"YOU'RE A FOOL"

That’s what he said to me over the phone when I told him I was going to make my first feature film for 20,000 dollars. He was a professor at Scottsdale Community College’s film school and also a filmmaker with a couple moderately-budgeted movies to his name. Someone recommended I ask him for advice. I guess you could say he gave it to me. “You’re a fool if you think you can make a feature film for 20,000 dollars.”

Maybe I was a fool. I didn’t know if I could do it for twenty; I didn’t know why I’d chosen that number. I just seemed like a reasonable amount for an indie filmmaker’s low budget feature film debut. Heck, at that point I didn’t really understand budgeting or scheduling or how to produce a movie. I was making it up as I went… All I knew is that we’d made a handful of short films since I started Running Wild with Gus in 2010 and it felt like time to do something bigger. Perhaps fittingly, that first feature was titled THE BIG SOMETHING.

Fool or not, I didn’t make the film for 20,000 dollars. I made it for 2,000 dollars. That’s right, a tenth of the number I told the wise one. Basically, I found my cast, a tiny crew, locked locations, set shoot dates, and proceeded regardless of how much money I had. Nothing could stop me. And during two weeks in the Phoenix summer heat we made my first feature film, THE BIG SOMETHING, but that is a bigger story.

Is there a lesson to be learned here? Maybe don’t listen to naysayers when you know what you need to do. Maybe trust your instincts and do wild things to follow your passion. Well, maybe. But what if I had listened to him? What if I’d waited to raise 20,000 dollars or taken his advice and waited to raise 200,000 dollars? I might have made a better film. I might have pushed my career along a lot faster than the pace it has taken. Or… I might still be waiting.

P.S. I saw him five years later at the Jerome Film Festival. He introduced himself. He didn’t remember our conversation. I reminded him.

This will eventually be published on my website, runningwildfilms.com, and my Travis Mills Facebook page. For the next week, it is exclusively available here

The picture was taken on the set of my first feature film.