in? One thousand dollars? So so you're getting a seven to eight
• 1:07:34
  return on your on your money on the dollar. No, it's more,
• 1:07:38
  it's it was that three. Yeah, exactly, So you're so you're not
• 1:07:43
  doing not doing bad. I mean, I'll do that all day. But
• 1:07:45
  just keep putting money in. If you keep thinking that, ROI, why
• 1:07:48
  not you put a dollar and you get eight dollars out of Yeah, all
• 1:07:53
  of a sudden you don't see the income coming in with your advertising going in,
• 1:07:57
  you just fucking turn it off. But of the day, just leave
• 1:08:00
  it there. I mean, the sales from that area are just just topping
• 1:08:04
  up your advertising spin. So just it's just a cyclic system. It's very
• 1:08:10
  basic and simple. Yeah, and I'm thinking about and the original name of
• 1:08:14
  my movie was Robot four. Do I relaunch the movie again? It's very
• 1:08:17
  about four and put up a ninety minute one? You know what, I
• 1:08:20
  don't know, Well, these things are going through my mind. You could
• 1:08:24
  you could do that because Dire's cut Robot four is the fuck? Is the
• 1:08:28
  is the the cut? Then? You know the thing that's wonderful about your
• 1:08:32
  story is that you are generating revenue. You've you've turned your movie into a
• 1:08:36
  money making machine, which is exactly what the book talks about, how to
• 1:08:41
  turn your movie into a money making machine. You've been able to do that
• 1:08:45
  using all these little tools and tricks and stuff. Did you generate I saw
• 1:08:48
  that you're selling or at least you're focusing energy on the single from the music
• 1:08:54
  single? Is that something you owner? You're just trying to give love to
• 1:08:56
  the artist, are you? Yeah, that's my daughter said that song at
• 1:09:00
  the end. Oh wow, that's awesome. She's did great. She's a
• 1:09:03
  very accomplished musician. You know, I sing a songwriter. She was living
• 1:09:08
  in Sweden at the time, and I said, hey, do you want
• 1:09:11
  to do a song for the movie? And she goes, oh no,
• 1:09:16
  yeah, because I stress her out. Apparently anyway, she sent it to
• 1:09:21
  me. She was shitting herself and she sent me the sent me the track.
• 1:09:27
  We checked it on the timeline at the end of dropped us straight over
• 1:09:30
  it and it was perfect, and I go, it's great, Darland love
• 1:09:32
  it And she's like, what, don't you want me to change anything?
• 1:09:35
  I said, no, that's your piece. Of art and we're gonna have
• 1:09:40
  as your family. My son helped me shoot the film, my wife helped
• 1:09:45
  me produce the film. My daughter wrote a little tiny piece of music at
• 1:09:48
  the end of it. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 1:09:57
  and now back to the show. You know, did you generate any
• 1:10:01
  revenue? Did you generate? Has she generated any revenue with sales from that
• 1:10:05
  song right now? I'm sure she's made a few cents. You know,
• 1:10:10
  the music industry is just as bad as work on Spotify. How much do
• 1:10:15
  you make negative two cents every time you owe us money every time someone plays
• 1:10:18
  it? Spotify started the whole cancer is subscription based bullshit. I mean,
• 1:10:27
  I've got a lot of disdain for that model because it You know, one
• 1:10:34
  good thing about Netflix, I suppose is Netflix will find a filmmaker with a
• 1:10:40
  good idea, give them the money to go and make the movie, give
• 1:10:44
  them their producers, for the directors, for you, and that's it.
• 1:10:46
  They'll keep the movie and fuck you off and that's it and it's all done.
• 1:10:50
  So Netflix are great for creating content and paying crew and breakfast and users
• 1:11:00
  that didn't have the money to make that movie and do it themselves, you
• 1:11:03
  know what I mean. So good on good on Netflix for that. But
• 1:11:10
  it's sad when they see a great movie but they won't pay that filmmaker what
• 1:11:15
  that movie at least cost, at least what it costs, you know what
• 1:11:20
  I mean, or what they what it could be worth in the marketplace,
• 1:11:26
  because I've seen a lot of my friends that have sold to Netflix and they
• 1:11:30
  are like getting chump change, you know that forever and waiting forever for that
• 1:11:34
  jump change. Yeah, yeah, well yeah. The deals are very long,
• 1:11:40
  like long, like oh yeah, three year deals and they get paid
• 1:11:44
  once a year and divide in and if they don't and if it's not really
• 1:11:47
  working and it's falling off the grid a bit, they'll just they'll drop a
• 1:11:50
  year out of you. Anyway, I'm sure there's a whole bunch of different
• 1:11:55
  deals going through. I don't really know in detail. I don't really want
• 1:12:00
  to know. It's I just see my my filmmaking friends all upset and they
• 1:12:04
  cry in their beer in front of me. So so let me ask you.
