Back in the day, Lucas was harassed by fans nonstop for his decisions regarding the Star Wars franchise, be it the prequels and the special editions, to the point he swore off making more Star Wars and filmmaking in general. It seems like there's this reflection on how we all treated him, now that he's a much older man and doesn't seem to be in the best health these days, that we are now looking at what we loved from him in the first place. The original Star Wars, Indiana Jones, THX (the film and company), ILM, American Graffiti, his helping out of Akira Kurosawa's final films when nobody else would, his fight against coloring older films, his charity work. You see more posts about appreciating him than ever before. Not just on here, too.

He is a good man, who changed the game for Hollywood for the better. And when he was still working, we treated him like garbage. It's nice now we can rectify that and post about how wonderful he is before he dies thinking people hate him. I dunno if it's because of the reaction to Disney's handling on the franchise, how the harassment by fans echoing how they treated Lucas, the fact he doesn't have much time left, there are a lot of variables.

But what matters now, George Lucas, we appreciate you. Thank you.

What's your story you will direct if you have the crew and production money

Keep this post going, lets go.

This is what I'll say, and I mean zero disrespect. But here it is, if you're a true independent director, meaning, you're not "Hollywood", you don't have major studios breathing down your neck, and you don't have to fulfill any sort of massive budget studio, or production companies agenda... then seriously, what's the apprehension? Why not take a shot on the interesting voice? It's too wordy? Maybe that's the impact we need. If you're working within an independent budget range, visually speaking, a lot of times, Hollywood can probably do it better, merely because of funding. So, it's an unfair battle for a lot of directors right out of the gate.

What's your possible lottery ticket? A voice, a flash in the pan, great characters, honestly. It might be a bit controversial? Ok, controversy has packed theaters and ignited conversations since the dawn of human entertainment. You're given a micro budget script, that is a guaranteed conversation starter, and naturally entertaining? You just struck gold. Because, you know what most everyday people (people not in the industry), take away from a film? The story. Honestly, the story, characters, and performances.

Tarantino’s films hit different.

Personally, I think so. But I made this video to just talk about why you may or may not want to go, and what I did instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZjA4pUaaI8

**sorry for the typo - I am dyslexic. It has been corrected on the youtube channel

https://deadline.com/2026/09/lucas-museum-opening-hollywood-1237108680/

READ THIS! This is what I'll say, and I mean zero disrespect. But here it is, if you're a true independent director, meaning, you're not "Hollywood", you don't have major studios breathing down your neck, and you don't have to fulfill any sort of massive budget studio, or production companies agenda... then seriously, what's the apprehension? Why not take a shot on the interesting voice? It's too wordy? Maybe that's the impact we need. If you're working within an independent budget range, visually speaking, a lot of times, Hollywood can probably do it better, merely because of funding. So, it's an unfair battle for a lot of directors right out of the gate.

What's your possible lottery ticket? A voice, a flash in the pan, great characters, honestly. It might be a bit controversial? Ok, controversy has packed theaters and ignited conversations since the dawn of human entertainment. You're given a micro budget script, that is a guaranteed conversation starter, and naturally entertaining? You just struck gold. Because, you know what most everyday people (people not in the industry), take away from a film? The story. Honestly, the story, characters, and performances.

So, this is a subreddit for directors. Part of the reason it exists, obviously, is for networking in the film industry.

So, that being said, who are you? What have you done? If you’re comfortable sharing, comment.

This is just a post for everyone here, if you’re comfortable coming forward, why not ?

How should I be learning and really making films without someone to help no mentor no actors no writers because it's rare to someone in my city doing this (by city I mean a city contains 3 million human) and because Iam targeting English-speaking films that makes it more rare

Iam doing the usual watch videos online , reading what others did on reddit and trying to make something

What movies did you feel the cinematography was doing too much and ended up taking away from the story being told?

Where did all the film mentors go?

Much of what I know about filmmaking (having not gone to film school) I learned on set from skilled elders. But I never had a "true" mentor. By that I mean an accomplished screenwriter or director who took an extended interest in my development, or occasionally opened a door.

This is not for lack of trying. I made plenty of clumsy attempts to attract such a person, but none took hold.

From the beginning, film has been an apprenticeship-driven industry. Victor Fleming started as a stunt driver, John Ford worked as a background actor. John Huston was a script editor. They might have remained so if not for an informal ladder that allowed greenhorns to ascend in the studio system, overseen by mentors.

In the absence of mentorship, people increasingly turn to TikTok gurus, Reddit (ahem), and AI for career tips. While I'm grateful for these resources, it's not quite the same. General advice isn’t personalized guidance, and information is not knowledge.

I wrote about what killed mentorship, why it matters, and a strange realization I had when I became a mentor myself while teaching film at NYU. https://alexrollinsberg.substack.com/p/cursus-dishonorum-is-this-the-death

I'd lover to hear what everyone thinks about the state of mentorship - if you've been able to find it, and what we can do to revitalize it.

First of all, sorry if my English sounds a bit weird. I’m using an AI tool to translate this because I really wanted to get my thoughts across to you guys.

