The Unglamorous Financial Realities of 5 Indie Filmmakers

In February 2025, while on the Oscars trail in support of his film The Brutalist, director Brady Corbet made headlines when he revealed on WTF With Marc Maron that he’d “made zero dollars” from his work on the film. While independent movies like The Brutalist aren’t known for being lucrative cashcows for their filmmakers, Corbet’s candor still served as a wake-up call. The Brutalist was a hit — a festival and awards darling that received a nationwide theatrical release in IMAX — and if a movie this successful on paper was a financial wash for its director, how could anyone in this industry possibly be making ends meet?

With some exceptions, like 2026’s surprise hits Obsession and Backrooms, this is a common story for independent filmmakers. Despite outward appearances of glamour during festival premieres, award shows, and press tours, their behind-the-scenes realities are much different. (During Corbet’s WTF interview, he added that he’d spoken with other Oscar-nominated filmmakers who “can’t pay their rent.”) Unless they have family money, they’re crashing on friends’ couches because they can’t afford hotel rooms at Sundance. They’re buying secondhand clothes so they can look red-carpet worthy. They’re scheduling endless media obligations around grueling day jobs. All of that work stumping for their films is also unpaid, which takes up valuable time they could be using to plan future projects.

By many metrics, the landscape isn’t improving. The cost of making a film is so exorbitant that filmmakers can’t expect to make much money from backend profits. The number of prestige buyers who can give films a shot at finding a sizable enough audience to meet this threshold is decreasing. Grant availability in America, once a possible avenue for filmmakers to supplement their income, has lessened. Filmmakers can grind for over two years on a film, and if at the end of it they make just enough money to pay back their investors, they consider themselves lucky. Still, the mirage of success is vital for filmmakers hoping to convince investors to give them money for future projects, so it’s important to keep up appearances. Of the 22 filmmakers we reached out to for this piece, 17 of them did not respond or declined to participate. The five who said yes opened up about the day jobs they’ve worked to pay the bills, sacrifices they’ve made to pursue their labors of love, and a devolving industry that makes this feel less sustainable every day.

As the director of the buzzy Blue Heron, Sophy Romvari is the latest in a wave of Canadian filmmakers having an international moment right now. She’s also learning in real time that promoting a successful film is a full-time job. She credits her ability to pursue this career largely to living in Canada, where access to grants helps her sustain her lifestyle in between freelance work, day jobs, and intermittent but unreliable paydays for filmmaking.

Photo: Mathew Tsang/WireImage

I have never really had a sustainable income as a filmmaker. I credit my ability to be one largely to living in Canada, which has given me access to applying for grants and has allowed me to pay myself to write scripts, which is very difficult to come by in the U.S. I also have health-care coverage. I don’t have any intergenerational wealth. I moved out when I was 18, and I’ve never relied on my parents, so I’ve never had that option. But it’s made me someone who works harder because of that.

Over the past ten to 15 years, I’ve been a freelancer many times. I do trailer editing and poster design, and I’ve worked on and off within movie theaters. While I was getting my master’s degree, I had some funding from the university. So it’s just been piecing things together and then working on my films on the side. It wasn’t until Blue Heron came out and started playing festivals that I started to have somewhat of an income from awards, mostly out of Europe because they give cash awards to filmmakers with debuts. But it’s not a given, and it’s not going to sustain beyond this time period.

There’s a sense when your film is being talked about that that equals a financial benefit, but the reality is that making a financial return on a film this size is very, very difficult. Even with distribution, so much goes into getting the film out there, so it’s very hard to get into any kind of backend. Film financing works very differently in Canada than the U.S. We don’t have a huge amount to pay back, but we do have some investors who helped us cover the cost of the music. Generally, when you sell a film of this size, the MGs are not very large, but they go back toward the investors, and toward any outstanding debts for music licensing and other fees. The way we organized the backend was that we tried to give points to all crew members so that everybody would get something. But it’s really not an expectation I have. If we get there, it’s a cherry on top.

