How to Make a Microbudget Movie When Hollywood Won’t Fund Your Film

The time of the Orc has come. Or at least, the time of the Ellisons.

A bunch of us at IndieWire have been thinking about the increasing barriers around film financing, the breakdown of the festival routes for discovery and exhibition, the perils of manufacturing marketing hype, and other hurdles in filmmakers’ way. 

But perhaps you have the idea for a microbudget feature — something that feels appropriately ambitious, contained to a single location, perhaps; or with a small, collaborative cast and a roving camera; or an idea where it’s possible to take an extended period of time to get it right. What are the pros and cons of the ways filmmakers can take their destiny into their own hands? By “destiny,” of course, we mean low six-figures’ worth of spending money, and by “hands,” we mean the tight-knit group of supportive collaborators required to make a film succeed. 

We decided to reach out to folks who have experience acquiring just enough of a microbudget to make things without permission, and ask: Where did the money come from, and what do you do with it? There are many options out there; these are several of them.

Option #1: Crowdfund the Shit Out of It

I don’t have $100,000 to make a fun original comedy film. Producer Laser Webber, a fixture of the LA theater and comedy scene and one-half of indie duo band The Doubleclicks, doesn’t have $100,000 to make a fun original comedy film. But Webber, a veteran of over 70 successful crowdfunding campaigns across music, theater, film, web series, and comedy, can raise a lot of money for projects that might never get a hearing.

They’re currently steering the Seed & Spark for “The Greatest Treasure in the World,” an improvised comedy by Dropout regulars Siobhan Thompson and Izzy Roland, and have recently run campaigns for projects like “Vidhya’s Guide to the Afterlife” and “Good Time on the Clocktower.” As of this writing, Webber and “The Greatest Treasure in the World” team have built enough of a community interested in the story they’re telling that they are a little over $10,000 away from becoming the top project in Seed & Spark history.

The one cool trick to breaking through and generating momentum via crowdfunding is that there is absolutely no cool trick. Crowdfunding requires a mountain of hard work to craft the graphics, videos, copywriting, marketing, and audience outreach that constitute a creative project. Even when the attached creatives have a large online following, crowdfunding requires them to do more than pass the donation tin around (“The Greatest Treasure in the World” is mid-campaign and just hit a stretch goal, wherein director Alex Fernie will develop a one-page RPG free to all backers).

The cast of ‘The Greatest Treasure in the World.’

But Webber told IndieWire that a well-crafted crowdfunding project has to speak to a passionate base and should offer stories with missions in mind. Projects that are proud of their taste and a little bit of an underdog have a great chance of succeeding to a level where really interesting independent filmmaking becomes possible.

“I think an audience, and a reason to exist, is what makes crowdfunds work. One of the questions I make all my partners answer is, ‘How will you be different after this is over? And how will the world be different?’ It doesn’t have to be huge, but how do you change the life of somebody who’s seen your film? If you can’t answer that, then go sell something boring to a network,” Webber said. 

The other thing that’s important in crowdfunds, both large and small, is cultivating a sense of audience participation and an underdog story about bringing a project to life that wouldn’t get a fair hearing. “Give them enough information slowly enough that this becomes a story that they’re not just hearing, but they’re also telling, and they’re instrumental in being part of. That’s what I love about crowdfunding. This is not art for a top-down situation,” Webber said. “We all did this together, and we are all telling this story about what’s possible together.”

Option #2: Grants, Loans, and Credit Card Debt

Crowdfunding, for all its utility, is often neither the beginning nor the end for a film project. Director Caroline Golum wrote “The Revelations of Divine Love,” an inventive adaptation of the writings of medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich, and immediately knew it would have to look a certain way and would take a long time to make. Longer than backers generally wait for their sticker packets and livestream Q&As.

But luckily, she cultivated an incredible community of collaborators who were down to work through different iterations of the project from script to short concept to its feature ambitions, all the way to shooting an expressionistic take on the Peasant’s Revolt and The Black Death from inside a warehouse in Queens. “The Revelations of Divine Love” has played in New York, LA, and Seattle, and will soon play select dates in Chicago, Oakland, and Los Angeles courtesy indie distributor Several Futures.

