“To me, what applies to indie film is the personal risk and collaborative nature of the filmmaking. This differentiates it from something more calculated towards profit, and in marketing the film it’s important to make that clear!”

But that’s exactly what can no longer be marketed, because everyone in America is making movies. Not so long ago, audiences would pay to see a low or no-budget film simply because it violated Hollywood conventions and still managed to end up in a theater. The films themselves were almost beside the point. Or they’d see films like El Mariachi because they succeeded in reproducing Hollywood conventions on no money.

But once this kind of novelty was exhausted, and the number of non-Hollywood films surpassed the number of Hollywood films, there’s nothing left to market except the films themselves.

We certainly do want personal filmmaking. It’s just that there’s no sustainable market for it and given the costs of filmmaking, it’s hard to see how the effort can be sustained, short of the miracle that every filmmaker believes in.

You yourself stopped producing garage budget projects many years ago — and who could blame you? Nobody can make a living doing it or finance future works doing it, and the kind of persuasive illusion that moviegoers expect today is all but out of reach with these limited resources.

This may be the future of many would-be filmmakers, but is it really the future of cinema?