The 2025 awards season was a triumph for indie filmmakers. Indie stalwarts Sean Baker’s “Anora” and Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” dominated the Oscars, combining for 16 nominations and 8 wins, sweeping the night’s biggest categories. And it’s to Baker and Corbet’s credit that while under the months-long spotlight of awards, they each chose to highlight how it’s difficult to make a living — even at the pinnacle of indie film.
“I’ve spoken to many filmmakers with films nominated this year who can’t pay their rent,” Corbet said on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast while discussing how filmmakers are not paid to promote their films, including during awards. “Both my partner [Mona Fastvold] and I made zero dollars on the last two films we made. Yes, actually zero. So we had to just live off of a paycheck from three years ago.”
For his part, Baker spent a great deal of time on the campaign trail discussing the headwinds faced by indie filmmakers. In his Indie Spirits speech, referring to the time it takes to make a film, he asked a rhetorical question: “How do you support yourself with little or no income for 3 years?”
We posed that question to producer Alex Saks on this week’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast as we explored the issue of why even the most successful indie filmmakers are unable to make a living. Saks is an indie producer, with 24 producing credits that include Baker’s “A Florida Project” and “Red Rocket.” Prior to producing she was a film finance agent at ICM, where she structured indie film deals and helped director clients get their films off the ground.
“Sean said at his Indie Spirit Awards speech, ‘I’m able to do this because I don’t have kids, I don’t have a family,’ and it’s objectively not sustainable otherwise,” said Saks on the podcast. “He’s done it because of sheer passion and force of will, and probably because he can’t possibly see himself doing anything else, but that is such a rarity on multiple levels. It is a big point to how is this sustainable, and I think the answer is it’s not.”
While on the podcast, Saks got into the reasons this is the case, including a breaking down the math involved with equity investment, which is how a majority of how the films premiering at the bigger festivals get financed. Using the rosy (some would say dream) scenario of a film costing $5 million and selling for $7 million, Saks explained how little money actually reaches the creative team.
Under this scheme, the equity investor floated cash flow to make the movie. They would recoup their $5 million investment, plus a 20 percent premium — so, $6 million goes to the investor. The sales agent would also take a 10 percent fee from the sale; that’s $700,000. From the $7 million sale, that leaves $300,000 to split between the investor and the filmmakers. That means just $150,000 for the creative team, which can include the producers, writer, director, and crew members. The splits vary from project to project, and are individually negotiated.
Under this same $5 million hypothetical budget, the director drew a salary for their services during production. However, if a film takes three years to make, it could amount to less than minimum wage.
“Depending on what they need to accomplish on a $5 million budget, [the director’s pay] could be anywhere from $75,000 to a few hundred thousand dollars, but a few hundred thousand would [only go to] somebody who probably made a bunch of movies — they’re gonna do this smaller project and maybe they could command that fee,” said Saks. “Otherwise, you’re probably in low, low six figures. And then who knows how long the movie took to get put together.”
In other words, that director would need to live on $75,000-plus for the three years spent getting the project written, off the ground, prepped, shot, and through post-production. Often, directors put part of their fee back into the film’s budget to cover the resources needed to see their vision come to life. And remember, this is all on a $5 million budget. For comparisons’ sake, “Anora,” was Baker’s eighth feature and his biggest budget by far at $6 million, and that came only after the critical success of “Tangerine,” “Red Rocket,” and “A Florida Project.”
Saks also discussed how Hollywood’s dramatic swing toward to subscription streaming services has increasingly shut out independents from a major revenue flow. Few independent distributors have SVOD output deals — like A24 has with Max, or NEON has with Hulu – and major platforms have become far less inclined to purchase the streaming rights of indies they don’t purchase outright.
“The other distributors that are independent distributors, if they don’t have those [output] deals, from what I’m hearing, it’s become incredibly challenging for them to get an SVOD deal to get those [dollars] from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu,” said Saks.
Saks also talked about how independent films are becoming harder and more expensive to make in the United States. For example, Saks discussed how “Red Rocket” was made with 10 people in 2020, during the first year of COVID, and in a way that is unlikely to be repeated in 2025.
To hear Alex Saks’s full interview about the state of indie financing, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