• 1:12:10
  So let me ask you then, because we've kind of hinted about this
• 1:12:12
  through the conversation. You used this as a calling card for for Hollywood to
• 1:12:17
  go off and do some movies. Uh, you are from from our from
• 1:12:21
  our past conversations. Uh which will you know? We won't say who.
• 1:12:26
  But you've had some pretty big players in the in the studio system call you
• 1:12:30
  about possibly doing some work. Can you talk whatever you can say about that?
• 1:12:34
  Let me know, can you talk about it? It is a few
• 1:12:36
  little India so I talk too much. But yeah, the biggest, the
• 1:12:43
  biggest of the biggest, the biggest of the biggest of cold and the smallest
• 1:12:45
  of the smallest of cold, or you know, everyone in between. I've
• 1:12:49
  been probably sent well, I've one hundred scripts I think since the movies come
• 1:12:55
  out. I've attempted to read most of them. But if they don't have
• 1:13:00
  me in the first ten pages, I'm fucking I'm out, you know.
• 1:13:03
  But it's you know what, it's a hard game even for the studios,
• 1:13:11
  right that they might have the money, they might have the cloud, they
• 1:13:14
  might have everything. But there's a big there's big machines attached to a lot
• 1:13:18
  of it. And I'm wary to do the big, the big giant studio
• 1:13:27
  job next because i know I'm going to have a bit of a hand up
• 1:13:31
  the coit puppet thing. You know, I'm going to be taught to and
• 1:13:38
  and really they're not going to get my full potential because they literally it's going
• 1:13:42
  to be directed from the sidelines, right, you know what I mean?
• 1:13:45
  So why ring me? I mean what they need They just they need to
• 1:13:47
  employ. And this is why a lot of young directors that are shot short
• 1:13:50
  films are doing massive blockbusters because the studio just needs a puppet in there too,
• 1:13:59
  just up together. They've already directed it, they already know what it's
• 1:14:01
  going to be, like I get done. Yeah, you know that there's
• 1:14:06
  there's ten directors on that movie. And it's not the one that they hide,
• 1:14:10
  you know, he's just he's just maybe the full guy, right and
• 1:14:15
  the thing and you go and do those big movies and it doesn't do well
• 1:14:19
  and your career is over and done with the rest of your life. It's
• 1:14:21
  all finished, you know. So I'll be very careful with who I jump
• 1:14:28
  in bed with. And a lot of them tell you, a lot of
• 1:14:31
  them tell you, oh, Mark, it's going to be your vision.
• 1:14:33
  You've got total lot of creative control, blah blah blah. But you know
• 1:14:36
  that's completely out of bullshit, right, you know, give me, come
• 1:14:42
  out of them, come out of me, ask for final cut, see
• 1:14:45
  what happens. Yeah. So look, I love and all the respect all
• 1:14:51
  the guys that have called me and the people were still talking to and we've
• 1:14:57
  we've got there's there's a half a dozen guys with their films, the big,
• 1:15:02
  biggest, well known producers, and they've got some really great script ideas.
• 1:15:09
  I'm really excited actually about what's coming up now. The thing is,
• 1:15:14
  they are still at the mercy of actors, right, They are still at
• 1:15:18
  the mercy of they don't get money unless that act of science. They're still
• 1:15:24
  going to try and convince that actor that Mark Toyer is the director for the
• 1:15:28
  job. Right, So there's all these hurdles. I might have opened the
• 1:15:31
  door nice and wide, and everyone's jumping on the Mark train because they go,
• 1:15:36
  well, Toya just made a fucking movie. What would have cost us
• 1:15:43
  catering money, you know, And he's made a whole movie of our catering
• 1:15:45
  budget and it's pretty good. And they go and that's why jumping on because
• 1:15:50
  they see me as a bit of a meal ticket in that sense, which
• 1:15:54
  is great, and I want them to see me as a meal ticket.
