You Can’t Choose a Road Until You’ve Chosen a Destination

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Editor’s note: This is the eigth chapter of “A Producer’s Path,” an ongoing column for IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking from independent producer Daren Smith. Read previous chapters here.

A GPS cannot give you a single instruction until you tell it where you’re going. Same with asking for directions from a stranger — you’d get the most confused look if, when asked where you’re going, you said, “I don’t know…” A compass is helpful but only in relation to the direction you want to go.

A single spot on a map can have infinite routes leaving it. It’s not until you define a destination that a single best or direct route emerges. Without the destination, every direction from where you stand right now is equally valid. Which is another way to say that none of them are.

We treat life and our businesses the opposite way. In our film work, we pick the road that happens to be right in front of us: the offer, the yes, the door that opened to us. We trust that it leads somewhere desirable, and with faith we take another step forward. But a road doesn’t owe you or promise you a destination. It simply goes where it goes.

The outcome for your career, for your business, for your film, has to be chosen before making the decision on how you’re going to get there, or the decision gets made for you. Most filmmakers have never once defined the actual destination of the thing they’re pouring their life into.

The road to a finished film is fairly clear. Someone gives you a vehicle in the form of financing, you hop in, and you know how to get from A to B. A script, a team, a shoot, arriving at a finished film. But that’s not the end. To get from B to C (distribution and an audience watching your films in theaters) is where we “just keep driving” in hopes that we eventually reach a desirable destination.

What often happens is after we have a finished film, we start asking for directions, and as soon as someone says “Yeah! Follow me!” we say, “great!” and follow along. Only arriving at the destination to find that our fuel tank is empty, we have no money for more gas, and the “kind soul” who gave us directions ran away with our film.

“We got distribution” feels like a destination. It isn’t. It’s a road, a path to a desired outcome. Most filmmakers can’t tell the difference, so they say yes to the first positive response they receive in the marketplace.

I have a friend whose recent film premiered at a major festival, won an audience award, had real buzz, and even sold out encore screenings of the film. They have two distribution offers on the table, and they called to ask me for some advice. One is a newer outfit, one has an actual minimum guarantee and a marketing commitment.

By every instinct, this feels like an obvious and emphatic YES!

I told them that the question wasn’t, “which offer do we accept”, but rather, “what outcome are you trying to reach?” Until they answered that, both offers were merely roads pointed at destinations they hadn’t yet chosen.

There’s a huge cost to getting this wrong. The equivalent of promising your family a weekend away at an all-inclusive resort, and instead ending up at a dirty road-side motel with creaky beds and dripping faucets.

I know this mistake because I’ve made it, as I’ve written about before. Films that I expected to be seen by many were seen by few. Films that on paper have entered profitability had too many middle men to pay before we have seen a penny. We said yes to the offer in front of us and called it strategy, then wondered why we didn’t end up where we wanted.

The cruel irony is that a “bad yes” doesn’t feel like a mistake in the moment. It feels like a huge win! But the bill always comes later, and it’s often much larger than we ever could have imagined.

What’s required in this moment is to reverse-engineer from the destination. If the outcome is a “profitable film”, then profitability is the destination, and every decision—every turn, every road, every set of directions from a stranger—gets weighed against one question: does this move us closer to a profitable film?

A film that’s all-in a few hundred thousand dollars needs to do multiples of that at the box office to account for the split with the theaters (50 to 60 percent) and the distributor’s fee (15 to 35 percent), just to get back to zero. A $500,000 box office only nets you a fraction of that:

$500,000 minus 55 percent = $225,000 $225,000 minus 30 percent = $157,500

If your movie cost $100,000, great! If it cost $1,000,000… ouch.

The reality with this example is that most films made for under $1,000,000 gross $200,000 or less at the box office. Not because the films weren’t good, mind you. But, rather, because not enough people came to purchase a ticket to see the film in theaters.

Here’s a test you can do on your film, right now. The “Box Office Mojo Test”:

A distribution deal isn’t inherently good or bad until you define your destination. It’s only good or bad relative to where you’ve decided to go.

The industry has trained filmmakers to treat distribution as the finish line, and offers “Hundreds of Beavers” or “Iron Lung” as the map.

Those films are anomalies (albeit with principles that we can learn from), not replicable plans. You can admire their success, but it’s unlikely that you can reverse-engineer your way to the same outlier outcomes.

The cultural mistake is mistaking exposure and awareness for outcome. A movie that “everyone is talking about” is not a destination, it’s a wish. The market is the reality. What you’re asking for with a “Hundreds of Beavers” approach is a dreamland.

Awareness is not the same as ticket sales. Millions — dare I say billions — of impressions doesn’t mean millions of tickets. Only a small fraction of those who are aware of your film will ever buy. You can spend your entire budget on awareness only to end up with a meager box office that pads the pockets of your partners and leaves you stranded with an empty tank.

Choosing a real destination that honors market realities is an act of self-respect. It’s refusing to follow a distributor whose road leads somewhere other than where you’re going.

As a test on a previous film, we ran a 30-day Kickstarter to see how much reach and leverage we had with our existing audiences. We didn’t devote a huge amount of time to it, it was meant to be a test. We set the goal at $25,000, told our friends and families, our email lists, and our social media connections about the opportunity to support the film.

At the end of the campaign, we’d barely cleared $2,500. One tenth the amount we set, and maybe 0.5 percent of what we actually needed for a proper marketing campaign for the movie. If the market of people who already know, like, and trust us only delivers a $2,500 outcome, what does that mean for the theatrical run for our film?

The $2,500 figure wasn’t a failure, it was the truth, arriving early enough to save us from oversupplying the market.

The reason filmmakers avoid defining the outcome is that the outcome might tell them something they don’t want to hear. Choosing the destination means risking the answer might be “no”, or “not yet”, or “not this way, you need to turn around and try another route”. Most people would rather continue forward than to hear that.

The destination doesn’t just guide your decisions. It tells you the truth about where you really are.

(For fun, I built a little box-office calculator that you can play around with to see if the path you’re on leads to where you want to go. You can find it at https://www.craftsmanfilms.co/calculator/)

Going back to my friend with two offers for their festival film. The conclusion isn’t “they picked the right deal of the two”. It’s that once they named the destination — a profitable film — the offers on the table revealed themselves as inadequate. Those paths got erased from the map.

Everyone tells filmmakers how hard it is, but rarely offer any real path forward through the hard. The better answer is, “Yes, it’s hard. And…here’s how to do it.” You can self-distribute. You can stay truly independent. You can define outcomes on your own terms and build toward it. You don’t need permission from anyone, but if that’s what you’re waiting for, then permission granted!

Stop being the filmmaker who takes the first road that appears. Become the producer (of outcomes) who defines the destination first and uses it to inform the optimal route.

Roads will always show up around you that lead to dead ends. The only protection you have is to know where you’re going, and have a plan for how to get there. That map will save you every time.

Daren Smith is the founder of Craftsman Films and managing member of Producer Fund I. His current film, “Brotherhood: A Cinematic Musical,” is in post-production for an October 2 theatrical release. All artwork for the Producer’s Path series is created by Steven de Groot.

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.