The end of the Independent Films?

For many aficionados of the independent film genre one question remains a permanent ubiquitous fear – can the independent films survive our current age of profit driven reasoning? Can young and upcoming artist still display their craft and convey a well told story even if that story is not intended to appeal to mainstream demographic s?
It’s hard to say but many in the film production process have already come to the conclusions, which is that independent films can survive but only with the help of shared financial responsibilities.
Sure there will always be your art house films produced by some obscure director through their film and trade school but for the exception of a few hundred people, that film probably will experience a mass production of it. Why? Because the price for making movies, even small independent films have become too much of a financial burden that many film companies have ebbed away from the traditional Indy film.
In today’s movie business, productions that cost under $ 100,000 are a rare breed and as the budget productions of movies go up you are less likely to find such diamonds in ruff such as Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi, which was filmed for less than $20,000.
A lot of the Indy films today base their entire budget around a well known actor or share the responsibility of million dollar plus budget with multiple companies. No longer are the days that an independent film shows up in the Toronto, Cannes film festival that have been made for under a million dollars. The demand for a quality film that follows a certain guideline has changed (Hollywood) and to ensure success that guideline has been adamantly theorized to the film director, possibly curtailing the artistic representation of that director.
I say possibly because I’m only theorizing this in relation to the nine-figure movie productions where the director usually has to work with the producers to make sure that the story will appeals to the masses instead of concentrating more on the emotional core of the film and its characters.
It’s funny that when you hear about these “small Indy film productions” budgets because they are throwing around numbers like 15 million, 20 million and 30 million are thrown around. The new film “The assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford,” was made for an estimated 33 million dollars and received a high honors award for the film at the Cannes Film Festival (notorious for independent/art films).
These shared financial endeavors are not a recent fixation throughout the movie business but it is for the independent film scene, which may affect the original vision from the director. It’s hard enough to come up with and display a well told story on film but it’s even harder when you have three or four producers looking over your shoulder adding their own little critique to every shot.
Why these subtle critique are disheartening is because they it can lead a film to resemble something that has already been created rather than displaying an original story and symbolic meaning.
I can’t say that these multi-million dollar multiple partner films are unoriginal or lack the creativity of a traditional independent film however, I do believe it may establish a precedent that in the future will not bode well for this genre.
There is a certain type of feel you get from seeing an independent film. A feeling that you have just watched the soul of the author speaks out and describes the raw emotion of the scene and the movie through this film. It can be very intimate feeling that can easily become muttered and manipulative when the forces of Hollywood are combined.
Sure independent films can survive but at what price? Can there still be films made that speak to a small group of people, conveying a symbolic truth that is absent of the cliché’s and big explosives. I hope so but with budgets that consist of eight figure sums the creativity is destined to succumb to the sound of cars colliding and buildings exploding.