Sure, it’s great to keep an eye on your long-term goal. But, as your parents are doubtless constantly reminding you, you need a job far more immediately. Unless you intend to live in their basement.

But what kind of job? Keeping with our functional approach, let’s think for a minute about what a job can give you:

1. Money
2. Experience
3. Connections
4. Credibility

Let’s look at each of those a bit more in turn:

1. Money

Unless you were born with an extensive trust fund (in which case, come talk to me about investing in movies), you’re going to need to make money to pay for your life. The tradeoff, though, tends to be that as you maximize how much you earn in any given job, you tend to minimize your returns in the other three categories. Make sure any potential gig pays well enough to cover low-cost essentials (an apartment shared with roommates, vodka that comes in plastic bottles, etc.), or you won’t be able to sustain yourself moving forward. Then, beyond that, focus more on the intangibles you can get out of a position, at least in the near term.

2. Experience

Looking back to the three-leg theory of filmmaking, there’s a fair amount of technical expertise involved in aligning each leg. If it’s raising money, are you familiar with PPMs, pitching investors, operating agreements, or the laws regarding accredited investors? Or, if it’s attaching cast, do you know how to make offers, draft deal memos, or figure out the finer points of a most-favored-nations deal?

And, of course, especially if you’re looking to produce or direct, would you actually be able to make a great film after the three legs are in place? Are you familiar with tech scouting, storyboarding, or how a shoot day runs?

There’s a lot of stuff to learn, and you can probably only pick it up by doing. So, ideally, a job helps you start filling the void in some area of your expertise.

3. Connections

All three legs of a film have at least one thing in common: getting them in place is far easier with an excellent Rolodex.

On the money side, for example, there’s a old adage that investors pick jockeys, not horses – they’re betting on you as much as on the project. Which means a cold-call is nearly always doomed to fail. Whereas a pitch to someone who knows you, who’s been actively following your career, and who is waiting for you to put something exciting in front of them, has an incalculable leg up.

A job, then, is a great way to start building your network. Perhaps it gives you the chance to meet agents, established producers, writers with interesting spec scripts, or entertainment bankers. All people you’ll need to know eventually. And all people you can meet far more easily if you’re in the context of an established company.

4. Credibility

People are like sheep – they love to follow the flock. If a number of name actors are attached to a film already, for example, it becomes increasingly easy to bring in more.

Eventually, to direct, write, or produce, you’ll need a lot of different people to place bets behind you. And the more you can provide social proof, evidence that other people have already bet on you in the past, the easier that will be.

That’s one more thing a job can potentially provide – a stamp on your resume indicating you’ve already been picked as smart and savvy by a decision-maker at some organization.

Here, too, there’s often a tradeoff. Working at a small literary agency, for example, you’d likely get much more hands-on experience, get to build many more outside relationships directly. Whereas working at CAA might leave you literally delivering mail, but provides a far more impressive piece of resume padding.

So, how to balance those four factors? And what kinds of jobs, specifically? In our next several posts, we’ll look at a number of possibilities, and the upsides and downsides of each, through the lens of those four factors.

So, here we go. The most important, though possibly most obvious, thing I can tell you about making movies:

Essentially, getting an indie film – or really, any film – made is building a three-legged stool:

You need a good script. You need a strong cast. And you need the money.

Once you have those three things, you can start production.

And, interestingly, if you have two of those things, the third quickly falls into place.

Get a script and attach some name actors, and you can easily raise the money.

Get the money and that same script, and suddenly actors (and their agents) will come on board.

The challenge, then, is when you have only one of those three legs. When you have, say, just the script. That’s the position that most young directors are in – they have a script, perhaps even a very good script. But they don’t have either financing or stars.

At which point, putting together the film becomes a giant game of chicken. You have to bullshit the cast about the money, and the money about the cast, and then hope it all comes together.

It works, sort of, sometimes. But not consistently or repeatably. So, while next up, we’ll be looking at jobs – and at what you should be trying to get out of them – keep in mind that, atop the list, is developing the ability to bring those three legs together on film after film. Because if you can do that, congratulations: you have a career.

Any doctor in the US became a doctor in roughly the same way: pre-med coursework in college, then med school, boards, internship, residency, maybe a fellowship.

