Featuring Filmmaking (Actually) Podcast creator Koura Linda

We are back with part three of How To Make A Movie and in this episode, I chat with filmmaker Koura Linda about the pros and cons of making your film independently or taking it to a studio. Koura has over 20 years experience in the film industry, has won multiple awards, and is President of Space Dream Productions. She is the creator and host of the Filmmaking (Actually) podcast an educational podcast that talks through a range of filmmaking advice from project development to navigating the festival circuit. She is also passionate about inspiring the next generation of female filmmakers.

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Or Read the Transcript of Episode 3 Below

McKenzee: Welcome, everybody, to a very exciting collaboration today with filmmaker Koura Linda. Koura is an award-winning director. With over 20 years of experience in the industry. She's president of Space Dream Productions and creator of the Filmmaking Actually podcast. She is also very passionate about supporting female filmmakers. Welcome, Koura. Can you tell me a bit about your experience in the film industry? What got you started and what have you worked on since?

Koura: Sure, that will be a long answer. I actually started working in film about 20 years ago. My interest in film got piqued when I was a kid and a friend of mine. I was a teenager. She worked as a P.A. and she was like, Look, those are those are my feet. You know, standing behind the door or like, I opened that door in that shot. And it was just surreal to me that anybody could just like, could be a part of that world. Hollywood was such another place for me. So that kind of got my attention. And then I thought it would be cool, but I didn't think I would ever do it.

And then I ended up having some opportunities to PA. I did some work as an assistant to an art director. One of my friends asked me to come with her. She was working for this event set up and she was like, Oh, you should, you should come with me. And I was like, Sure. So I came and the art director liked my work, and I ended up working for her for the rest of the summer and for the next ten years.

Over that time, I had worked with her during the summer months, and then during the rest of the year, I started just kind of reaching out, seeing what I could do. I learned camera and wardrobe and hair and makeup hair, just basic stuff. And I actually went to a rigging school. It was a rigging intensive and I learned how to be a set rigger. And in about 2013, I decided that I wanted to really make this my life. And I started putting Space Dream Productions together. And then fast forward to now, and here I am.

McKenzee: Wow. Lots of different things there. And I guess you've got your podcast Filmmaking (Actually). What kind of inspired you to start that?

Koura: On the one hand, originally it was going to be a YouTube channel and that was just kind of exploring like, Hey, maybe I could be a YouTuber. No, I cannot. I'm also noticing we were doing a lot of festivals and I was noticing that a lot of the questions I would get asked on panels were the same, and it felt almost like a press junket, just repeating myself. It'd be so much easier to just be able to say, Oh, I have a podcast episode for that here. And yeah, that's kind of how Filmmaking (Actually) was born.

McKenzee: Now I don't want to linger too long on it, but I think it's important, since we're both very passionate about supporting female filmmakers, that we talk about it a little bit. In your podcast is some of the things that you talk about. Do you think it's different for men as opposed to women? Like I use sort of adjusting the advice you give to compensate for some of the barriers that my female filmmakers might come across?

Koura: I think it's more in how I present the information and what's important than what I'm saying, if that makes sense. Like I hate the phrase “dudebro”, but I know that that communicates exactly a very specific type of male. So A, many filmmaking podcasts are male-centric, but B, they're very dudebro, for lack of a better word. A lot of them are either like armchair critic or they're this like attempt at some sort of erudite high-brow scholastic take on filmmaking as opposed to just talking about, you know, if you want to make a movie, what do you need to do? Like, it's not about like the lens flares and this and that. Or like watching the latest Star Wars episode on Disney Plus and analyzing why it's good or why it's bad. Who the heck are you to see if it's good or bad?

