"That can open up a thousand doors of possibilities"
A conversation with filmmakers Clint Bentley & Greg Kwedar
This week, something a little different! I’ve been wanting to find ways to expand this newsletter and include people whose brains I deeply admire. This is the kickoff to what I think will become a monthly installment… a pick-your-brain chat if you will, with people who are thinking in new, expansive ways.
Clint Bentley and I met through Cailin back in 2013. We’ve been rooting each other on as we make our way through the wild world of independent film. He collaborates with Greg Kwedar - when one writes and directs, the other produces. Together they’ve made three films, Transpecos (SXSW 2016), Jockey (Sundance 2021) and Sing Sing (TIFF 2023). Film is a uniquely collaborative medium yet people are literally divided between “above the line” (writers, directors, producers) and “below the line” (production crew). Greg and Clint have created a system of pay parity that values equality and care-building. It’s a radical paradigm shift and for an hour over Zoom we dove into their model and how it is reimagining the future of film. Here’s an edited and condensed version of what we talked about…
ASK: In a nutshell, how do you two make your movies?
CB: However we possibly can…
GK: In a marketplace that is trying to pay less for the movies while costs continue to rise, how could we do something that would dramatically lower risk for investors while creating a more transparent and fairer playing field for the artists we work with? Out of that, the Jockey model or the Model 1.0 was built on three pillars. The first was pay parity: we standardized the rate either on a day or a week rate pegged to a SAG scale, paid across the entire film, all the way through post-production. Even our publicist at Sundance was on that model. Two, we shared our creative half of ownership in the film that's normally reserved for above-the-line talent with the entire cast and crew of the movie. If you worked a minimum threshold of time, you automatically collected the equity allocated to that bucket. In the typical waterfall, first money into the company is recouped up to 120% to the investors and then profits are split 50/50. On Jockey, we split that money off the top 60% to investors, 40% to cast and crew until the investors recouped 120% and then it was 50/50. So third pillar, no matter how the movie performed, our cast and crew were going to share in the revenue as it came into the company. We then expanded into 2.0 with Sing Sing, from a 10 person crew and a smaller budget to a 50 person crew and a larger budget. Would it still hold together at that scale? How would it need to adapt?
CB: You don't know all the questions you're going to have to answer until you get into it. It's like making a movie in general, right? On Sing Sing, we made some things better that we didn't do on Jockey and we've learned things from Sing Sing, we'll bring it to the next one. As long as it's equitable for everybody and nobody is getting preferential treatment or side deals, then you can answer whatever problem comes up.
ASK: Did you have the idea for Jockey first and then the model, or did you have the model and then Jockey?
CB: They developed hand in hand. Our driving question was: how can we treat everybody fairly and how can we make it so that if the film does win, it wins for everybody, even if it's just a little bit? It always fed back into the creative of keeping the film small and the ethos of it, of making it equitable to everybody.
GK: We tried to make Jockey in the industry but we couldn't raise a dime out there. We were really pushing Clifton Collins Jr. as a star and in their system, he had no “value” but we were so convinced that it was his time for a starring role. And is there a way to lower the risk and bring production costs down while not sacrificing on quality? We had been pondering why budgets inflate and personnel is the biggest cost on any movie. Producers historically hold the information, they keep everybody else in a silo. That starts people into a process of distrust from the get go and then we've now seen the alternative when you operate from a place of complete transparency of like, no one is in a better position than you are. The only variable of getting paid more or less is time on a film. That can open up a thousand doors of possibilities.
ASK: How do you convince investors and producers and crew to get on board in the face of filmmaking as an inherently hierarchical structure?
CB: It's the same approach that you take with investors that works with a gaffer or a sound person. Let them be as involved as much as they want to be involved and don’t play some sort of shell game where information is tucked away. On Sing Sing one of our crew members had made, I think 20 films before this and yet had no idea how the waterfall worked and how it split out. Taking that five minutes to explain that went such a long way. Magnify that across the entire crew - treating people with respect and dignity, they will more likely than not give you the same in kind.