The promotion I’ve been doing for nearly a year is completely unpaid work, which is such a blessing and a curse. It’s a gift to have the film received so well and get to do it, but at the same time, it’s an insanely exhausting job. The festival circuit can give the illusion of glamour, but really, it’s just me shoving my suitcase full of clothes and traveling from city to city trying to promote the film while not having any regular routine, nutrition, or laundry, and I’m washing my underwear in the sink. I didn’t have a budget for a stylist, but every single day you have to be presentable, because they’re taking pictures of you, you’re doing Q&As, and you’re constantly on this exposure train that everyone sees from the outside. The way that I did that was I went to a consignment store in Toronto called Common Sort, and there was a stylist there named Maggie Keogh who did free personal styling for me. She basically pulled a bunch of secondhand outfits for me, and I just bought a bunch based on her recommendations. That’s the only way I was able to afford to do it.

I do still have a job at a movie theater that I work at whenever I am home. The preview screenings for Blue Heron in Toronto were at the movie theater that I work at, so I got to introduce the film there. But leading up to that, I was literally selling tickets to my own movie. I’d posted on social media that there were still tickets available, and people were coming in and saying, “Can I have a ticket to your movie?”

I remember before we played Locarno Film Festival, I was in this middle ground where I’d finished the film, but it hadn’t come out yet, so I didn’t know how people were going to feel about it. We were playing The Brutalist in the theater, and I remember helping clean up the theater at the end of the day and watching the credits go by. We have the same colorist on Blue Heron, Máté Ternyik, and I remember seeing his name in the credits as I was sweeping up the theater not knowing what my future was going to be. It just felt like I was in a movie, doing a bit.

After winning the award for best new director at the Locarno Film Festival in 2012 for his debut feature, Ape, Joel Potrykus spent the next several years scraping by until he landed a stable teaching job. He’s made four additional features since Ape thanks to his resourceful microbudgeting, ability to rely on his partner’s income, low cost of living in Michigan, and resignation to the fact that independent filmmaking, like punk rock, isn’t supposed to make you rich.

Photo: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images/Getty Images for Tribeca Festiva

I was bouncing around until my late 30s. There were a good eight years when I was just scraping by. During my first three features, I basically had no job. I was freelancing, shooting live concerts and things like that, but I was absolutely broke. But I lived in Michigan, where you can live very cheap, so I wasn’t paying $2,000 a month for rent in a bigger city. It was a perfect place for me to make movies, because my friends were here and I could make the movies for little money.

My side hustle is teaching at Grand Valley State University. I started as an adjunct professor teaching just one script-writing class, and I stuck with it because I loved it so much. It was also an opportunity to get summers off to make my movies, and during the school year, I write and bounce ideas off of people who are more than half my age. I’m always telling my students, “If you want to direct, be good at one other thing too — editing or cinematography, or something that you can do to sustain yourself while you’re spending so much time seeing your movie through from beginning to end.” Sometimes I meet young filmmakers who have this ridiculous notion that they’re getting into filmmaking to make the next Blair Witch Project for financial purposes, and I just think that is so absurd. It’s the same as starting a punk band to make a bunch of money: You’re not going to make money, and if you do, you’re one in a million, or you spent 20 years on the road and paid your dues.

I’ve never done the math, but it really is at least a full two years, almost full time, for me to teach and make a film from beginning to end. I’m doing 80 hours a week. In the early days, I was really drawn in by this idea of points and backend: Our budgets are so low that we have to make money. Then I started to learn how distribution works and how much expenses go into just distributing one small movie, and I realized that it’s almost impossible for an independent filmmaker to make enough money to sustain their life in the back end. Even if we’re only having to recoup $80,000 or $100,000, that’s still a decent profit to me. That’s a major success to me that something that I directed made $80,000, and we can pay back the investors, but very rarely am I seeing any money afterward. You wonder why a seemingly small indie movie has a budget of $2 million. Well, it’s because that’s how the crew and the director and everybody involved get paid.

I’ve made five features now, and I’ve been able to do them for really low budgets, but what that means is that my crew isn’t getting paid what they get paid on a larger-budget production. I consider us like a band: We all get paid the exact same amount on every movie. For this next movie I’m going to make, I’m actually seeking a larger budget for the first time — $500,000, which is still very low, especially if you’re approaching your sixth feature — and that’s going to compensate the crew who’ve all stuck together for the last ten or 15 years helping me direct these movies. I want to start actually paying them what they’re worth in the industry.

After getting his start directing documentaries in the video departments of The Atlantic and The New Yorker, Daniel Lombroso left to co-found his production company, Outerboro Films, in 2025. Now, he routinely works 60-80 hours a week balancing his work and projects for other clients to pay his bills and subsidize passion projects like Manhood, his feature documentary that premiered at SXSW in March.