Like so many filmmaking podcasts, at least to me, maybe it's because I'm female, but it feels like a very masculine energy to sort of dominance position this like like. And there’s that's nothing wrong with saying like, I know what to do, but it should be I know what to do because I've done it. You know, if you're a film critic, you should be a film critic because you've made movies and you know what it takes. And I'll just quickly shout out one of my favourite critics is a woman named Danielle Solzman. She does Solzy At The Movies and her film reviews are so just genuine. And she is a filmmaker also. Like, she's speaking from knowing what it takes to do what these filmmakers are doing. The number one feedback that I get on my podcast from women and non-binary people is it's just advice. It's just if you want to make a cake, take a cup of flour and a half a cup of sugar and two eggs and put it in a bowl and mix it up and set the oven and put it in and take it out with the frosting, let it cool first and then eat it and have fun.

Like that's the direction that I take. And I don't know if I take that direction because I'm female or if I take that direction because that education, like educator mentality.

McKenzee: No, I think I, I totally get it. I've definitely been on sets before where, you know, I've needed someone to show me how to do something. And, you know, it's not even necessarily that like a guy would tell you how to do something in a condescending way or anything. But you can definitely feel, I think, a shift in the energy between, yeah, a man telling you how to do something or a woman showing you how to do something. It's kind of it's, you know, it's this weird, non-quantifiable thing that we all just kind of sense.

Let's get into the main topic for today, which is kind of indie filmmaking versus studio filmmaking. In my experience, I haven't really seen a lot of education or people talking about how to really take your film idea from a script and start it in the pre-production process. You know, so you've got a script, you've worked on it, you're really happy with it. You know, how do you know whether to go to a big production company or to make it independently? What are some of the things that you need to think about and how do you make that decision?

Koura: That's a great question. The biggest thing with going to a big studio versus doing something independently is how much ownership and control do you want to have? Because if Marvel Studios is going to make your script, I guarantee you you are probably not going to have any creative control. And for some people, that's fine. You know, they want the pay, they want the paycheck. That's all they care about. And this is how they want to earn their money. And that's fine. There's nothing shameful with a hard day's work and collecting your paycheck for it.

I know the kind of general idea of independent film is that you don't have a lot of money. You don't have a lot of resources that sort of like the the brand of independent. My mom once made a joke. She wrote a little story. She said, “as she looked over the budget, she wished for a little less independence”. And I think that is sort of the stereotypical view of the studio versus the independent. Studios have all the money. Independent filmmakers don't. That's not necessarily actually true. Studios are a machine. It's like going into the Ford assembly line back a hundred years ago and you jump in and put the bag and it goes on the line and boom, you've got a car coming out every couple of minutes or whatever it was. That's what the studios are. An independent film just means that it's not part of that machine.

The difference between the studios and the independent filmmakers is their education level, really. And I don't mean their degrees, I don't mean who went to Harvard Film School. I'm kidding. That doesn't exist. Having a diploma that tells you how to do things, but it's knowing things. Like what parts? Like the hundreds of hours covered in the podcast. But that's really the difference between a studio and an independent world is in the independent world, you're probably going to be dealing with people who maybe have a little bit less experience. Studios are very formulaic. They are run by business people, so their focus is business. Independent filmmakers tend to be very much, I want to stick it to the man. I'm going to tell stories. I'm going to do this, which is great, but you have to have a little bit of that business acumen because it is a business and people are giving you millions of dollars and they're not just giving you millions of dollars to light on fire and dance around. It's to make a movie that they want to hopefully get their money back on. So for hundreds of thousands of dollars or whatever, $5.

Looking at that studio versus independent. There's so many pieces to it. I don't think there is a pat answer. I think that it depends on the filmmaker. It depends on the person's involvement. Are they trying to direct this piece, in which case do not go after a studio because they will take you to the curb faster than next Sunday? Is it are you a writer or do you just want the script made? Are you an actor who's trying to star in it? Like, who are you and what do you want from the world? Is probably the question to ask. And then why can't you do it independently? What? Like someone's going to have to do the work of raising the money, of putting the budget together, of casting it, of screwing it up, scheduling it, all of that stuff. Like either be willing to do the work or be willing to sell it to somebody who's going to do the work and know that they're going to do the work. So that's going to come out of how much money that they're paying you.

