The one most important thing I learned from film school is that money doesn’t grow on trees.  It comes from sucking all the right dicks.

When you’re making a movie, you have to call in all your chips and then some.  The endeavor is, more often than not, quite expensive and unless you have the choicest of choice connections, you will still have to spend two or three pretty pennies to get the process going.

So aside from sucking all the dicks, you also have the additional revenue streams provided by asking people and just plain working.  Since droning on about working is actually quite boring, my story, of course, takes you down the asking route.

Basically, the only rule of thumb about seeking film funding is that you can’t be afraid to ask anyone.  In that sense, it’s kind of like dating.  You just ask and ask until finally you find someone way too exhausted to resist.

Wait a second – that sounds like rape.

But yeah, clerk at the Target?  Ask ‘er!  Doctor’s check-up?  Ask ‘im!  Lonely guy at the bar?  Definitely ask him because he’s probably going to kill himself soon anyway.

The safer bets always lie with the family.  But I mean, this is all relatively speaking – compared to the near non-existent chances you’ve got with random people in the outside world, these people will at least think, “Aw, look – he’s trying to make something of himself, kind of like a kid pretending to be a superhero.”

By the way, that last bit?  True story – overheard it at a party as I asked for scratch.

The most awkward part about asking for funding in family settings, for me specifically, is that most of my movies are very dark.  Yes, “dark” is a buzz word, so to put it plainly, people usually die in my films and they bite it in grisly, sometimes flip – though never light – ways.

Some context: my immediate family, particularly the older folks, are kinda, sorta conservative.  So how to pitch these sort of projects to them?

“Well, it’s about a guy cooking a meal for himself.  We follow him throughout his process.  He’s very meticulous, very precise.  But you never quite know what he’s making.  And over the course of the short film, you see more and more of his ingredients and they – they’re very weird.  They don’t make a lot of sense together.  What could he be cooking?  And this guy – he just seems kind of weird, kind of off.  Then he walks out of the kitchen into the living room and – well, you find a woman bound and gagged there.”

AFTER A LONG PAUSE–

“He’s going to eat the woman.”

…I funded that one myself.