Photo: Robby Klein/Getty Images

This is a moment of unbelievable disruption with huge consolidation. There used to be something like double the number of buyers for films, and the catalogues of streamers are also shrinking dramatically, so acquisitions out of festivals have shrunk by probably 50 percent or higher. Of the 12 years I’ve been in the industry, the last two have definitely been the biggest period of economic flux. New things will come out of that, like independent distribution and community screenings, but everyone right now is really trying to figure it out. I just hope that, in the next few years, it starts to self-correct again, because there are so many unbelievable films being made, and the people making them deserve to survive and live.

I have a unique path. I was a filmmaker at The Atlantic and The New Yorker for eight or nine years, which is how I made money for a long time. I was able to make White Noise at The Atlantic, and I’m so grateful I did. Something important, like the surge of white nationalism, can work in a newsroom. But something important is not necessarily what a buyer, commissioner, or streamer is looking for. I’ve definitely had to reorient to films with more commercial hooks. We made Manhood, my feature, for under $500,000, which is very low for a feature budget. It’s a very sincere study of penis enlargement and body dysmorphia, but it at least has the impression of being commercial. We shot it over 50 days in 12 states with an eight-month edit. But I put more money into the project than I took from it, to say the least.

Now I run a small production company, and it’s a whole new world out here as a freelancer. It’s so rare to survive just as a director unless you’re getting commissioned by a streamer, and even then, most of those people are taking other jobs. So we do commercials, produce for other filmmakers, do public speaking, make nonprofit videos, and create social campaigns. And all of that, if we’re lucky, allows us to be in a position to make a film. We’re lucky to be sustainable, but I haven’t taken a day off in a year and a half since we started the company. When I’m on the subway, I’m doing QuickBooks, and then I wake up early to work on a pitch deck before I have a bunch of Zoom calls for a baby-formula client. The deep work on my films is done on nights and weekends when my phone isn’t ringing.

I directed a commercial in the fall with a $15,000 director fee, and we needed $15,000 for music so we could be ready for the SXSW deadline. I called my team and said, “Guys, I’m going to take my director fee and just pay for music.” I’m glad I did, but if you do that too many times, it becomes reckless. And I cannot tell you how many funders have been willing to give us money if only the director and producer deferred their fee. Everyone knows that a deferral is just a wink-wink that you won’t get paid. It becomes a problematic dynamic when the financiers start to see film as a hobby, because if they know you’re going to do it no matter what, they know that the budgets can shrink. Grants are amazing, but there’s just not that many. When I make a short, it’s all grants because the chance of getting a return on a short is one in a million. If you see your film as a commodity, you will be disappointed, and you probably will not see money back. A lot of times, even people who sign with distributors don’t see much money back.

The perception of filmmaking is that it’s glamorous. We just had a film in SXSW that got really fantastic reviews. But then you come back to New York, and you have to find a way to make a living. I’ve made a lot of films that have played at the big American festivals, and some in Europe, and I still have never made money as a director. I have friends who’ve been nominated for Oscars and then have gone back to day jobs near the minimum wage. I think the secret that people don’t talk about is that a lot of people in independent films come from a huge amount of family money, so they probably don’t have to work and can focus on their films. That’s okay, but it’s certainly not my situation.

Even as his features Bad Fever (2011), Person to Person (2017), and The Adults (2023) starred recognizable actors like Michael Cera and earned critical acclaim, director Dustin Guy Defa has not been able to parlay this into a financially sustainable lifestyle. He got his first taste of stability over the last two years thanks to screenwriting jobs, but that money has since run out, and he’s once again taking financial risks to make his next movie.

Photo: Jason Mendez/Getty Images

I can’t remember all the jobs I’ve had. I was teaching for a bit at Rutgers, I worked at coffee shops for a large portion of time, I worked for the Census, and I worked for a season at the Bryant Park carousel as the carousel operator, which was actually a really amazing job. I think my whole story would be different if I had children, but it’s just been a lot of stress on me and sometimes the partners I’ve had. I’ve had to borrow money and then pay it back, and I’ve just sort of skimmed by. It helps that, by nature, I don’t own a lot of things, but I wonder if I’d buy more things if I had money. I would love to have an iPad.

