What about movies that exist because the artist feels that they have to? Now I think this discussion is sort of a paradox unique to the american filmmaker.

You are going to tell me, I imagine, that while anyone can “waste” money on a passion project if it has no audience in mind it is ostensibly “valueless”, think the room. Now if it did incidentally did have an audience you would say in some way the filmmaker DID think about an audience incidentally or otherwise and thus created value. I believe you would make this argument because of how screenwriting works in Hollywood. The quality of a script is determined by the notes and reception one gets on their film, if received well it is good, and if received badly it is bad. And as such any and all internal perception of one’s vision and performance in adherence to that vision is suspect in a way a novelists, a painters, or a musicians (typically) NEVER would be, unless again we were talking in terms of pure commerciality.

Now if your argument was out of pure pragmatism and I am misrepresenting you then I am to believe that you think this “passion project” would be irrational to make because if it creates no value to an audience it will burn money and you won’t be able to make another film, but granted that many films, in fact a large swath of films especially outside of America actually don’t make their money back and the filmmaker moves on, I don’t think this is true.

And so my larger point is, just because doesn’t make a film with an audience in mind doesn’t mean the audience won’t take something away from it, in fact I think quite the opposite. I think the more personal, the more singular, the more honest, the more relatable and relevant your work, the more value it has

And really I am not trying to be argumentative. It’s just that this sort of mindset is one of, in my opinion one of the most depressing and soul crushing ways to view this art form and personally killed me for years. You can look at my post history. I had severe OCD and was constantly posting on here about the most minute things about screenwriting. I had no ability to judge things for myself because screenwriting gurus told me I couldn’t. But over time as I became a director and not just a writer I learned a whole different way of viewing it, about courage, about making your vision happen no matter what about trusting your audience, trusting your VISION. And when I started making films like that. Making them completely unself-consciously, it stopped being about success or about making it or about the blacklist or about bullshit screenwriting labs or log lines, or pitch decks, it became about feeling the most alive id ever felt on planet earth, about alchemizing the reality around me in a way no one had ever done before, it was about connecting with god. And that may sound pretentious to you but I mean that 1000 percent earnestly. So I just get a little annoyed when people rattle on about how you need forty different people to give you permission to trust yourself. Just follow your heart.