Vancouver is not indie-friendly

By MAT
Posted November 18, 2011

Of the last four cities in which I’ve lived, and others of which friends have told me, Vancouver is far and away the least friendly to independent movies. In this city, we are completely swamped by the outsized presence of the Hollywood industry that shoots here.

The scene here is very cliquey and unwelcoming. Just attend an evening at Cineworks or The Celluloid Social Club to witness people ooze self-congratulatory smugness about how “inside” they all are. People look right through you after deciding you’re not important enough to talk to, because if you were important enough to talk to they would know who you are. If they decide you are important enough to talk to — i.e. if they think you can further their careers — you’ll never lack for false friends.

Careerism is rampant — which, while certainly understandable, is a barrier to entry. Everyone wants to “go Hollywood” as quickly as they can; they can’t wait to sell out.

People look at every project not as a thing in itself, but as a stepping stone: “If I put this on my résumé, will it help me become an international star?” The quality of a project is irrelevant; what matters is becoming attached to a project that people more deeply inside the clique will hear about. People want to complete projects; they don’t want to make movies.

The local scene

There are five kinds of movie-makers in Vancouver:

1. Students, who have to make short movies for their programmes. They have the luxury of drawing from a pool of equipment (the school’s) and crew (their fellow students). Once they are out of school (graduate, drop out, flunk out), they rarely make another movie, although they usually spend a few years in a futile quest to raise money for a project. They sometimes move into the second group.
2. Dilettantes, who make short movies that they pay for out of their own pockets. A significant minority of these movies are never completed. If they are completed, they are rarely seen by anyone outside the family and friends of the principal creators. In those rare cases where the principal movie-makers actually follow through on their promise to give copies to the cast and crew, the audience increases by the precise number of family and friends of the cast and crew. This doesn’t say anything about the quality of these movies; a small minority of them are actually quite good.
3. Professionals, who work on American productions. Canadian indie Producers can’t afford to hire them. Every wannabe movie-maker in Vancouver aspires to join this group. It is interesting that these wannabes never consider that they won’t get to make their own movies; they’ll always be working on other people’s projects.
4. Videographers, who shoot weddings and corporate events and (less often) TV commercials. There are fewer opportunities in this field all the time, as the equipment available today has advanced to such a degree that an amateur with a Canon T3i and a copy of iMovie or Windows Moviemaker can do a good enough job at capturing that speech by the Vice President of Corporate Morale.
5. Pornographers, who are usually three friends: one boy who owns a camera, one boy who’s excited at the idea that he’ll get to fuck a random girl, and one friend who’s been dragooned into helping. To judge by the postings on Craigslist, for some reason these guys seem to have difficulty finding actresses.

Collaborators

Movie-making is surely the most collaborative medium, so you’re going to need other people to help you turn your idea into an actual movie. If you want to make a movie, you need one (or, better yet, both) of the following:

1. A group of friends who are as dedicated to your project as you are.
2. Lots of money, so you can pay people to be your friends who are as dedicated to your project as you are.

What if you don’t know anybody, and don’t have several thousand dollars lying around? Then you have to convince people that your project is worth their time and talent.

• Performers. It’s easy to find actresses. It’s slightly harder to find actors. That’s always the case. Ever since I was in elementary school, every amateur-theatre audition saw fifteen girls and three boys — and every script required seven men and two women.

  The 2008 economic crash and subsequent downtown has affected Vancouver actors for the worse. The “A” roles, of course, go to American actors, as they always have; the Producers hire as big a star as they can afford, to have some kind of name to promote to distributors and audiences. In the past, Vancouver actors could often expect to play the “B” roles: friends of the hero, henchpeople of the villain, etc. Alas, those roles are now also going to imported American actors, who are desperate for work. This has pushed the Canadian actors down to the “C” roles — characters who appear in one or two scenes, and speak two or three lines.

  This can be to the advantage of the indie Producer, as desperate actors lower their sights and become willing to take roles in Canadian independent movies.

• Cinematographers. It’s a bit harder to find Camera Operators — but the good news here is that if you do find one, he (yeah, almost always he) usually owns his own camera, either a prosumer camcorder such as the Canon XL-H1 or Sony FX1, or a DSLR such as the Canon 5D Mark II. If he owns a DSLR, there’s a minority chance that he owns a lens other than the stock lens he bought with the camera. If you’re lucky, he will own a tripod — probably something he picked up for $69 at London Drugs or $129 at Black’s Photography.

  The bad news is that he is probably a gear geek, and won’t know anything about telling a story visually.

  He also won’t know anything about lighting other than “tungsten is 3,200 K and daylight is 5,600 K”. He almost certainly won’t own any lighting instruments or lens filters.

• Editors. It is possible to find an Editor for your movie. Usually they are an individual with a MacBook and a pirated copy of Final Cut Pro. If they have a track record or experience, it will be from their time at film school (see 1 above) or their own short movie (see 2 above). They know the software they use, but don’t know anything about narrative or timing, so they will manage to cut the shots together without telling the story.

  They also won’t know anything about sound editing, so your dialogue will vary in volume depending on the take and there will be no soundscape to convince the audience that the movie is happening in the real world. If you’ve managed to find music for your movie, he won’t know how to cut to the beat or notch the audio so music doesn’t overwhelm the dialogue.

• Screenwriters. There are surprisingly few Writers around. The Vancouver Screenwriters Meetup group allegedly has 196 members, but they get anywhere between four and twelve people at their in-person meetings and their online message board isn’t very active. Those screenwrights you do encounter fall into two camps:

  • Screenwrights who want to go Hollywood and who are pre-embittered about the shameful way Hollywood treats writers. That’s certainly a real and legitimate gripe, as Hollywood relies ever-more on committees of screenwrights, each of whom adds a touch of whatever the market researchers think the script lacks.
  • Hyphenates who want to direct their scripts. Interestingly, this is never a Writer / Director / Producer; they all seek somebody else to raise all the money and handle all the business aspects, and leave them alone to do whatever they want.

  In neither case do they think they should have to take into account the budget of the movie. If they write a scene set on a moving train, or a walk-and-talk through downtown streets, or 200 alien ships attacking a space station, they don’t worry about how that can be shot.

• Directors. It’s impossible not to encounter Directors. Alas, they all want to be the boss of a project that already includes a Producer who will raise all the money and secure all the permissions, and a crew that will handle all the practical details so the Director can concentrate on their Art. He’ll also want to rewrite your script — before he’s read it.

It is not possible to find other people to work on a movie. Nobody wants to be a First Assistant Director, Sound Recordist, Gaffer, or (god forbid!) Production Assistant.

Conclusions

Vancouver is not a good city for the independent, micro-budget movie-maker.

If you want to act, you can work for free on lots of short movies (see 1 and 2 above), some of which may even be completed. With a little talent and a lot of luck, you can get paid to play a character in a scene or two on an episode of Fringe or Psych. Just don’t come to Vancouver expecting that you can make a living acting.

If you are a Cinematographer with your own state-of-the-art camera — and, even better, your own lighting kit as well — you can be working for no pay on every weekend you have off from your day job.

If you want to make your own movies, don’t come to Vancouver at all. There’s no point.

Comments