“ I’m not interested in making films about myself or by myself because I would go insane,” Golum told IndieWire. “ I like to say that the only thing I can take credit for is that I had the idea. And then from the outset, other people were involved. Like, you do not make a film like this on your own in a vacuum. There were five of us that were the core group of this movie — me, Kate [Stahl], our producer, Gabe [Elder], our DP, Grant [Stoops], our art director, and Sydney [Buchan], our AD, who has a production design background. And between the five of us, we made one competent production designer.”

‘The Revelations of Divine Love’

There was a lot that needed to be designed, too. Golum brings a wide range of influences — everything from “Black Narcissus” and “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” to the films of Andy Milligan and Guy Maddin — into a film that splits its look into the Heavenly and the Earthly. There’s a naturalistic style in the sequences of Julian’s (Tessa Strain) visions, where she sees things that express themselves as truths of God and the Universe; then there’s a very consciously artificial, model-and-matte-painting aesthetic for Julian’s life in Norwich. But it extended to the full-court press, “let’s all pull together and save the rec center” effort that it took to gather the resources for “The Revelations of Divine Love.”

The film also had a crowdfunding campaign on Fractured Atlas, an arts service organization that isn’t strictly just a crowdfunder like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, or Seed & Spark. It has that platform, but it’s more like a nonprofit that helps provide resources to artists and sponsors them so that their fundraising counts as nonprofit donations. Golum and her team raised just under $50,000, but that wasn’t where it started or ended.

“We made a proof of concept for this film in 2021, and then I got a grant from NYSCA [New York State Council on the Arts] at the end of that year for $10,000, and that became the tool that I could use to crowdfund. So then 2022 was spent getting the money together, all of 2022,” Golum said. “It got a fair amount of attention on social media, partially because my dear friend, [‘Blue Heron’ director] Sophy Romvari, who’s an amazing filmmaker in her own right, shared the campaign, and we got some bigger donors as a result. If you’ve got the mouthpiece to tout other people, that’s important. I hope to be in a position to do that for someone else.”

In addition to crowdfunding, however, Golum also applied for four grants and took out a loan from her credit union. It was a patchwork of luck, community, and debt that made it possible for Golum to see the film the way she wanted to make it. “That’s how you fund a $100,000 movie,” Golum said.

Option #3: Nobody Is Telling You To Steal $10,000. But If You Have $10,000, You Can Make a Movie Like It’s a 2006 YouTube Video.

If no one is giving you money, or loaning you money, or granting you money, well, the options for where a microbudget feature’s money comes from are very few. Self-funding is a tricky business, from Francis Ford Coppola to Tommy Wissau. But if there is a sane path for setting one’s own money on fire in the name of cinema, it might be the one that rising indie director Pete Ohs prefers.

Ohs made one independent film the “traditional” independent film way — getting a script into a workshop into a successful fundraise into a low-budget shoot into a festival slot — and he hated it so much that he never wants to do it again. While Ohs latest film “Erupcja” is a little shinier, what with its European setting and acting turns by Charlie xcx and Jeremy O. Harris, he’s still working in the same way he did on his films “Jethica,” “Love and Work,” and “The True Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick,” all made for five-figures and “Jethica” for only about $10,000.

‘Erupcja’1-2 Special

This is, in large part, possible because of the way that Ohs likes to work: A very small cast of mostly his friends, all collaborating on the storytelling as they go, shooting with his 2012 Canon, adapting the Airbnbs, doing a mountain of unpaid work himself, and trying to keep the filmmaking process as close as possible to a reflection of his 15-year-old self making videos.

“Everyone’s wearing a bunch of hats. There isn’t really a crew. We had three or four Polish helpers [on ‘Erupcja’], which is essential because I’m in a city where I don’t speak the language, and they were amazing. They were also wearing multiple hats. But the actors are also writers. They’re also kind of set decorators. They’re kind of crafty. They’re wearing all these hats. And what I love about that is the removal of any hierarchy, which starts with me,” Ohs said. “I am the director, but I’m so open to the ideas of everyone.”

Needless to say, “everyone” needs to be down to wear many hats for little pay; some stories you just can’t tell that way. But for Ohs, at least, less is more.

“Smaller is better. Let that be what influences all your choices, and it will allow a lightness to the process, which will mean it will be more enjoyable, which will mean that your collaborators will have a better experience, which will hopefully be communicated through the film that you eventually make. But also, when you watch that movie again, you don’t have to relive your own trauma,” Ohs said. “You get to remember the good time you had, and it’s the gift that keeps on giving.”