• 1:15:57
  Yes, I can do all the special effects myself. I shoot myself.
• 1:16:00
  I do everything that a whole lot myself, and I can do that stuff
• 1:16:02
  so swiftly and easy, and I know how to break the rules. I
• 1:16:06
  don't need the technicranes. I don't need all that shit that complicates the movie
• 1:16:11
  and makes the movie massively expensive. And they still get their big budget looking
• 1:16:15
  movie for probably quarter of the price. So and they know that it's so
• 1:16:19
  hard for them now to make movies, to make profit on a movie.
• 1:16:25
  So all of a sudden, people like me that are sort of multi skill
• 1:16:29
  we become the commodity. We become their little gold mine for a bit.
• 1:16:34
  So I've proven that with the Monster movie, the Monster's of Man movie.
• 1:16:41
  Now I just need to prove to that so same people that I can do
• 1:16:45
  deep drama as well. So I'm going to do another film where it's going
• 1:16:49
  to be very, very active driven, and that'll just tick off that box.
• 1:16:55
  So I can do the action and I can do Now, are you
• 1:16:57
  going to release it the same way? Are? What are you going to
• 1:16:59
  do with that? Why not? It worked right? Yeah, but but
• 1:17:03
  there's no explosives, not to killer robots, Sir, so I'm not sure
• 1:17:06
  the drama explosions. Oh maybe our mate goes in there and he's you know,
• 1:17:15
  and he and he holds up a petrol station in l A and we
• 1:17:17
  blow up the petrol station. Right, so there's an explosion. Maybe there's
• 1:17:20
  an explosion. You need trailer moments, seriously, if you if you're going
• 1:17:25
  to sell a movie, you need moments in that trailer where people go,
• 1:17:29
  this looks fucking cool, right, and it does. You can't be stupid,
• 1:17:32
  right, Dramas don't sell. Every distributor in the world will come and
• 1:17:39
  tell you. Unless you've got Meryl Streep and the bloody thing, it won't
• 1:17:44
  sell. And even if it has Meryl Streep and it doesn't, we don't
• 1:17:47
  still don't know. Right, So if you're going to do a nice,
• 1:17:50
  beautiful drama or you know, a love story, whatever the odds are,
• 1:17:55
  you make and a dollar okay next to nothing. And also, by the
• 1:18:00
  way, you also sold you've also saw this film to territories individually, right,
• 1:18:03
  so you're doing that as well. Yes, yes, it's in about
• 1:18:09
  one hundred and forty different countries. Now, you know we need to a
• 1:18:13
  region, you know, like to Japan, French, countries all of a
• 1:18:16
  sudden that combines thirty countries or something, you know what I mean. But
• 1:18:20
  it's not hard to you know, it's nice to say, yeah, I
• 1:18:24
  started doing in fifty countries, but the reality is you've started to you know,
• 1:18:29
  probably a dozen or more regions that encompass those countries. But yeah,
• 1:18:33
  no, we've we've done pretty good out of that. Yeah, I probably
• 1:18:39
  could have made a lot more. I mean, i'm during I think it
• 1:18:42
  was. I think it might have been what's that fucking dodgy show you left?
• 1:18:47
  Go and do the AFM AFM. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There
• 1:18:51
  was a guy there and he rang that. He said, I'll give you
• 1:18:54
  a million dollars for the movie, but international sales, right, I should
• 1:18:59
  have just given it to him, because and international sales are since you're pain
• 1:19:01
  in the ass. Oh that's a whole other level of crazy. Yeah,
• 1:19:05
  it is a whole lot of a little crazy. And you know, the
• 1:19:09
  Germans will ring up and they go, oh, Mike, we love your
• 1:19:11
  movie. It's sucking great, but our AI robots some scandal movie and we've
• 1:19:15
  found one hundred and thirty seven problems with it, And okay, what fucking
• 1:19:19
  problems? You know? You go down to the first So you go down
• 1:19:23
  to the time code and there's like a pixel out that no one will ever
• 1:19:26
  see. Ever. You fix that, and they go, oh, there's
• 1:19:30
  a little bit of artifacting and I go, what its fucking stock footage.
