Experiences in Crowdfunding: Robert Greene and “Actress”
by Erik Luers on November 5, 2014 in Interviews
Documentary filmmaker Robert Greene’s latest work, Actress, opens this Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center for a week-long run. A delicate character study that is both a concentrated observation of former television star Brandy Burre (The Wire) and of the role of performance in documentary storytelling, Actress is a remarkable work, recently nominated for a 2014 Gotham Award for Best Documentary. Greene has been very active on social media and at festivals and conferences promoting the now critically-acclaimed film (he was a guest speaker at the Filmmaker Conference at Independent Film Week this year), but the sailing wasn’t always smooth.
After rocking the festival circuit at respected doc institutions like True/False, Hot Docs, and Lincoln Center’s own Art of the Real (securing a strong distributor soon after), Greene ran into some difficulties attempting to obtain affordable music rights to specific selections sampled in the film. What to do? The film was going to be opening on November 7th one way or another, but would it be the original version that had been shown to thousands of people at festivals? With a release date and theater already in tow, Grene took to the world of crowdfunding to raise the necessary funds (and in turn, awareness) needed to deliver the film untruncated. Bypassing Kickstarter and Indiegogo, Greene enlisted the services of Seed&Spark, an organization with a lower but no less respected profile that proved a perfect fit. I spoke with Greene about what led him to crowdfunding, why he chose Seed&Spark, and the humility involved in asking other people for some hard-earned cash. — Erik Luers
IFP: What were your thoughts about crowdfunding beforehand? Had you participated in it before this current foray?
Greene: This was my first time. A lot of people try to get their work crowdfunded upfront before they’ve proven that the movie is worth doing, and that’s misguided a little bit. I’ve had my issues in thinking about the process of crowdfunding. Asking for money upfront always seemed a little bit weird to me, and so I never considered it before now, before it was necessary. I was happy that we were in a different stage of our film’s life when we needed to turn that way. I was happy to be able to say “hey, this movie’s coming out and you may have heard about it and we can tell you it’s a good movie! Help us finish!”
Have much money were you attempting to raise and did you ever consider the possibilities if it didn’t come to fruition? If you weren’t able to raise the intended amount?
Greene: For us, it was a very specific thing. The way the movie has been made is that we’ve paid as we’ve gone along. We dreamed of big things but never expected big things. We didn’t have any money upfront. The production company that I work with, 4th Row Films, paid as they could. They paid for a lot of the music that is already in there. While we were never going to not be able to pay for DCPs, would we be able to get them in some kind of economically responsible way?
The biggest cost we had were these three songs in the movie that we kept attempting to negotiate the cost for. It was absolutely a possibility that we’d have to replace those songs. Obviously the film was still coming out. There wasn’t going to be anything that was going to stop the film from coming out on its release date. We did, however, want to retain what the movie was that got us there in the first place. It was definitely a possibility that we’d have to lose the songs if we couldn’t pay for them. The whole goal was to get the cost down to such a degree so that we’d feel confident going out and asking for help. When we first discussed it, the potential cost was a lot higher, and we just kept working with the record labels to find creative ways to get the costs as low as possible. That’s why it took so long for us to raise the money. We were working to make it as cheap as possible and coming up with a contingency plan in case we had to replace those songs (which is something we never wanted to do).
Why specifically Seed&Spark? Had you looked at other crowdfunding outlets?
Greene: We talked to Kickstarter and they’re great, but we went with Seed&Spark for a few reasons. The tone of the people working there and what the brand means….they’re up-and-coming in a way that felt like it was an alternative way to crowdfund. It’s like trying to sell your book at a mom-and-pop bookseller first and then trying to get into Walmart later. Kickstarter is a big brand, and it didn’t make sense for me to say “I’m kickstarting a film that’s already coming out.” Beyond that, Brandy Burre, the star of the film, myself, and 4th Row Films have several different connections with people who are at Seed&Spark. They are largely run by women and are a little bit more hands-on in terms of their service. I was texting people from the organization to make sure things were going smoothly, etc.etc. That kind of hands-on approach and the fact that they were friends and largely women running the company, all made sense in relation to what the movie is. For whatever reason, it just matched up in my mind and felt better. I’m sure Kickstarter would have done a great job, but I really liked the way Seed & Spark treated us and the way the content of the movie related to the way the company is run.