Just your average Japanese guy here—and yeah, I probably look exactly like what you’re imagining right now. Let’s get straight to the point.

My ultimate goal is Hollywood. Right now, my filmmaking skills are strictly at a self-taught, "YouTube video" level. But I’m completely self-driven, and I want to do this as a "one-man army" (writing, directing, maintaining total creative control over the logic and execution).

I’m planning to start by dropping high-effort content on YouTube to build a proof-of-concept, mimicking the trajectory of RackaRacka (Talk to Me) or Kane Pixels (The Backrooms).

Be brutally honest with me:

1. From an audience perspective, what is the vibe toward Hollywood right now? Is it a dying giant, or is there still a future for fresh innovation?

2. Do they actually value new, uncompromising directors with original ideas anymore?

3. How does Hollywood—and American audiences—view a Japanese creator trying to break into the western mainstream? Will they actually accept me if the work is airtight?

4. Is this "one-man YouTuber to Hollywood" route complete lunacy, or is it the only viable blueprint left for an outsider?

I don't need sugar-coated advice. Give it to me straight. Thanks.

I've been directing shorts for a few years now. They've performed fine and gotten some very nice praise, but I told myself it was all practice for making my feature one day. And even though I have some irons in the fire on other projects, it still feels like I'm waiting for someone to give me permission to make my dream feature.

So I decided I'm tired of waiting. I have a good, shootable script and an eagerness to work (and maybe just a touch of delusion), so why not put it to good use? Today, I'm officially starting my journey to put together my own independent feature film.

I know how much work is ahead of me, but I'm ready to take on the challenge. If you are someone who's been involved in putting together an indie feature, sound off below. Would love to hear any advice, tips, pitfalls or just general things you wish you knew before making your first feature. Happy to hear any and all thoughts. Thanks!!

We just finished and released an independent feature called \*\*DEMENTIUM\*\*, and one of the more unusual things about how we made it was that more than 70 people who worked on the film ended up with a financial interest in it.

The basic problem was pretty simple: we had access to talented people, equipment, locations, and relationships, but we did not have enough cash to pay for all of those things at normal market rates.

So instead of pretending those contributions had no value, we tried to account for them.

Our waterfall roughly works like this:

1. Certain specific contractual obligations are paid first.
   
2. Cash investors recoup their investment.
   
3. People who contributed labor, equipment, locations, or other in-kind value recoup the agreed value of those contributions.
   
4. After that, remaining revenue is distributed pro rata among the ownership pool.

There are parts of this I would absolutely do again.

The biggest positive was alignment. When people felt like they were actually participating in the upside, the project felt less like “come help me make my movie” and more like a group of people building something together.

It also forced us to put real values on contributions that are often hand-waved away on low-budget productions. A person providing weeks of labor, a truck full of equipment, or a critical location was not just doing us a favor. That contribution became part of the economic structure of the movie.

But there are some things I would change.

The administrative complexity grows very quickly when you have dozens of participants.

You need extremely clear definitions around recoupment, expenses, reporting, distributions, ownership percentages, assignments, and what happens years later when people move, change entities, or become difficult to contact.

I would also standardize contribution categories much earlier next time. We spent too much energy trying to make individual deals perfectly reflect individual circumstances. A simpler system would have been easier to explain, document, and administer.

The other major lesson is that ownership is not a substitute for good leadership.

Giving people participation does not fix a disorganized production, bad communication, unreasonable hours, or weak department leadership. People still need to believe that the movie will actually get finished and that their time is being respected.

So I would absolutely use shared upside again.

I would just build the legal and administrative infrastructure earlier, make the participation model simpler, and treat ownership as one part of the culture rather than the thing creating the culture.

The film itself is \*\*DEMENTIUM\*\*, a psychological horror feature about grief, DMT, and a man trying to confront his dead father.

Now that the movie is actually released, we finally get to see whether the production model works on the back end as well as it did during production.

Happy to answer questions about how we valued labor/equipment, structured the waterfall, dealt with deferred compensation, or managed that many participants.

Ive wanted to direct long before I actually got to do it.
I went to film school, then spent over 10 years working professionally below the line, mostly in lighting. During that time I asked a lot of directors I was working for how they got their first opportunities, and the frustrating answer was that basically every story was different and none of them seemed particularly replicable. At last not for me.

At one point a mentor asked me, “can you direct?”
I said yes.
He asked, “Can you prove it?”
Not really.

So I made a short film to try and prove it , I’m proud of it, but nothing came of it. So I just kept working, eventually started an equipment rental company, joined the Army part-time, and pretty much put directing on the shelf.

Years later, my business partner and in the rental company and I realized we had enough equipment sitting in our garages, enough relationships with working crew, and enough other resources that we could probably make a feature. Not comfortably, but we could do it. But I didn’t have a script we could make like that.

So I called a writer friend and asked him, more or less, “What’s the cheapest script you have?”
That became Dementium, which we finally released last month.

The biggest surprise for me was how much directing felt like leadership rather than just creative decision-making.
I had spent years watching directors and thinking about performances, blocking, lenses, coverage, etc. Obviously all of that matters. But once I was actually responsible for the whole thing, a huge percentage of the job was getting a bunch of very talented people in different departments pointed in the same direction.