• 1:19:31
  Of course it's going to have an artifact and I've destroyed the Q see you
• 1:19:35
  see now? Hey? So that yeah, all the see stuff and you
• 1:19:39
  just go out of it. I think there were probably out of one hundred
• 1:19:43
  something in comments, there's probably four things that were, oh, okay,
• 1:19:46
  there is a time it is a missing frame there or something, do you
• 1:19:48
  know what I mean? Which is serious. You can watch that movie a
• 1:19:51
  thousand times and never see the missing frame. We'll be right back after a
• 1:19:57
  word from our sponsor and now back to the shell. But the robot picked
• 1:20:05
  it up, you know. But anyway, so what you fuck around the
• 1:20:09
  Germans for for six eight months just trying to get your movie? See where
• 1:20:12
  everyone else? It's playing around the world and no one else has any other
• 1:20:15
  problem with it. Germans they paid well, then the French paid well.
• 1:20:25
  I've purpose purpose mate to this thing. I've purposely kept all the English speaking
• 1:20:30
  countries for myself, you know, America, Canada's Australian New Zealand, blah
• 1:20:36
  blah, but in anywhere that they speak English, I've I'm not going to
• 1:20:40
  sell the rights to the movie for that unless they and as just as at
• 1:20:45
  Chat, the Netflix or the Amazon's ring up and just dangle a carrot,
• 1:20:47
  which they won't completely won't. But it's a I love keeping the English speaking
• 1:20:54
  one for myself because that's the one that's going to just keep churning over for
• 1:20:58
  me forever. More that you've got probably one distributor roung me saying, you
• 1:21:03
  know, telling me everything I wanted to hear, which is great they always
• 1:21:09
  do, but they he said, this thing's probably got with his body of
• 1:21:14
  work that he's got that he's selling. He said, You've probably got another
• 1:21:16
  ten to fifteen years in it because it's a relatively current subject. Your post
• 1:21:21
  production's done really well. It's not shot in a city that's going to age.
• 1:21:27
  Race said. The thing that ages the movie is Neil McDonough has a
• 1:21:30
  wire coming out of the z where everyone's Bluetooth now, but maybe I just
• 1:21:38
  paint the wire out there you go, there you go? Now? Is
• 1:21:41
  there going to be a sequel? No? No, you left us old.
• 1:21:46
  Yeah, come on, you know I did on purpose. It's there
• 1:21:55
  could be. There's a lot of a lot of people have rung me.
• 1:21:58
  Not a lot. There's been a few people wrang me going, hey,
• 1:22:00
  can we do can we do the second version? You know, we'll pay
• 1:22:04
  for it rite at the whole box? Nice, but we want you to
• 1:22:08
  direct it. And I went, get back to me. You know,
• 1:22:13
  I'm not investing no time into it. You guys want to go and do
• 1:22:15
  that, that's fine. You go nuts and get back to me and we'll
• 1:22:19
  decide then. So, but you know, I'd like to do it.
• 1:22:24
  I'd like to do it Monster the Men, so it'll be it would be
• 1:22:27
  fun. Yeah, it would be fun. And it literally has opened up
• 1:22:31
  to go bigger because when I was making the movie, I thought, fuck,
• 1:22:34
  I just I just want to go for Michael Bay. If you like
• 1:22:41
  goes uh, we're going to give you some money for this. You're like,
• 1:22:45
  okay, So if I start doing movies for studios, I'm going to
• 1:22:47
  try and convince them to just sucking do a Michael Bay executioners as well.