The first time I got what I would call a real paycheck from making movies was close to ten years into my career. I didn’t ask for enough, nor did I make enough money on my feature Person to Person. I also edited that movie, and I was still just scraping by. So I learned to ask for more money on The Adults. It wasn’t actually that much money. We did not have any money by the time that movie premiered. It doesn’t happen all the time, but with festivals, most of the time you’re paying for your own flight and staying at people’s houses. One of the scariest times was when I was at a film festival and I ran out of money. I was saving food from the hotel to eat during the day.

The first time I had a feeling of really, truly quitting was during COVID in 2020. I did sort of quit for one day. I had a meltdown, did a lot of crying, and felt like it was actually over. Lately it’s felt that way too. Sometimes, I can’t understand how I’m still going. Over the last two years, I’ve been very fortunate to have been writing a couple movies for money, and it’s definitely the most money I’ve ever made in my life. But now, I’m back out of money, and it’s very hard to find a job. I’m writing my next movie at the moment, and because I believe in it so much and I’m putting everything I can into it, I got a credit card just over a month ago, and I am going into debt for the first time. I’ve gotten to the exhaustion level of like, It’s irresponsible to keep going.

When documentarian Penny Lane left her tenured professor job to be a full-time filmmaker in 2019 after over a decade of juggling both careers, she didn’t anticipate how much of a drop-off in financial stability she’d experience. She’s directed acclaimed features, like 2023’s Confessions of a Good Samaritan, since making the leap, but the constant financial precarity is a constant struggle. She launched a Substack in late 2025, which has bolstered her income.

Photo: Getty Images for Tribeca Festiva

When I was in graduate school, I made a half-hour documentary called The Abortion Diaries. I made it with a credit card, and it cost me $3,000. It cost something like $6,000 to make in the end, but I got the other $3,000 from a grant. I was very inspired by the punk musicians I was familiar with, and I was like, I want to do a tour! So I booked one, and it was so much fun. I took the bus and stayed on people’s couches and in hostels. I traveled the whole country with this movie, and I sold DVDs in the ballpark of $10 each. This is when I was a college professor, so I was booking dates during spring break and summer. By the end of two years, I had made some $10,000. I realize it’s not that much, but the movie cost a lot less than $10,000 to make, and that seemed so incredible to me. I was like, Wow, I’m in the black! All it took was two years of work, work, work.

After I made a couple of well-received feature documentaries, people started to call me and ask me to direct things. The idea that there were jobs where someone else had already done all the work, and they were like, “HBO has already green-lit it, and we just need a director,” I was like, That’s a job?! I’d only done like the DIY indie thing, where every film was my own idea, and I was just pushing it up the mountain.

I didn’t start only being a filmmaker for a living until 2019. Up until then, I was a full-time college professor with tenure, salary, and a retirement account. But in retrospect, the other thing that happened in 2019 was that it felt like pretty obviously the height of a big boom in demand and the amount of money people were willing to pay for what I do. That’s why I left my teaching job. I was like, There’s a lot of incredible opportunities I’m saying no to, and if anyone’s positioned to make it as a filmmaker, it’s me. But then there was no income whatsoever for around a good year.

The money kind of comes in chunks. Everything always happens at once, and you end up with these fallow periods, and I don’t know what to do with those. Up until a few months ago, I was trying to get more work during the in-between periods, but that started feeling increasingly difficult. I started to panic, and I was like, We might be in a new normal that I just have to adjust to. So I started thinking more seriously about other avenues of income that I should be pursuing, and decided to put a little more effort into my Substack. I started it because I wanted an outlet, but I quickly started earning money, which was quite a huge shock. In four months, I earned a little more than one month’s rent, and to me, that is very meaningful. It’s making an impact on my ability to feel like I have a diversified income stream that can withstand the ebbs and flows of film financing. I’m doing writing that I genuinely feel is helping me become a better thinker and filmmaker, and it’s a very natural outgrowth of my life as an educator.

I’m now basically seven years into this experiment, and it’s been very interesting to have this huge shift in my financial precarity. I’ve been doing great, and almost entirely paying all my bills through being a director, but I’m also pretty aware that I’m six months out from bankruptcy at any one moment. It’s been really hard for me to adjust emotionally. I’ve developed a habit of grinding my teeth at night, which I presume is from this constant feeling.