My Learns While In The Middle of Film Finance

In Film, The Challenge Is To Negotiate

I’ve done film challenges before, with their pressure-cooker deadlines and getting know and then love/hate all the team-members you’re stuck with as you spend almost 48-hours straight with them. And as grueling and stressful as this can sometimes be, it is all done for the love of creating a story through film. But not many film-makers can love, or even appreciate the art, of making a successful negotiation.

I’ve found in the last month, from taking my Negotiation and Deal-Making class online, that the love for the craft and the passion behind making a deal go hand-in-hand….If you want to be a successful indie film-maker. The biggest take-away I go from this class is that even if I don’t like a person that I’m about to work with, I can at least find a way to work with their passions. It is said in that it is important to “separate the people from the problem” in any negotiation.

This tactic was mentioned in Getting to Yes, a very smart, negotiation tactic book. This ideal very recently helped me out when I met a potential financier in NYC. He was smart and Harvard educated. But looking behind the title and seeing this man for what he’s really worth (or why he was there meeting me that day) I knew that we could make a deal. He was there to make money and gain experience producing a film and I wanted to get a responsible hedge-fund manager that knew how to “talk money” to investors.

What I loved the most about my real-life negotiation this month is that I got the instinctual feeling that both this financier and myself can learn a lot from each other and ultimately make each-other more successful. Although it seems everyone wants to be a director in this business (ask the film students I went to school with), I’‘m finally getting the handle of what it is to be a savvy negotiator in this business.

And although I’m not filming this spring, which I outlined in my learning timeline, I’m much happier with where I’m at now as part of being a good negotiator is not rushing anything!