What It Really Takes to Finance Your First Feature, From a WME Agent

Abe Bengio is an agent at WME Independent, the division handling domestic and international film sales for the agency.

He has packaged and sold some of the most acclaimed independent films of the past several years, including Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, Saim Sadiq’s Joyland, Ira Sachs’ Passages, and this year’s big Sundance winner, Josephine.

He grew up in Montreal with no connections in the film industry, studied at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, started in WME's mailroom in 2018, and worked his way up.

At Aspen Shortsfest this week, he sat down with programmer Jason Anderson to discuss how independent film is actually made. We’ve compiled what emerging filmmakers need to hear most.

Short Films Are Still Your Currency

“Filmmakers are the bread and butter of what we do,” he said. “I mean, especially if you look at all the big filmmakers doing well in the studio system, Ryan Coogler or Chloé Zhao, et cetera, they’ve all made a short, they've all made a feature, they've all gone through the same system.”

Shorts are how you get on the radar of the agents, managers, and producers who can help move your career forward. The industry is generational, he said, and the people who will champion your first feature are often the ones who watched you grow through the short film circuit.

If you haven't made one, that's your first step. If you have, make another. For more on what makes a strong short, here's what you need to know.

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The First Yes Is the Hardest to Get

Much like anything in creative fields, you just need buy-in from one person.

“Having the first money in is the hardest thing for me to get in my day-to-day,” Bengio said.

Even for Bengio, pitching Josephine, a film starring Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan, from a director whose first film Soft and Quiet premiered at SXSW and landed on Netflix, meant going to 30 or 40 investors and hearing mostly “no.”

Everyone waits for someone else to go first. Once you have an anchor investor, others follow.

For bold, unconventional projects, Bengio said, the right first investor is often a “patron of the arts” type rather than an institutional financier, who tends to gravitate toward safer, more star-driven material.

You have to find the person who believes in the vision before they believe in the return.

“You Have to Make Art and Commerce Have a Baby.”

This is the practical part about melding creativity and business. If you’re asking for large sums from investors, how can you hope to recoup costs and make it worth your financiers’ time?

Day-and-date is done, Bengio said, and direct-to-VOD isn’t the best option either.

Bengio added, “If you’re not a streaming movie, then you’ve got to be a theatrical movie. And if you’re not a theatrical movie, you’re stuck in the middle, and you’re in tough territory.”

The market right now is consolidating, risk-averse, and unforgiving of the middle ground. Buyers are scared of losing their jobs, Bengio said, which makes them cautious, but at the same time exhibitors are starved for content, and studios like Warner Bros. and Sony are doubling down on original films, in his view.

The question every filmmaker needs to be able to answer is, “What makes your film worth seeing in a theater?”

The films that are breaking through (Weapons is one they called out) do something audiences have never seen before, in a form they instinctively recognize.

Check out more on the current indie landscape.

The Script Has to Come First

Bengio talked about the amount of noise in today’s industry, and the thing that will help you stand out is what’s on the page.

"It's all about the writing,” he said. “You read it, you can't breathe at the end of it."

Before any of the financing math below matters, Bengio said the script is everything. His discovery of Joyland director Saim Sadiq started at the IFP Week (now the Gotham Lab), and it was the writing that stopped him cold.

Institutions like the Sundance Institute, the Gotham Lab, and the Blacklist exist to cut through the noise and help highlight great material. For filmmakers who don't yet have development money (which is most of us), these programs are great platforms.

We keep an updated list of grants, labs, and fellowships here.

“Try to Get as Much Non-Risky Money in the Door, and Then See If There's a Tiny Gap at the End.”

Think of your budget as a stack you build from the bottom up, starting with money that isn't at full risk. That means co-production financing, foreign government grants, and tax credits, or what Bengio calls "soft money."

Every country outside the U.S. treats film as a cultural right, which means foreign funding structures exist that American filmmakers often ignore. A foreign sales agent (often based in France, Germany, or the U.K.) can help you map co-production opportunities and structure deals around your director's nationality or your DP's passport.

Anderson pointed to Blue Heron as an example, a roughly $1 million budget stitched together from Canadian and Hungarian money.

Once the soft money is in, you look for the gap. For a deeper dive on how these layers work, this primer from producer Cassian Elwes and this breakdown from a former Netflix exec are both worth your time.

“Write the Features … Reach for the Stars

Shorts are currency, as Bengio said earlier, but they're usually not the destination. At a certain point, you have to stop making the thing you already know how to make and start writing toward the thing you actually want to do.

“Write the features, write the feature films,” he said, “because making shorts, it's really challenging. It's not a business. There are very few people to help finance them. And at the end of the day, you need to start really pitching for the job you want in the future, not the job you already have, being a shorts filmmaker. You can reach for the stars.”

The short film world has almost no financing infrastructure behind it. Features do. Agents, producers, labs, and investors are all oriented around features. Use your shorts to prove your voice, then turn that proof into a feature script.

Understand How the Money Gets Split

Bengio included a brief “film finance 101” to explain who gets what.

"The producers typically control what we call the producer share of net profits, which is 50% of the pie,” he said.

Net profits are divided into two halves: the producer side and the investor side. Producers control their 50% and share it among the people who put in sweat equity (director, writer, maybe a composer who worked for less than their rate).

The other 50% goes to equity investors on a pro-rata basis, proportional to how much they put in. Agents take a commission off the sale, typically 10%, sometimes 7.5% or 5% on co-representations, not off the backend.

Structures get more complicated with debt and pre-sales involved, but that's the baseline. For more on equity basics, this overview is a good starting point.