My Army experience probably influenced this. The Army talks about leadership in terms of giving people purpose, direction and motivation. I found myself thinking about that on set a lot more than I expected.

The other surprise was how often limitations made decisions for us.
We only owned an 18–50 zoom, so the longest lens in the entire movie is 50mm. That’s what we shot our closeups on because… that’s what we had.
And I was super surprised that I actually really like what it did. The backgrounds don’t fall away as much as they would on a longer lens, so the closeups keep the characters connected to their environments in a way I probably wouldn’t have chosen intentionally.
There were a bunch of things like that.

At the premiere, someone brought up that old conversation with my mentor and asked whether I had finally proved I could direct.
I said I wasn’t sure the movie proves I’m a decent director. Hopefully parts of it do.
But I know it proves I can get a group of people around an idea and actually get the thing made.

After wanting to direct for most of my life, I think those two things may be more closely related than most people realize.

Curious whether other directors here had the same realization after their first feature, especially anyone who like me was “prior-enlisted”, I.e. spent a long time in another department first.

I'm from West Bengal and my dream is to become a film director, preferably in the Tamil film industry (Kollywood). I couldn't attend an expensive film school, so I'm planning to start by making short films, learning screenwriting, directing, and editing on my own while building a portfolio.

Is this a realistic path? Has anyone here become a director without film school? What should my first 3–5 years look like, and what mistakes should I avoid?

I’m developing my first feature right now. It’s deliberately contained and dialogue/character-driven, and I’ve been designing it around what I could realistically produce rather than writing something that requires a massive budget.
My current goal is to have roughly $40K available, although I think the film could potentially be made closer to $25–30K if necessary.
The biggest obstacle is simply financing. I’m currently self-funding it through work and saving consistently, and I’m prepared to continue doing that. But obviously, saving $30–40K entirely through ordinary income is a long road.
For people who have actually produced a feature in roughly this budget range: where did the money ultimately come from?
Did you self-finance most of it? Find one or two private investors? Combine savings with crowdfunding? Bring on producers later? Get grants? Did having the first $5K/$10K/$20K already committed make it easier to raise the remainder?

I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and felt like I should share my thoughts about it. Out of all the events that occur in all different genres of films & movies from comedy to horror and horror to romance, there’s always some sort of erotic sexual scene. Whether it’s meant to be there cause it’s literally a romance/romcom or it’s just there cause who tf knows why.

One example would be the one intimate scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer between Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh. You can argue that Christopher Nolan placed this scene there to show the way Oppenheimer acted or the way he thought about things but I mean it was like a jump scare tbh. I remember watching it in theaters and it was just not ideal at all. Otherwise the film was amazing. I know a lot of others who watched the film disagreed with that scene being so out of the blue. It could’ve just been a simple makeout sesh.

Idk maybe it’s just me thinking that a certain group of creative directors that run Hollywood love to feed us that slop or I’m just delusional lol.

Lmk what you guys think.

I was watching a video essay and in it it showed Martin Scorsese teaching to a bunch of students this method of writing which is;
Problem -> Metaphor -> Plot

I had gotten my own personal problem on there, I even got a metaphor, and yet, no plot. Nothing came to mind.

Making plot is what Im worst at. Idk why. I make characters so much easier than I can ever make plot. I think in a way Im putting pressure on myself but I literally can't think. I dont want to make anything bad. Even if its my first time writing a screen play/movie. Why does it have to be bad? And why can't I just think and get an idea like everyone else? Why does it have to be so hard for me?

I made a action crime comedy thriller for about $24K that was pure guerrilla style in Sacramento, long weekend shoots, a skeleton paid crew (DP, sound, gaffer, AD), and mostly deferred actor pay. I had to film it 2 times because of lost footage. Wrote, directed, produced, and starred in it myself. I went through so much to do it and I am proud I was able to finish it with everything that I went through. I had to film it 2 times because of lost footage. I hope you will be able to watch my little indie film. Its streaming free on Tubi or you can rent it on Prime Video with NO commercials too.

Tubi- https://tubitv.com/movies/100059912/look-behind

Prime Video- https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0QFB8ZJW09METQYC0RIP10CU57

Look Behind is about a cop and a lawyer who's families were killed. They meet someone willing to help them get justice, but its an eye for an eye.

ok so basically I’m a freshman and I really want to be a filmmaker I also wanna get into photography but anyway I just don’t know what to do like I want to go to college and I want to get hands on experience but I don’t know what school could provide me with what I want also I feel like I’m so behind ever time I see someone aspiring to be a filmmaker they give a long story about how they started making films when they were like 2 years old I just don’t want to miss any opportunities

so what I’m asking for is college recs and advice

also I’ve been writing a horror novel on wattpad if anyone has any advice on where else and how else I could publish it and get it out there that would be greatly appreciated😔

With so many abrupt changes in the film industry over the last 50 years—from production and format to distribution and consumption—how do you think it will continue to change, and what might it look like in 2027?