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Editor’s note: This is the fifth installment of “A Producer’s Path,” an ongoing column for IndieWire’s “Future of Filmmaking” series by independent producer Daren Smith. Read the first chapter here.
For the past four months, I have dissected the structural failures of the independent film industry. We have examined the investors who hemorrhage capital into projects without a roadmap, the distributors who quietly entomb visionary films in the digital void, and the audiences—long dismissed as fragmented—who have simply been ignored by a system that refuses to listen.
Three factions, three systemic failures. But there is one final, critical piece to this puzzle: the filmmakers themselves.
This column is for the writer-director who left a stable career to chase the flickering light of the screen. It is for the producer stuck in the purgatory of “the maybe” for three years running, the cinematographer with a drawer full of half-finished features, and the film school graduate staring at a phone that never rings. I have been every one of those people. Consequently, this is not a pep talk. It is a necessary disruption—a wake-up call followed by a roadmap for survival.
The Harsh Reality: Why the Industry Owes You Nothing
A few years ago, an email circulated through the Utah film community that became the stuff of local legend. A recent film school graduate had sent a mass email to a directory of working professionals. The core of the message was simple: “I am a recent graduate, and I expect a $40,000-a-year minimum salary directing films and television.”
The email was forwarded for weeks—not out of malice, but out of a profound, collective bewilderment. The student was not wrong to desire a career; they were fundamentally mistaken about the nature of the industry.
Let me be as direct as possible: The film industry does not owe you a career. It does not owe you a seat at the table because you earned a degree, bought a high-end cinema camera, wrote a script, sold your furniture to fund a short, or sacrificed your twenties to the altar of cinema. The market is an indifferent mechanism of supply and demand. Every script currently sitting in a producer’s inbox has a human being behind it who feels just as “called” as you do.
The market does not reward passion. It does not reward the “grind” in the abstract. It rewards results.
The Volume Problem
The most uncomfortable truth in this business is the requirement of volume. When a filmmaker tells me they cannot raise money, my first question is always: “How many investors have you spoken to?” The answer is almost invariably fewer than five. I tell them it will likely take 100 or more, and their eyes widen in disbelief.
We live in a culture that loves the myth of the overnight sensation, but competence is forged in repetition, not revelation. I once guest-taught at a university where a student had directed thirty-two short films before graduation. That is the volume the market quietly expects of you. When I transitioned from running a production company to senior-producing a network show, it wasn’t because I was a prodigy; it was because I had hundreds of projects, failures, and logistics-heavy lessons behind me.
The Shift: Moving from Passion to Craft
In 2017, I was failing. I had left a successful production company I co-founded to pursue the dream of making "real" movies. That year, I earned roughly $35,000 to support a family of five. I went $15,000 into personal debt to keep the lights on, engaging in the desperate financial gymnastics of a man refusing to admit he was drowning. I spent months working in construction for a friend just to keep my household afloat.
It was the most difficult financial year of my life. During that period, I revisited Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You. The premise is simple, yet deeply unfashionable: stop pursuing your “passion.” Instead, adopt a “craftsman mindset.”
The craftsman mindset is an outcome-focused approach. It dictates that you do not deserve a career because you love a medium; you earn a career by becoming so proficient at delivering valuable results that the industry—the investors, the distributors, the audiences—cannot afford to ignore you. As Steve Martin once famously told Charlie Rose, when asked for advice for young artists: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.”
That shift changed everything. It wasn’t an overnight explosion of success; it was a slow, agonizing, disciplined pivot toward building a body of work.
Chronology of Compounding Results
By 2018, the shift began to pay dividends. I was hired as a senior producer for Relative Race, working through four seasons. While that show provided the structure for my professional life, I was simultaneously building a public portfolio of work.
- 2021: A director who had been observing my output approached me to produce her debut narrative feature, Amy Redford’s What Comes Around. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was acquired by IFC Films.
- 2022: I produced two additional features, one of which became a streaming success on Amazon Prime in Latin America.
- 2024: We successfully self-distributed two of my films into over 400 screens.
It took me twelve years to produce my first feature. It took me three years to produce the next four. The catalyst was not luck or a sudden industry favor; it was the compound interest of discipline.
Supporting Data: The Visibility Loop
The principle of "be so good they can’t ignore you" is only half the battle. The other half is the practice of visibility.
On the second film I produced, I posted a single, high-quality black-and-white still from the set every day of the shoot. At the time, I had fewer than 1,000 followers. Reach was irrelevant; the point was "reps in public." I was documenting the value I could provide—the logistics, the visual aesthetic, the team leadership.
By the end of the shoot, a director I had admired from afar reached out. He had been watching my daily updates and wanted to know if I would produce his next film. The gig came to me because I made the quality of my work visible.
This creates a feedback loop:
- Produce a result.
- Make that result visible.
- Attract the "right" audience.
- Leverage that attention to produce a higher-value result.
Implications for the Modern Filmmaker
The implications are clear: the era of the "undiscovered genius" is largely over. We are in an era of the "documented professional." If you want to survive, you must stop waiting for a gatekeeper to grant you permission. You must start building your own infrastructure.
The Framework
Over the next several columns, I will lay out the “Movie Framework”—my day-to-day operating system for sustainable indie production. We will cover:
- Development: How to validate ideas before spending a dime.
- Capital: How to move from personal debt to sustainable financing.
- Distribution: Why you must build your audience long before the film is finished.
Official Stance and Conclusion
As I write this, I am in the final week of production on Brotherhood: A Cinematic Musical. None of this would be possible had I not started showing up nine years ago—on a project nobody asked for, for an audience that didn’t exist yet.
The next generation of successful producers will not be "discovered." They will simply become so proficient that the industry will have no choice but to acknowledge their presence. The architecture of independent film is currently broken, but you have the tools to build something stronger within the wreckage. Stop chasing the dream and start building the machine.
Daren Smith is a Utah-based indie film producer and founder of Craftsman Films, an independent studio dedicated to producing values-based, audience-driven cinema. His next project, “Brotherhood — A Cinematic Musical,” is scheduled for an October release.
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