GW: The hierarchy is something we think a lot about that's so ingrained in the business. We want to erase the line between above and below the line and create a culture where the best ideas can win. We've found that it encourages deeper, more passionate, vulnerable work because it's like if I'm ever going to empty the tank on something, I want to do it on one where I'm seen as valued as my peers.
CB: We've had a few more experienced producers speak so flippantly about this, like that little thing that you do on your indie films. They're not big budgets, but you can see the impact on it. People are coming to our films from much larger things within the industry saying this is the best set that I've ever been on.
GW: Independent film is the laboratory of where the future of our business is forged. It's where the ideas that can shift norms are birthed there and then they can move through the whole industry.
ASK: What are the nuts and bolts of what it looks like to actually enact the model?
CB: That's the beauty of it - it's just a shift in mindset, then it can live within the existing systems of SAG and payroll softwares and the like.
GK: What can sometimes be hard on the front end is working with actors’ reps who are initially up for the model but in the home stretch might push for a side deal. The strength you have is in the solidarity because everyone in this company is working on these terms. Either you'll lose that person or they'll come through for you. And usually it's the actor who does because they’re like, finally, I actually know what the fuck is going on on this movie.
CB: Even though the actors are the most valuable aspects of a film, they're also some of the most infantilized people in terms of what information they're given or not given. As soon as you give them the opportunity to just look inside, it pays out a hundred fold in terms of how respected they feel as well. And rebuffing that concept that the investors get paid back first plus 20%. This thing that came about in the early 90s of investors getting 120% and then moving to profit sharing just doesn't make as much sense nowadays, for how little films are being sold for.
CB: Recognizing the true value of labor and of a person's time, rather than looking at it as this is some sort of handout we're getting because we love what we do. You're making something that's going to go on the market and it's going to have value, and it's not about us versus them. It's just about all of us being in it together.
GK: You're building in a chance for profit, because most of these buyers are trying to think about how much you spent making it and assessing whatever their acquisition price is. The sales figures of both of our films were not the press-worthy Netflix deals but I would argue we probably had higher profit margins on our sales than those movies did. Our lower seven figure sales on both Jockey and Sing Sing created enormous profits for both our investors and all of our cast and crew.
ASK: How do you see this model scaling up and inspiring other filmmakers?
CB: We want to see how far we can push it up. How can you look at a 7 million film with this? We're trying to be as open with the information as possible, we also want to see as many people try this as possible and learn things that we don't know yet and make it better because it really can be something radically different in the industry.
GK: Could we do this in the studio framework where there's no market we're selling it to? If it's got a single buyer, we don't want to create an environment where they're just paying less for the same thing. Also if you are truly offering ownership to all parties involved, is there a way to create some kind of union deal that could work across SAG, WGA, DGA et cetera? Then we're actively trying to set up a company where we can become investors in films that embrace our model. If somebody has a production team in place, we can provide the financing and the tools they need to follow the model, but then just let them make the film they want to make.
ASK: Were there any specific models that you looked at when you were kind of coming up with this, inside or outside of film?
GK: The Duplass brothers had dabbled in pay parity, but I don't know to the extent that their equity was really engaged in the same way that ours was.
CB: And John Sloss was doing something similar in the nineties at some point. Coppola was doing something similar with American Zoetrope back in the seventies. It's both heartening and disheartening that we're in a place, where we're still trying to solve the same problem, but here we are.
GK: We brought pay significantly up on Sing Sing from Jockey, and now you have a production assistant earning a livable wage at the same level as an Oscar-nominated movie star. Production assistants are the talent pool for the future, how we treat them and how we nurture them to stay in the game can enable that future. We were thinking about that while shooting Sing Sing, how much talent have we lost to our industry because they couldn't survive that gauntlet?
GK: Having a crew getting checks from something that they worked on 10 years ago… That sustains an actor, that sustains a director or a writer, and so why should it be any different for a gaffer or an AC?
ASK: Residuals were the fight of the 1960s and now are a completely accepted concept.
CB: Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. And now we just have to prove that we have value against robots. I think that's the new thing we have to prove.