But any two directors or producers or screenwriters likely took completely divergent career paths to their current jobs.

Which, essentially, is both the good and bad news.

On the plus side, in a world like film, you can get where you want to be much sooner. There’s no way to circumvent a decade of medical training, but a lot of brilliant features are made by early 20-somethings.

On the down side, you can also end up never getting to where you want to be at all. While the vast majority of med school grads go on to practice medicine, the majority of film school attendees never make even a first feature film, much less a career’s worth.

So, in such a nebulous world, how do you carve out a plan?

First, you need to look at what it takes to get a movie made. In the next post, I’ll lay out the three-leg stool theory of greenlighting films. Which, in short, says there are three things you need to somehow line up on every single project you do if you want to roll camera.

Then, you need to look at potential jobs as ways to build your experience with and access to each of those three legs. It’s a functional approach, and one that may lead you to jump around from company to company, job type to job type. And it also may dictate that you should be spending nearly as much time and energy pursuing side projects and networking opportunities.

But, first and foremost, you need to accept that figuring it all out is your responsibility. There isn’t a straight line you can default to, or a job you can take now that will take you to where you want to be just by putting your head down and working hard. Instead, you need to think, to carve out a path of your own, with the end in mind, and with savvy decision-making along the way.

The first thing I ask young film people is: if you could wave a magic wand, and be doing anything in the film world right now, what would it be?

Writing? Directing? Producing? DP’ing?

A surprising number have absolutely no idea.

Which makes things very easy. As the Cheshire Cat observed, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.

If you don’t know what you want, I don’t know what I can do to help you. The only advice I’d have in that case would be to get on any sets you can (short films, student films, gonzo porn) in any capacity you can (PA, POC, fluffer), and then watch and listen and watch some more. Get a sense of how films work. Of what the jobs are. And then come back here. [Or don’t. I’m not your mom.]

This guide, then, is for people who already know what they want. Say, you want to direct features. And the purpose is simple: get you actually doing that job, in a sustainable, career way, as quickly as possible.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been deluged by emails from young filmmakers, direct out of film school or college, looking for guidance as they try to figure out their next steps.

And while I don’t know how helpful what I’ve passed along to them has actually been, I figured I’d replicate it here nonetheless, in case it might be at least somewhat useful to you readers, or to folks you know.

So, coming up, a Making Movies series of posts. Let’s get to it.

With Cyan’s focus on newer films, it seems I totally forgot to hype an older one: After the Cup: The Sons of Sakhnin United, a documentary for which I spent several months in the far north of Israel as on-set producer, and that’s currently in theaters in New York and Los Angeles.

While the film premiered a couple of years back at the Tribeca Film Festival, footage licensing and internal politics held up the theatrical release, until now. But, despite the delay, If you live in New York or LA, it’s certainly worth checking out. (If you live elsewhere, you can add it to your Netflix queue.)

The film follows a mixed Arab / Jewish soccer team, on its way through winning the Israeli national cup, and then representing Israel on the UEFA world tour. Essentially, it’s about how sport can bring us together – but also about how it can still leave us very far apart.

Given the way profits flow on a film like this after it’s been sold to a distributor, I’m unlikely to see a further penny of your ticket price (or your Netflix subscription), so I can say this in an at least relatively unbiased way: this is a good, thought-provoking film that’s worth your time and attention. Check it out.

“SOMEONE HAS TO MAKE THE SCENE DRAMATIC. IT IS NOT THE ACTORS JOB (THE ACTORS JOB IS TO BE TRUTHFUL). IT IS NOT THE DIRECTORS JOB. HIS OR HER JOB IS TO FILM IT STRAIGHTFORWARDLY AND REMIND THE ACTORS TO TALK FAST. IT IS YOUR JOB.”
– David Mamet, from a must-read memo to the writers of The Unit.

While I was at Sundance, a friend pointed out that there seemed to be a shortage of great indie comedies in the last couple of years.

By my estimation, though, that isn’t quite true. Instead, I’d say there seems to have been a shortage of great indie films in general.

The difference is, if you make a dramatic film, and it doesn’t quite work, the audience leaves thinking, “maybe I didn’t get that.”

And if you make a comedy, and it doesn’t quite work, the audience leaves thinking, “I got that, and it sucked.”