• 1:22:54
  You know. So my question to you is, sir, do you regret
• 1:22:58
  really rise? Well again, I didn't read the book. Sorry, I
• 1:23:04
  don't like killing trees. But the the e book was fantastic and and I've
• 1:23:12
  recommended it to a lot of people. Don't you worry, No, no,
• 1:23:15
  thank you appreciate that. I appreciate It's it's you know, you probably
• 1:23:20
  just need to do a what do I call the addition to oh yeah,
• 1:23:27
  updated, Yeah, I got updated. Yeah, there's there's you might have
• 1:23:29
  to doing every year. You might have to do it every year because it
• 1:23:31
  changes so fast. I mean a lot of the core concepts and there are
• 1:23:35
  still going to be good for their evergreen, but there's some things that I
• 1:23:39
  wish. I need an expanded edition. I need to do a second edition,
• 1:23:42
  and the third edition and a fourth day. I can't recommend it highly
• 1:23:45
  enough. It is that that book is. Yeah. Look like I said,
• 1:23:51
  when I was listening to it, I was just gone, it's so
• 1:23:54
  fucking logical, right, It's so logical and with and you know, there's
• 1:24:01
  so many alarm bells in the film industry, so many alarm bells. If
• 1:24:06
  you were an indie I wanted to make a movie, you really need to
• 1:24:12
  go to therapy first, because and read your book. I was one of
• 1:24:18
  the lucky ones. But the amount of effort and energy I put in behind
• 1:24:24
  my movie to make sure it didn't fail was extraordinary. And you also think
• 1:24:30
  you also have a massive volume of expertise, education, knowledge about all the
• 1:24:38
  things that you're doing. So you're also on an anomaly in your own rate,
• 1:24:43
  just yourself. So it takes a lot to do what you've done with
• 1:24:46
  that question. Yeah, I mean, look, I know the whole prod
• 1:24:49
  production thing. I've been doing posts forever, so I can post a movie
• 1:24:56
  on my laptop on an airplane here, I could make an eight K movie
• 1:25:01
  like literally in my on my laptop, where other people have got to go
• 1:25:04
  to a post house and then get completely like right, you know, like
• 1:25:10
  that they will. You'll be getting a fucking big bill if you did it
• 1:25:14
  that way, right, you know, just you know, people go,
• 1:25:19
  I've made a movie for thirty grand I said, yeah, But by the
• 1:25:23
  time you do proper sound, proper everything, so you can sell at to
• 1:25:26
  certain companies, there's all that's going to cost more than your movie if you
• 1:25:30
  want to do it properly, you know what I mean, Because a lot
• 1:25:33
  of these companies might even take your movie with your shitty stereo sound that you
• 1:25:38
  did in premiere, You know what I mean. Certainly the stems you need
• 1:25:43
  to supply alone, Oh my god, just the deliverables. And then you
• 1:25:48
  get it to QC with the pixel here and the pixel there that, and
• 1:25:54
  the reality is no a reality is that's so overcooked and so over hyped.
• 1:25:59
  I think that's been matter affected by post housers. To give them more work
• 1:26:01
  for the reality. Agree to the amazing content you see on YouTube now done
• 1:26:06
  by young kids at home, and these amazing pieces of content no one cares
• 1:26:14
  about if there's a fucking missing frame or a pixel oud or whatever, and
• 1:26:16
  it looks fantastic. So yeah, a lot of that. The film QC
• 1:26:20
  is just the lot of ship I would I would agree with you one hundred
• 1:26:25
  percent. And and by the way, if you do have a distributor,
• 1:26:27
  it'll take that crappy version with the crappy audio. I promise you they'll never
• 1:26:30
  get to pay you beause they would have to be fixing it. Yes,
• 1:26:35
  if they'll fix it, or they just put it out the way it is
• 1:26:38
  and they just don't care and they're just going to see whatever money trickles in.
• 1:26:41
  Like you said, the little, the little, the little the little
• 1:26:44
  problems that get thrown off of it. It is looking. But on the
• 1:26:47
  for the record, I don't want to diss on distributors because distributors are there
• 1:26:57
  for a reason that they're there to fill a job that you're too lazy or
• 1:27:01
  inexperienced to yourself. Agreed. I walked into I walked into this completely inexperience.
• 1:27:09
  I've come out of fucking Swiss army knife, you know what I mean.
• 1:27:12
  And so I know all the pieces. So now I know what a
• 1:27:15
  real distributor should be doing. Right, But most of them, but most
• 1:27:20
  of them I could to do it. But but you know what, You're
• 1:27:24
  absolutely right, And it's not that we rag on distributors. Distributors have a
• 1:27:29
  job to do, and there are good ones out there. It's just a
• 1:27:30
  majority of them are great ones, not not that great. Yeah, And
• 1:27:35
  you know, and there's distributors that have a lot of reach and there's ones
• 1:27:40
  that don't. You know, right there, it's all still fun and games,
• 1:27:45
  you know. For example, this is what a movie is worth now
• 1:27:49
  now that the streamers have literally devalued a feature film too literally is now officially
• 1:27:57
  a feature film is now acually officially worth about three cents. That's what your
• 1:28:02
  feature film is worth in the marketplace. Three cents. That's really sad when
• 1:28:09
  you say that, right, And I say that three cents because if the
• 1:28:12
  movie will eventually end up an AVI or spite or wherever. But that's probably
• 1:28:16
  all you're going to get from your movie after your t vot experience is about
• 1:28:21
  three cents maybe time someone watches it. So you go. Now, I
• 1:28:27
  sold a little bit of stock footage the other day right to Netflix, but
• 1:28:31
  you know through you know, for our through to three our stock guys,
• 1:28:38
  and I made fifteen hundred dollars for five seconds. Oh yeah, well,
• 1:28:45
  you know from an advertising perspective, that's great. So the thing is,
• 1:28:50
  how is a movie with so much work and effort from hundreds of people worth
• 1:28:56
  three cents when people watch it that you stop footage, It was a picture
• 1:29:01
  of a fucking stop sign, like hundreds of dollars full. So so a
• 1:29:06
  perfect example is, look, I'll give you. I'll give you a perfect
• 1:29:10
  example. Let's say tomorrow I open up a new service that allows you to
• 1:29:15
  get bananas on demand demand. Anytime you want a banana, you just have
• 1:29:20
  to just open up your your your your your you're covered and there's a banana
• 1:29:26
  there, because I've set up a technology that allows you to do the bananas.