You were very active throughout the campaign. Some filmmakers will make an introductory video and then leave it at that. Your video laying out what you needed was great, featuring Alex Ross Perry, David Lowery, Sean Price Williams, and others. You then continued to release new videos, updating everyone throughout. When your previous film, Fake It So Real, was at the ReRun theater, you put out videos of filmmakers and programmers like Tom Hall (Executive Director of the Montclair Film Festival) saying “come see Fake It So Real at Rerun this week!” and doing a kind of classic wrestling promo. How crucial was it to have fun with it and to continuously update funders or potential funders on the project?
Greene: Every time I put out a video, I literally came up with the idea about five minutes before! When working on the first video, I thought about filmmakers who try to pull the sincere card. And yet, it is sincere. You sincerely want to make a movie and you sincerely want to get to that next level. A lot of times, however, that sincerity backfires; it’s just not a very fun process to watch. My goal was to make fun of myself and the whole process, because it’s a very hard process that can be very demeaning and ridiculing. It can make you feel really weird. I wouldn’t have made three or four videos if I didn’t come up with three or four ideas to make videos. If someone were to tell me “okay, you need to release one video per week,” my instinct would be to say that that’s probably not right. Unless I have an idea for a video, I’m not going to do it. It’s not clever or entertaining if it’s forced.
While Actress is a movie that has a certain tone that may not necessarily match the tone of the campaign, hopefully it’s an entertaining movie in the end. In that respect, the crowdfunding videos have to be entertaining as well, and my way of being entertaining is to make fun of myself and to look stupid. That was fun. The red dress idea (for one video, Greene donned a red dress memorably worn by Burre in the film) was basically me coming up with that concept, shooting it, and then being done with it within a twenty-five minute span. If someone had come up with that idea for me, I never would have done it. If the videos were just meant to plug in some sort of grid, such as to update it everyday, I never would have done it. The idea seemed funny enough for me to execute as fast as possible. For me, it was very important to be aware of how ridiculous you sound when trying to crowfund. If you’re aware of that and can make that part of the joke, then people can see I’m having fun with this and need the money (or else I wouldn’t be asking). The way we did our promotional videos for Fake It So Real had me embrace the self-aware, self-promotional aspect that wrestling brings to the table. That was the tone we used with Actress as well, even if Actress is such a different kind of movie. Nonetheless, self-aware self-promotion was definitely the way to go. You can’t take yourself too seriously in life and you can’t take yourself too seriously when crowdfunding.
Did that frame of mind also apply to the perks you were giving away as well? Or was that a separate plan of attack?
Greene: We were very specific about the things we were giving away. We sold tickets to the film’s opening weekend at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Our campaign wasn’t: “hey, in some future scenario, you may see a movie….” It was: “this film is coming out from a great distributor, Cinema Guild, and we need to do ‘x’ to see the film that everyone else is excited about and here’s the date to see it if you support us.” Our pitch was a clear pitch. We also have a cool poster, so we added things like that. I’m also going to cut a short out of unused material in the film to share with contributors. You obviously hear that the perks and the prizes are a cool thing, and I totally agree. If I’m going to ask people to spend money on a crowdfunding project, I’d rather they spend it on the backend when the film’s actually done and people can see it.
Brandy Burre and yourself will be at a few of the opening weekend screenings for Q&As. Any other special guests or events lined up for this Friday and Saturday?
Greene: We’re doing Q&As after the seven o’clock screening on Friday and the seven o’clock and nine-thirty screenings on Saturday. Film critic Eric Hynes is moderating on Friday, and Lauren Sandler who recently wrote a piece on the film in The New York Times, will moderate on Saturday. She’s a journalist who has done a lot of writing about being a mother and being a woman in professional environments, so she will bring a different perspective to that screening. We also have Dan Nuxoll of Rooftop Films on hand to moderate our Saturday screening at nine-thirty. Tickets are selling pretty quickly!
Actress opens at the Film Society of Lincoln Center this Friday. Tickets are available here. To take a look at Greene’s crowdfunding campaign for the film, click here.