The best example I can think of is that old children's book, The Little Red Hen, the one that wants some bread. So she asks around the farm animals, you know, who wants bread? And everybody's like, Oh, I do, I do. And she's like, Cool, Who wants to help me plant this wheat? And everyone's like, or like, goes back in those little stalls and, you know, so she plants the wheat and it's, you know, who's going to help me weed and water the wheat. So she goes out there, you know, and so she does, she weeds it and grows it and harvests it every step of the way. She's like, who wants to help me harvest it? Who wants to help me grind the wheat on the wheat stone? Who wants to help me, you know, needs the bread, bake the dough, heat up the oven, get it started, bake the bread, too. And then you know, she does all the work and then she's like, Who wants to help me eat the bread? And all of a sudden, all the farm animals are like I do. And she's like, Hold up. And she goes back over all the work she did, and she's like, None of you were here when I was planting and harvesting and cutting. And no, you don't get to skip the work and eat the bread. You want the bread. You got to be part of the work. And I think that is the most powerful story for anyone who wants to work in film because that beautiful, hot, fluffy, crispy, crusty, amazing loaf of bread was made by someone who knew what they were doing or who spent a lot of time and energy figuring it out and spent a lot of work growing that organic wheat, getting that water and needing the dough and powdering the psyche, all of that work.

So when you have an amazing film that rockets to stardom, it gets picked up by festivals, it's made by somebody or somebody who put their blood, sweat and tears in and did everything to get there. And depending on what you want and where you fall on that line, you just get handed a hot piece of bread. You may have to start with digging dirt and finding the seeds to put it in the ground.

There's my really long answer.

McKenzee: Yeah. Lots of things to think about. So my next question is a kind of about production, like studio productions specifically. I think, you know, how much sort of pre-preparation should you do before pitching to a big company? Do you just need an idea or do you need to have like the script fully fleshed out, like an idea of a budget, any crew attached? Like how much sort of do you need pre-prepped before you go into pitch your idea?

Koura: It depends on the company. It depends on, first of all, most places don't take unsolicited scripts. They just don't. You have to have an agent. You have to have somebody representing you, somebody up at that meeting as far as having a cast or crew attached, unless they are established names like if you're going to come in and you're like, you know, I've got Steven Spielberg and Leonardo DiCaprio attached, they're going to be like, Great! If you're like, You know, I've got my best friend from film school and my little sister are attached. They're going to be like, No, you don't. Like if we're taking this, we are not taking that part and it sucks. Excuse me, because sometimes your little sister or your friend from film school is literally the perfect person for that role or that job.

But a big studio's going to want to work with people that they know and they're going to want to work with people that fit their formula of what they think is going to bring in money at the box office. And it's really funny to me because, in my opinion, they don't actually understand anything. Witness the fact that, like if I have, I mean, especially after Top Gun: Maverick, but if I have Tom Cruise attached to a project, every door in the universe would open for me. But what's funny is that Tom Cruise has been in some movies that didn’t do so well so it had nothing to do with the fact that he's Tom Cruise. So not to do with the fact that maybe it wasn't as big of a blockbuster hit or it was a little more niche of a topic, or it was a little more not for general audiences as some other films could have been. And then you look at a movie like Top Gun: Maverick, which was pretty much a masterpiece. I mean, everything about it from story to acting to sound editing, the filming, the stunts and everything about it, was spectacular. That has to do with him as a producer, but it doesn't have to do with the name Tom Cruise, because the last Tom Cruise movie that came out didn't make that much money.

The studios don't understand that there's more that sells a movie ticket than someone's name. Someone's name is going to sell you a certain number of tickets, but it's going to catapult above to that hundreds of millions of dollars range. When it's a good story, when it's a good film, when people enjoy it, when it is entertaining, it speaks to people. I mean, no one expected Black Panther to make $1,000,000,000. But a studio is going to look at checkboxes. Who's attached? What's your budget? Why is that your budget? They're going to tell you your budget is too high without even looking at your script. They're just going to look at the names you have and the dollar value and say no, which makes absolutely no sense.