• 1:29:29
  Before bananas used to cost, you know, sixty nine cents a pound,
• 1:29:33
  ninety nine cents a pound, which is not a lot of money,
• 1:29:35
  but there's a lot of volume in bananas. Now I've essentially brought down bananas
• 1:29:39
  to less than a less than a penny per thing. All of the hundreds
• 1:29:44
  of thousands of people that go into creating bananas, cultivating them, packing them,
• 1:29:48
  picking them, packing them, shipping them, all of that, all
• 1:29:51
  those people, how are they going to be living? And that's exactly what's
• 1:29:55
  happening to us as filmmakers. Will be right back after a word from our
• 1:30:00
  sponsor, and now back to the show we are. We are not able
• 1:30:10
  to make a living doing this. And you and I are both old enough
• 1:30:14
  of similar vintage to remember the eighties, the nineties and even the early two
• 1:30:17
  thousands where you can make crap movies and make a lot of money with it.
• 1:30:23
  But now you can't. And the distributors are still trying to figure it
• 1:30:27
  out, all of them. The studios are trying to figure it out.
• 1:30:29
  Which is the biggest studio in Hollywood right now. Which is the biggest studio
• 1:30:33
  in Hollywood right now, the one that makes the most money, that would
• 1:30:38
  have no idea, Disney that Disney. Now, why does Disney make the
• 1:30:43
  most money because they use the film entrepreneur model because money. I didn't invent
• 1:30:50
  it. They've been doing it since the day of seven the Seventh Dwarfs.
• 1:30:55
  The second they put Mickey Mouse on a T shirt. They started making money
• 1:30:58
  outside the film industry. So now where are they So where are they making
• 1:31:01
  their money is when when they do a Marvel movie or a Star Wars movie
• 1:31:04
  or Frozen. They made a billion dollars off the dresses and Frozen alone,
• 1:31:10
  according to my according to my friend who works a disday, a billion off
• 1:31:14
  the first movie. And that movie, by the way, made a billion
• 1:31:16
  in the box office, and they made a bit. They make more money
• 1:31:19
  off of everything else they sell them the actual movies. Is that they stopped
• 1:31:23
  being a movie studio a long time ago. They're about selling baby yodas.
• 1:31:27
  That's what they want to sell. They're not Mandalorian makes them some money,
• 1:31:30
  but it's a marketing tool, and that's what the film entrepreneur method is all
• 1:31:32
  about. It's about doing that but for the independent and focusing on niches and
• 1:31:35
  all that kind of stuff. But but that's that's and that's the future,
• 1:31:40
  and that's why a lot of these other studios are having more difficult times surviving
• 1:31:44
  and making, you know, making money, because it's just I don't know
• 1:31:48
  where this is all going to go, my friend, but your story is
• 1:31:53
  very inspirational. I wanted to have you back on the show. Thank you
• 1:31:55
  so much for being so candid and open uh with the audience and with the
• 1:31:59
  tribe about your your your adventures over the last two years getting this movie out
• 1:32:03
  into the world. And of course when you make your next movie, we
• 1:32:08
  will be here to hear what happens with that one as well. And if
• 1:32:14
  you do decide to make one of those big movies, please come back.
