THE BRUTAL TRUTH ABOUT WHAT IT TAKES TO GET YOUR FIRST INDIE FILM MADE

Dead bodies, Paris Hilton, and a thousand No’s — this is how KILLER MOVIE happened.

by Jeff Fisher

They don’t cover this in film school: sometimes your first feature gets born in a frozen cabin in the woods, fueled by fear, a very good dog, and strangers who really want to tell you how their relatives died unbelievably brutal deaths.

For me, it was February in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. 17 degrees below zero. No cell service. No internet. Just me, my dog, howling wind, a rental Chevy sub-compact built for a mall parking lot doing its best on a frozen lake, and an endless parade of locals with a horrific accidental death story for every occasion.

This is how my first feature, “Killer Movie,” came to be.

THE RED-HEADED STEPCHILD YEARS

Even though my short films were a romantic comedy (“Garage Sale”) and a musical romantic comedy (“Angels, Baby!”), the first directing jobs I got were in reality television. Shows like “The Real World/Road Rules Challenge,” “The Simple Life,” and “Big Brother.” The truth is, reality TV was an incredible training ground. It taught me to shoot efficiently, to problem-solve on the fly, structure story beats and to work with minimal resources.

Every time I’d wrap a season of a reality show, I would try to “shadow” a scripted show — this extremely awkward process where you follow a director around on an existing show hoping to convince the showrunners and network to give you a directing slot. Nothing says “hire me” like sitting quietly and lots of nodding. I shadowed on shows like “The O.C.” and “Enterprise” but wasn’t having any luck convincing anyone that my directing skills would transfer.

Reality TV was the red-headed stepchild of television, and I was making zero headway getting one of those scripted directing gigs.

WHEN THE SIMPLE LIFE GOT COMPLICATED

I had just finished Season 3 of “The Simple Life” — a show I genuinely loved working on — when Fox brought in a new network president: fresh off running FX and its splashy hits like “Nip/Tuck.” The previous president had loved “The Simple Life” and was riding the wave of early reality hits like “American Idol.” This new gentleman wanted to take Fox in a different direction, and I don’t think he ever quite saw where the show fit on his new schedule.

It got more complicated fast. Paris and Nicole weren’t speaking to each other at the time. People in their twenties get into differences of opinion. It just gets more complicated when People Magazine is covering the friction. We shot a test to see what the show would look like without the girls, um, speaking with or seeing each other.

It didn’t work. Their chemistry was the secret sauce of that whole show, and without it, the test just sat there. The show got cancelled.

I’d been holding out hope for a Season 4 pickup for months, so now I needed the next job I could land, and I needed it NOW. It ended up coming in the form of a show for the Sundance Channel that was shooting in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan — in February. Like I said, I needed a job, so the only real question I asked was “Can I bring my dog?”

I took it, only to arrive and find out I was like the fourth director hired in the past four weeks. They’d burned through three before I got there. Guess that brisk winter climate and the fact that half the town thought filming a reality show there was a very bad idea wasn’t a fit for my predecessors. Full disclosure, even if I was privy to that info before arriving there, I probably still would have said yes. I needed the work.

THE PREDATOR ROUND UP

The weather was brutal. Seventeen degrees BELOW zero when I got there. I grew up in Florida and was living in California. To say the weather kicked my ass was an understatement. I wasn’t sure what I’d just gotten Chase (my little Jack Russell Terrier) and I into.

Production had rented us the, uh, most reasonable cars available. Small Chevy Aero sub-compacts. Ironic: Los Angeles is a town packed with SUVs that never see anything off-road. Here we were somewhere an SUV would’ve actually helped getting stuck on the ice in these little bad boys.

The wind in the U.P. (what locals called the Upper Pennisula) in winter would howl at night, and I’d lay awake in my remote, half-winterized cabin thinking of every horror movie I saw as a kid. Fun stuff. I was fairly certain Jason and Michael Myers were snow-shoeing around just outside my window.

To add to it, like I said, some people in this small town didn’t trust the reality TV crew. And MANY of them seemed to have a story about how someone they knew died a horrific accidental death, which they would use as an ice-breaker upon meeting them.

I’d meet a guy with a five-year-old and get: “This is my nephew, Billy. My brother-in-law’s Carhartt jacket got caught in the rotary saw up at the mill. We found him six hours later. Decapitated. So, Billy lives with us now.” Billy blinks up at me. Um, WHAT? We didn’t have a lot of rotary saws where I grew up in Florida.

Meanwhile, Billy was more of a man at five than I was at 35. The kid was literally fixing a snowmobile with a wrench while his uncle told the story.