No other business operates like that. You know, if you walk into a bakery and you tell them, I want a wedding cake, I'll give you $100. But it has to be organic and made from scratch. And with free-range eggs and with vegan, low glycemic dairy free and a five tier wedding cake, the baker would be like, Are you nuts? It's going to cost me more than $100 just to buy that stuff! In the film industry, if that Baker was an independent filmmaker or the distributor or whatever would tell them, well, that's not my problem. You need to figure out how to do it for $100, because I'm not going to be able to sell it for more than $10.

I don't know any studio that takes ideas at this point. I do know studios that take scripts like actually finished screenplays. You can get those repped by a literary agent. You can have those sold like optioned. When a script gets optioned, you may lose some of the writing credit. Somebody else may come in and rewrite it. You may not lose the writing credit, but they may do a ton of rewrites. What one script we optioned once was a short film. We changed one tiny, tiny piece just because the location we were in, we had to move like how somebody came around the corner or something like that. That's the only script we ever just shot, as is every other script. It's majorly rewritten. If not completely rewritten. A big studio is going to do that.

The other thing to have is a finished film. Anything in the middle between the script and a finished film. I don't necessarily know how necessary it is to have a budget and a breakdown and a pitch deck and cast and crew attached and potentially things like that could possibly help. But depending on the studio they may just tell you, Great, make it and we'll tell you if we want to, because all those Netflix original quote unquote, Amazon original, those are at Netflix. Most of them were finished films made by an independent producer that Netflix bought and slapped their name across it.

McKenzee: Yeah, it's yeah, it's really interesting. Like, yeah, I don't know. I feel like I don't hear a lot of people talk about that whole process. And it just kind of like happens in the background and no one really talks about it, which is why we're doing this interview because it's yeah, it's really good to get some of this information. I guess is there a middle ground between… and this may vary obviously because I'm in Australia and you're in the US, but is there a middle ground between those like huge studios Netflix, Disney's Warner Brothers, etc. and you know, independent, completely going out on your own? Is there a company that you can go to somewhere in the middle there that you might have a little bit more success with getting support or taking your script to, to get made? Then, you know, if you really don't want to go out there on your own, but you can't really take it to a studio or is this somewhere else you can go?

Koura: That's a great question also. There is a lot of middle-range independent studios that are like Warner Brothers, Disney, Sony, Paramount, whatever, which I think at the end of the day, they're all actually owned by like there's only like two or three different studios that they just own all of them. I don't know if that's a film studio, but like there's the Geena Davis Institute, which has Geena Davis’, and she does a lot to support women, especially there's I don't know if it's actually a production company.

I know that Zoe Deschenal. I think she may have sold it, but she had a company years ago called Hello Giggles. There's Corbin Bernsen, the actor from L.A. Law and the TV show Psych. He has a production company that largely does like faith-based projects. There's a lot and I don't I'm not saying that any of those are more accessible than the others. I guess it comes down to what are you trying to do with the project? Meaning, do you want to make it? Do you want to be the producer? Do you want to be the director? Do you just want to be the writer? Do you just want to sell it? In which case, find an agent that will go out and sell your script.

So there's a platform called InkTip, which is a screenwriting platform where you can list your script to be optioned. We've actually optioned a couple of projects from them. One of our features in post right now, we got three attempts. If you're just trying to be a screenwriter and get your film made that way, you should probably have an agent or somebody helping you to do that because they're going to form those connections at any level.

McKenzee: And I think, yes, there’s definitely companies like that in Australia too. For anyone who reads me in Australia.

Koura: Inked Up, maybe international, because I know the last script reaction was from a writer in Canada.

McKenzee: Okay, yeah. And sometimes independent film can be sort of synonymous with crowdfunding. A lot of people associate those two together. Would you recommend that filmmakers go down this route? Do you think this is a good do you think that crowdfunding is worth it basically?

