Shane Stanley, Filmmaker/Author/Instructor: I’d rather have four or five films under my belt in five years than talking about making one. That’s just me personally.
Film Courage: When you were making movies with Charlie Sheen, at that time how much did it cost to make them and how much were the distributors paying you for the movies?
Shane: Back when we were doing those we were an independent company that decided to do its own content. It’s the early working with some of the majors but getting a real taste of independent filmmaking. We were really in a fortunate situation because Charlie was a movie star. He had just come off things like Terminal Velocity and Shadow Conspiracy and The Arrival and his incredible catalog of work. We had the Avi Lerners coming to us saying we’ll give you up to 10-to-12 million to go make a movie. They weren’t distributors that were buying them. They were people like Avi that obviously (smart businessman) would cast it with real players and sell it at Cannes [Film Festival] or AFM [American Film Market] before we even shot a foot of film. I remember we went to Cannes for the 50th anniversary and they put us up at the Hôtel du Cap and we had a press conference and it was mock artwork of the film with Charlie Sheen, Mark Dacascos, Joe Lando, Martin Sheen and they pre-sold that thing globally I’m sure for a lot more than they gave us to make it. The film did very well. Miramax Dimension actually ended up picking it up and they made some good TV deals on it. We made the film for 12, we actually made it for nine because we shot it in Arizona. At the time they had a 30 percent rebate so we got I think 3 million back in actual cash rebate (wasn’t tax incentives, it was cash rebate) and that’s how movies used to be made especially in such a huge home video market. That was the height of Blockbuster and Hollywood video and all those great brick and mortar Ma and Pa stores were just printing money because of the home video market and DVDs coming out blu-ray hadn’t hit yet so they were giving us a lot of money. We were making some of these indie films for eight to 12 million. Those were good times, those were really good times.
Film Courage: How much easier was it to make movies in the 90’s?
Shane: Well, I don’t know if it was easier? When we…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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