• 1:32:16
  I want to love to hear the stories from the inside of the studio walls
• 1:32:21
  as well. Yeah, look, I think I will. I will because
• 1:32:28
  it's you know, I've got a lot of a lot of time for you,
• 1:32:31
  alex and and and the information you give to a lot of filmmakers,
• 1:32:35
  because I see a lot of young fellows making movies or young people. Sorry
• 1:32:41
  don't young fellows, but young people making movies, and I'm already looking at
• 1:32:46
  dead people walking right. In many ways, you're absolutely right, and I
• 1:32:51
  want to go over there and just say, look, don't don't it's I
• 1:32:57
  can't. You know, they've got to go down their path of creating something,
• 1:33:01
  you know what I mean, creating something to sell, and it's you
• 1:33:08
  know, I think telling a movie is like writing a book, right for
• 1:33:12
  a writer, writing a book for a chef cook in the best food of
• 1:33:15
  his life. For filmmaker of the best movie he's can with his own hands.
• 1:33:20
  It's a creative release. And it's great if you've got a rich dad
• 1:33:26
  or a mum whatever, that it's just going to dump money on you to
• 1:33:29
  go and make your movie and have fun. But the realities are, if
• 1:33:33
  you're going to use other people's money, there's a responsibility there, and you
• 1:33:39
  don't, You're never going to be You're always going to have this monkey on
• 1:33:43
  your back. If you borrow money from the accountant down the road and Aunt
• 1:33:47
  Mary and Dad and someone's mortgage to their house, and you go and make
• 1:33:53
  a movie and it doesn't make any money right forever more, the stress that
• 1:33:59
  will be upon your head and and and the reason why you're not going to
• 1:34:02
  make money is not because you might make the most amazing film. Look like,
• 1:34:08
  you know, we had a little breakthrough with our one, and you
• 1:34:11
  did everything right and you got your money back. But the odds if you
• 1:34:15
  don't do everything right, yeah, you know, and and it doesn't work,
• 1:34:21
  it's gonna and the odds are it's not. There's I don't even know.
• 1:34:26
  I've I've I know countless filmmakers independent like myself, truly independent guys that
• 1:34:32
  have made me and reached out to me, and literally none of them have
• 1:34:38
  have a good story for me, you know what I mean? That literally
• 1:34:41
  bring me up asking me how. And it's really really sad that some of
• 1:34:45
  the stories I've heard have been decimated, I mean terrible, and I've showed
• 1:34:48
  them. I go, look, I'm going to tell you my process.
• 1:34:50
  And I go, oh, that's where I fucked up there. Well that's
• 1:34:54
  okay, that's what I mean. And you know, and I fucked up
• 1:34:58
  in certain areas selling my film as well. I could have made a lot
• 1:35:00
  more money with it, you know what I mean? But lesson learn It's
• 1:35:03
  a life lesson. But you know what the other system, too, is
• 1:35:06
  you can get into the traditional system and just make wages. You can go
• 1:35:14
  and get your director's fee and whatever. You know. That's the other thing
• 1:35:17
  too about being a director is the director's party that you're not going to get
• 1:35:23
  paid much as a director. You know, I've got a friend of mine
• 1:35:26
  that's finishing a movie now for Netflix, and he worked out because he ended
• 1:35:30
  up, you know, hanging out with the makeup artist and making out with
• 1:35:33
  her. He worked out that her hour, right, her hour, the
• 1:35:40
  amount of time he's spent on the movie compared to the amount of time she's
• 1:35:44
  spent on the movie, she was making four times more than him because he
• 1:35:51
  got a contracted amount of X amount of dollars, you know, a few
• 1:35:54
  hundred grand she came in just for you know, the four weeks to suit
• 1:35:58
  this thing. Of five weeks, she was making more money per hour than
• 1:36:01
  him. So really, as a director, a movie director, get jack
• 1:36:08
  ship unless you're going to be like a fucking famous Marvel director. Maybe you
• 1:36:13
  know, after your second or third Marvel film, you might be making some
• 1:36:15
  good days, but the reality is even a lot of the offers I've been
• 1:36:19
  getting, okay, fuck massive pay cup. You know, I could make
• 1:36:24
  what they offer I could make doing an ad or it's not two weeks or
• 1:36:28
  two or three weeks. Yeah, you're you're literally paying me if you want
• 1:36:32
  me for a year and a bit and you're going to pay me a month's