Koura: I have run several successful crowdfunding campaigns. It's a very personal choice for the filmmaker, and it has to not be, Oh my God, give me money like that is not how you crowdfund. Crowdfunding is a business move. It's a marketing strategy. There is a free class at Seed and Spark Online. It is like an 11 module class. It takes like maybe an hour and a half to get through all the modules if you just play through them. I've taken it twice. It's completely free. It teaches you everything you need to know about crowdfunding and a little bit about marketing. And you, any filmmaker should really take that class and then decide if crowdfunding is right for them.

McKenzee: Yeah, great. And I guess finally you sort of touched on it a little bit, but in your experience, I guess from the films that you've made or worked on, what was the easiest way to make a film? Was it just going out independently on your own or was it going through a studio?

Koura: Unfortunately, if you want the bread at the end of the day, unless you know a farmer with a wheat field, the easiest way to do it is to go get yourself some wheat seeds and dig the dirt, put the seeds in and plant, do the water, get educated. I mean, the very the very first film, what I did was like full-scale SAG project was names on the wall. It was independent, but as a producer it was a massive, massive, massive learning curve in any way, every way imaginable. There is nothing more empowering than not needing permission and giving yourself the space and faith to do it. I don't mean faith like religious. I mean faith in yourself. Just having the “I am a filmmaker” and this is what I'm doing. I can do this.

And I will say that for your very first film, Like you want to lean into the expression A rising tide lifts all ships. So you want to find people whose boat is at the same water level as yours, and you want to work together to rights. Because if you're trying to go after a Steven Spielberg and be like, You should direct my movie, he has no right. Maybe you have the best movie in the world, but you need to have something to show for it. You need to have a resume, have a portfolio, and the way you get that is by doing it, by making movies, by showing people that you know what you're doing by learning. And unfortunately, a film school degree is not the same thing as films that experience. And sometimes, in my opinion, it can actually inhibit your growth because you think you know it all now and it shuts off your mind from learning more. And I work with many film school graduates and many non-film school graduates to come to that conclusion. So I think the most powerful thing you can do is find people at your level network with them.

And, you know, don't look for some union cinematographer with all of their own gear to come shoot your little film for free, figure out how to shoot it yourself, Find someone who just graduated, find someone who just bought a new camera and they need material with it. Find someone who, like you, needs to grow and build each other up to where now you all have this amazing piece that you created together that everybody can use for their reel, that they can use for pitch meetings we can use to get an agent. Don't expect a professional to help you for free when you're trying to learn how to become a professional and realize that that professional got there through a lot of hard work.

In this day and age, at least in the independent film world, very few people just fell into success pretty much everyone I know has worked their tail off to get to where they are, and that's how you get there is by working really hard. Hope that helps.

McKenzee: Yeah. No, no this has been great. That was my last question. I was just going to ask you where people can listen to your podcast.

Koura: So we try to make the podcast as accessible as possible. So it is through Anchor, which then Auto distributes it to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google, all the podcast platforms without lawmaking actually making. Actually as a podcast, if you're somebody who prefers an audio along with captions, it's available on YouTube and it's just on our Space Dream Productions YouTube channel, thats Space Dream Productions with an ‘s’ and there's a playlist of all of our videos.

And then if you are someone who prefers to read content instead, we've been transcribing all the episodes and those that what's on our website is the blog version. You can also click through to the YouTube video and directly to the podcast link through the blog posts.

McKenzee: Great. Well, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it and I've learned a lot.

Koura: It's my like tagline or whatever is that money is not independent filmmakers problems, it's knowledge. There's so many talented people out there that just need that knowledge and skill to go with their passion and ingenuity and that's that.

McKenzee: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And of course, you can check out the New Filmmakers Guide, which is a series that I'm currently writing here on The Women's Direction blog, all about the filmmaking experience from someone who is still pretty fresh in the industry. We also do film reviews, featured posts, and a whole bunch more. Go check it out www.thewomensdirection.com to see more.