Film Courage: Why is having limited resources a bad excuse for not making a film?
Michael J. Epstein, Filmmaker, Writer, Musician, and Scientist: I think anything you want to do in film there’s no such thing as unlimited resources really, so you have to decide What are the confines of what I’m doing? If you have 100 million dollars, there are confines. If you have one dollar, there are confines and having those limitations and those constraints is an opportunity in my view. It’s not a pain or a punishment or anything, more than an opportunity to say What can I do creatively or what can I do in a smart way that works within those constraints? That’s why when we’re thinking about what film we’re going to make, I might have a script that is a 100 million dollar script, I’m not going to make that film, I’m not going to try to make that film. But I know that if I have these resources I’m going to write something that works within the confines of those resources. It helps me to be creative because it says instead of having the whole world to write about, instead of saying there are unlimited ideas, I know I only have this much stuff to work with and we write a lot for location. For example Sophia, my creative and life partner, parents had a barn with sheep in it. It was like it would be really interesting if we use this as part of telling this type of story that we want to tell. That gives us some production value for no cost. We wouldn’t have necessarily done that if I had the world to work with, I wouldn’t have said…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
Michael J. Epstein is a filmmaker, writer, musician, and scientist. With his production company, Launch Over, he has made theme-driven genre shorts and features that have played more than 75 film festivals and have been distributed worldwide. Prior to his film career, Michael toured and recorded with indie bands The Motion Sick, The Michael J. Epstein Memorial Library, Neutral Uke Hotel, and Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling. He has also published more than 40 book chapters, papers, and abstracts in the auditory and psychological sciences and has written books on crowdfunding and the logical structures of science, mathematics, and statistics.
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