There was more where that came from. A guy who lost control of his snowmobile and plowed straight through a barbed wire fence. Vague, unsettling references to an aunt and an unfortunate encounter with a bear trap. Ice fishing accidents.

There was no cell service and no internet where I was staying, so I’d call my cell phone from the landline and leave myself voicemails about these crazy stories. I think I was trying to get those stories out of my head, but some part of me knew if I survived this job, I needed to remember this sh*t.

There was also a big banner with a wolf on it hanging over the town bar advertising the local Predator Round Up, a hunting expedition for animals considered predators. My private worry, walking Chase past it every morning before crew call: that some frustrated local, annoyed by the reality TV circus in town, might accidentally shoot a crew member Dick Cheney style. Chase was unfazed. Me, not so much.

HOW A SLASHER MOVIE GOT A HEART

I finished the job. Yes, the weather was brutal and I was completely out of my element — but I didn’t quit. And some of those townspeople were actually really salt-of-the-earth types once I got to know them (preferably inside).

I’d been trying to get a feature made from a rom-com script I’d written and wasn’t having much luck. But the box office was having a horror movie boom — remakes of “Friday the 13th” and “Halloween,” along with the “Saw” movies, were having giant opening weekends.

I decided to try writing a “Scream” wannabe script about a reality TV crew trapped in a northern town with a masked killer on the loose. Hey, I might as well mine those sleepless nights for a good piece of fiction.

I’d spent years around Paris Hilton on “The Simple Life,” and one moment from that show had stuck with me more than any other. We were shooting at one of the guest family’s house — small place, tight quarters — and while we were getting settled and getting lights up, the family’s teenage boys started throwing out some rude AF, derogatory comments about Paris in the kitchen. I couldn’t believe it. I was already walking over to shut it down when our A camera swung around and found Paris standing in front of the bathroom mirror, tears running down her face. I never knew for sure if she’d heard them. Didn’t matter — that’s immediately where my head went. I pulled the camera, had a quiet word with the family, and made it clear that wasn’t going to happen again.

It bugged me, watching people assume that because a couple of twenty-somethings were in front of a camera, they were somehow bulletproof — immune to whatever anyone wanted to say about them on the internet or IRL. Paris and Nicole carried that show because they knew funny, better than most trained comedians. So when I added a blonde starlet character to my slasher script — I called her Blanca Champion — I already knew one thing about her: she wasn’t going to be a punchline. She was going to grow into being the hero. Personally, I like my horror with a bit of camp, so…it was a pretty organic fit.

I gave myself a three-month deadline for the script. I’d booked a job directing a show for MTV with Jennifer Lopez called “DanceLife.” Every morning before that 7am crew call, I’d wake up two hours early to write pages of the script I was calling “Dead of Winter.” The scariest thing about it: it was becoming clear that I was going to have to raise the money myself to make this thing if I wanted to get it done quick.

STRIKE POINTS AND KARAOKE NIGHTS

The first thing I did was reach out to one of my best friends from college, who was doing really well in his Wall Street job. I told him I wanted to find investors for my first feature. He told me I needed a business plan. I asked him to please explain to me what a business plan was. Doh! Luckily he didn’t hang up the phone and talked me through it.

Terms like “strike point,” “ROI,” and “high-risk investment” got thrown around a lot, and I was scrambling to keep up — talking genre trends and crew pedigree while everyone else on the call was talking numbers, like we were negotiating in two different languages. No one on the call wanted to hear about my deep dive into the early filmography of Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers. They cared about how much money could be made — and whether tickets to the premiere party came with the investment. I was starting to wish I’d taken one class in finance instead of an entire semester on French New Wave Cinema.

I was extremely grateful when that friend — along with two of HIS friends from Wall Street — ended up being the first money in. But the deal was that zero of the money could be touched until the entire budget was raised.

I found an entertainment lawyer with indie movie experience to make sure everything was papered and fair, and somehow convinced my great friend Cornelia Ryan Taylor (who’d produced “Angels, Baby!” and another short with me) to come on board as producer.

Then I had to find the rest of the money.

That led me on a road of what felt like — and probably was — a thousand No’s.

It was starting to land that my path forward was asking people for money. I mean who wants to do that? Yikes.

My big authentic selling point was that these types of movies were hitting big at the box office, and I’d lucked out — friends from my short films had started working on big studio features and were still willing to work with me at our lower budget. We wanted to make a movie for less that looked like 10X its cost. That was the mantra.

How that translated in reality was I’d have to finish shooting a 12-hour day on a reality show (“Dancelife”) —which meant six location moves a day chasing dancers through auditions for the Janet Jackson tour — then drive to a karaoke bar in the Valley to meet the son of a dentist who wanted to be an actor whose Dad was maybe interested in investing in a movie.