• 1:36:35
  income, Like, Yeah, directing at work directing a movie is not really
• 1:36:43
  that right exactly. And by the way, your story is could have been
• 1:36:48
  a cautionary tale very easily. You could have if you didn't know marketing,
• 1:36:53
  if you didn't know Facebook ads and YouTube ads, if you didn't make your
• 1:36:57
  money in TV and just try to eva or Unlet's say you just want to
• 1:37:01
  thrown it on Amazon Prime and left it there. You you might have been
• 1:37:05
  able to make some money with it. But it wouldn't. This story could
• 1:37:10
  have gone wrong in multiple places, multily. But I did want it to
• 1:37:15
  fail, and if it was going to fail, I wanted it to fail
• 1:37:18
  with my own hands. I didn't want it to fail on someone else's hands,
• 1:37:24
  because then I would have kicked myself stupid for allowing myself to let it
• 1:37:29
  fail with not because if I'm going to put no effort into selling that film,
• 1:37:34
  I get somebody sitting back and oh, they're going to do everything for
• 1:37:38
  me because they told me they're going to do two thousand dollars in marketing for
• 1:37:42
  the PR And they tell me they're going to spend six grand here and and
• 1:37:45
  and the movie's going to blow up, right right. I knew that was
• 1:37:48
  bullshit because I'm in the advertising world, right, I know that's completely out
• 1:37:54
  of shit. I'm like, six grand don't get you shit, nothing,
• 1:38:00
  nothing, And online news you know, when you hit the PR companies and
• 1:38:02
  they put stuff on all those oh the PR web things. Yeah, yeah,
• 1:38:05
  yeah, no one reads that crap. Come on, no one.
• 1:38:10
  And hey, even justified monetizing it, you know, it might end up
• 1:38:15
  in variety and it's like gone, It's like a way. So listen.
• 1:38:20
  I hope this conversation inspires and scares the shit out of people at the exact
• 1:38:25
  same time, because it is definitely an anomaly. It is a cautionary tale.
• 1:38:29
  It's an inspirational tale, and this is the reality of where we are
• 1:38:33
  in the world right now and where we are going as filmmakers. That's why
• 1:38:38
  I wrote the book, so we have a fighting chance because in the book,
• 1:38:42
  you read it, you know you've got to execute things in order for
• 1:38:45
  it to work, and you've got to do a lot of work. That's
• 1:38:48
  not the filmmaking part of it. It's not the working with actors and getting
• 1:38:53
  in the edit room and going to the premieres. That's another part. But
• 1:38:56
  in today's world, filmmakers need to do that next part if they want to
• 1:39:00
  survive as filmmakers. And that's just unfortunate. I don't make the rules.
• 1:39:04
  These are the rules, and unfortunately this is where we're going. Mark.
• 1:39:08
  I do want to appreciate your time, brother, Thank you so much for
• 1:39:11
  coming on the show again and being so candid and open with us, and
• 1:39:15
  I hope this does help some filmmakers out there. So thank you again,
• 1:39:17
  my friend, and continued success, and let keep me updated on where you
• 1:39:21
  are in the world and what you're doing now. Are is Zelea? You
• 1:39:26
  have a good diet. It's always good to tokio mate. I want to
• 1:39:30
  thank Mark so much for not only coming on the show and dropping some amazing
• 1:39:34
  knowledge bombs on us and sharing his journey in a very transparent way, but
• 1:39:40
  thank you for doing this experiment and taking a risk with your million dollar action
• 1:39:45
  film Monsters of Man. And I'm so glad that my book has been was
• 1:39:51
  an inspiration for you Mark, and that you were able to not only recoup
• 1:39:57
  your money, but be very very profitable making your in dependent film. Thank
• 1:40:00
  you again, Mark. If you want to get links to anything we spoke
• 1:40:02
  about in this episode, including how to watch Monsters of Man and see what
• 1:40:06
  he's done, head over to the show notes at Indie Film muscle dot com
• 1:40:11
  Forward slash seven fifty one. If you have it already, please head over
• 1:40:15
  to Filmmaking podcast dot com, subscribe and leave a good review for the show.
• 1:40:19
  It really helps us out a lot, guys. Thank you again so
• 1:40:23
  much for listening. Guys, As always, keep that hustle going, keep
• 1:40:26
  that dream alive, Stay safe out there, and I'll talk to you soon.
• 1:40:29
  Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle podcast at Indie film Hustle dot
• 1:40:32
  com. That's I N D I E F I L M h U S
• 1:40:36
  T l E dot com.