Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Sundance '12: Filmmaker / Industry Reflections

Simon Barrett (co-writer/segment producer, V/H/S)

Like many filmmakers, we went to Sundance with no idea of what to expect in terms of how audiences there would respond to our film, or if audiences would show up to see it at all. I think literally less than a dozen people had watched the finished movie before its premiere, so it was entirely untested, and we had allocated approximately $20 to our festival poster art. Ultimately, the movie was a success beyond my wildest expectations, but my fondest memory at Sundance isn’t the film’s premiere, acquisition, or much publicized audience fainting incident (that part was kind of stressful, actually), but the first moment I realized people were actually excited to see the movie we had made. I had just got off a city bus with the film’s main producer, Roxanne Benjamin, and we were standing miserably in the wind and snow trying to figure out where the hell Main Street was.