I remember walking into that karaoke bar pretty exhausted, someone belting out Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” thinking, yeah, pretty much. The dentist’s son did not have what you’d call a humble demeanor, and I remember thinking: why couldn’t the dentist have Natalie Portman as an offspring instead? That dentist never invested. But it was great prep for pitching the dentist who actually did.

It was an endless medley of “Thanks but no thanks,” followed by me asking “Do you know anyone who might be interested?” — and connecting those dots.

I also found a company that liked the script and said if I could raise half the $1.5M budget, they’d finance the rest with a bridge loan and some pre-sales. So I had the goal. Our plan was to shoot in Minneapolis, which had an early production incentive that would pay for post entirely, and had the weather for “Dead of Winter” — but we’d have to be shooting by April at the latest to catch the snow. So we had a ticking clock.

I remember the last big hope of a meeting that got a “No.” It felt like it was over—April was looming and we’d just have to return any money we raised. It felt like we were out of options.

Then, at the last minute, enter a venture capitalist from Northern California — let’s call him Bob — and Bob actually said yes. He’d invested in other films and was enjoying the process. He was smart and kind and had read the script. Bob didn’t just become the major investor in the project — he’d go on to offer great advice about the business side of the entire production, and turned into a real ally and friend long after the movie wrapped. Still so grateful to him all these years later.

His investment meant we could move forward. He also released a small amount of money so we could start casting and hire a location scout in Minnesota to try and get there in time for the snow.

THE MRS. VOORHEES PROBLEM

Casting had always been a huge passion of mine. I interned for a casting director and was a casting assistant for Mary Jo Slater before I started working at ICM. I knew that casting could make or break a movie.

It was both terrifying and exciting to hear your own script come to life with actors auditioning the material. It runs the gamut from “you should really consider never writing another word” to “This actually could work!”

When Paul Wesley came in to read for Jake — a reality TV director fresh off a very public breakup — he was the immediate front-runner. He was it. When Kaley Cuoco read for Blanca Champion with that effortless comic timing, I knew that was it too — she had the talent, the looks, and the self-awareness the part needed. Then we got Leighton Meester for Jaynie. While we were in prep, Leighton booked a pilot called GOSSIP GIRL.

I was beyond psyched when my friend Nestor Carbonell (who was in my short “Garage Sale” and would go on to win an Emmy for FX’s “Shogun”) agreed to play Jake’s agent, Seaton Brookstone. Torrey DeVitto, Robert Buckley, Al Santos (a role I wrote for him based on his role on the show “Grosse Pointe”), Gloria Votsis, Jason London, Adriana DeMeo, Andy Fischer-Price, Cyia Batten and Hal B. Klein rounded out a cast I was genuinely thrilled about.

Then the company financing the other half of our budget finally sent their casting list — and it was quite the wake up call.

They wanted Udo Kier, Keith Carradine, and Dominique Swain for Blanca — she’d recently played Lolita in the remake of that film. I wasn’t really feeling her for the part.

I was scratching my head. The only parts that made sense for Udo Kier and Keith Carradine were the two rival coaches — not huge roles. But if that’s who they wanted, fine. They were certainly talented actors.

The thing is, they didn’t want them for the coaches. They wanted them to play the 25-year-old leads. These guys were in their mid-to-late 50s at the time. No offense to two (great) actors, but it clicked for me right then: these people at the company probably hadn’t read the script. They also didn’t seem clued into the fact that this genre is populated by young, hot people who somehow manage to be sexy while being chased by a masked killer. Think about it — from “Scream” to “Halloween,” you don’t get a lot of leads over 25 who aren’t destined to turn out to be the killer’s avenging mother. Props to Betsy Palmer who played Mrs. Voorhees, but wardrobe wasn’t putting her in a belly shirt for the final two acts.

Through the whole process, I’d been asking them exactly what names WOULD get us a green light and never getting a straight answer. Just reaching the fundraising halfway point had felt impossible. Now this?

I called some friends at the studios, and they told me this: the real star of these movies was the GENRE. Sometimes they didn’t even put the actors on the poster…just a picture of a hockey mask. “Put the best actors you can find in the roles” — not people who might work for pre-sales in territories where they weren’t right for the part.

I knew I had to trust my casting sense. Whatever else I was doubting about myself on this shoot, that wasn’t one of them. I’d been picking winners since I was a kid watching Michelle Pfeiffer deliver a one-line guest spot on “Fantasy Island” and thinking, “this lady’s got something.” I remember the first time Juliette Lewis opened her mouth in her first scene on the set of “Cape Fear” — a seventeen-year-old going toe-to-toe with Robert De Niro and not blinking — and I sang her praises to anyone who’d listen after that. Whatever the financing company was pitching, however talented those actors were, they weren’t right for THIS movie.

If I caved, I’d end up directing a movie I didn’t even want to see, let alone make. And believe me — as a first-time feature screenwriter, this script needed all the elevation it could get. By the way, even after many more scripts and all the lessons that come with them, that still holds true!

I made a bold move. I cut the auditions for the actors I actually wanted together and sent them to our existing investors, along with what I’d heard from the studio marketing execs. I couldn’t believe it, but it paid off — the existing investors agreed to up their investment and take the production company with the bridge loan and gap financing out of the picture.

NO SNOW, NO TITLE, NO PROBLEM

I was over the moon when Paul, Kaley, and Leighton’s deals closed. We had a read-through with the LA-based actors before heading off to Minnesota, and I was SO excited. Sitting in that room, watching this cast’s chemistry and star quality land in real time, I remember just thinking: this is really happening. I can’t believe this sh*t.

Then we got to Minnesota, and the snow was gone.

We’d been talking to the location scout before we arrived, holding out hope for one more winter snap. It didn’t come. In retrospect, it was just another lesson — I was attached to the snow because that was the experience that had inspired the story. But by that point, the revised script had taken on a life and flavor of its own that had very little to do with that shoot in the UP. The winter storm that started it all was just the spark. Losing the snow turned out to be the least of our hurdles.

So “Dead of Winter” needed a new name — fast. We slapped “Dead of Night” on the call sheet as a placeholder, just something to print on the script pages until we could do better. It wasn’t great and it definitely wasn’t permanent — we figured we’d land on the real title once we actually had a movie in the can. (We did. “Killer Movie” rose to the top of a running list the cast and crew had been lobbing at each other for weeks, and it stuck.)

Now the only thing left to prove was that I could actually direct a feature — something bigger than a short film, and a completely different animal from an episode of reality television.

The morning we started shooting, it was adrenaline and “can we actually pull this off” in equal parts. Every possible worry running through my head at once: will the killer’s creepy camper actually start? Will the location agreement with school number one close in time? And underneath all of it, the real question — how do I make the story that’s been living in my head for a year look and feel the way I want it to, on this budget, starting right now?

It was starting to feel like I was parallel parking one of those giant cruise ships. Easier said than done.

The locations, the weather, the budget — those I’d braced for. What I hadn’t braced for were the calls you have to make about people. Next week: the hardest decision I made on that shoot, and the twist nobody saw coming after we got the movie in the can.

What I Learned (So Far):

→ Desperation breeds creativity. That freezing cabin in Michigan’s UP — Predator Round Up banner and all — became the birthplace of my first feature.

→ The “No’s” are part of the process. A thousand rejections aren’t a sign you should quit — they’re the price of admission for getting to “yes.”

→ Protect your vision, even if it means firing your own financiers. When the company wanted to cast 55-year-olds as 25-year-olds, I could have caved. Instead, I went back to my existing investors with the truth. It paid off.

→ Cast actors you believe in, not names that look good on paper. Paul Wesley and Kaley Cuoco weren’t household names YET, but they were PERFECT for these roles. Trust your instincts — you’ve probably had them since you were a kid watching a one-line guest spot and thinking, that person’s got something.

→ Fight for the people who can’t fight back in the room. Blanca Champion exists because I never forgot watching two twenty-somethings get treated like they weren’t allowed to have feelings just because they were on camera. That belief showed up on the page whether I planned for it to or not.

→ Sometimes you have to take the job that pays the bills to fund the dream. Those karaoke bar meetings in the Valley after 12-hour reality TV days? That was the grind. That’s what it takes.

If you’d like to watch KILLER MOVIE on me, here’s a link: https://vimeo.com/572687380?fl=ip&fe=ec

PART TWO DROPS NEXT WEEK

Need help navigating the industry?

Whether you’re prepping for a pitch, an audition, a big meeting, or a job interview in a genre you’ve never tackled before — I offer one-on-one coaching and consulting sessions. Reach out at reeltalkwithjeff.com and let’s get you ready.

Jeff Fisher is a director and writer whose credits include Paramount Pictures’ “The Stranger in My Home” and “The Image of You,” Hallmark’s highest-rated film of the year “My Christmas Love,” and reality hits spanning from “The Simple Life” to “Keeping Up With The Kardashians.” Visit www.jefffisherdirector.com to see his work and www.reeltalkwithjeff.com for more industry insights. @jefffisher_insta

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