Why non-dependence is a sublime career move
Evidence that NonDē is both a stabilizing & empowering force, and how to make it a practice this very week.
My friend, the fairytale’s a seductive one.
The assumption for a long time has been that if you simply play the Hollywood game, one day you’ll win yourself into a place of personal and professional security.
Get the name actor.
Get the laurel.
Get the money.
Get the big name actor.
Get the big award.
Get the big money.
Of course that list is reductive. Of course there are countless mini-games to play in between each one of those steps. And of course, the game may be cynical, but the filmmakers playing it are not. They’re artists just trying to play the hand they’ve been dealt.
In fact, I believe stability, more than recognition or piles of cash, is the main driving force for a good deal of filmmakers who are playing the system’s game.
How couldn’t it be?
We live in a loud world. We’re flooded with information, opinions, drags, smears, arguments, and worse on the internet.
It’s also an unsettled world. A deluge of news about war, humans vs. machines, political corruption, misinformation, and an elite ruling class make up our daily headlines.
Personally, I often feel so destabilized by the constant clamoring of the external world that I find myself compulsively focusing on random metrics (for instance, why am I currently so obsessed with the 30-day view number?) in an attempt to find a hit of stability for myself. Anything to stave off the feeling that inertia, like an impending tsunami I can see coming but can do nothing to stop, might sweep me away.
That might sound like an outsized reaction, but it’s not just me, and it’s not just you.
This is the cultural moment we find ourselves in.
So it makes complete sense to professionally hedge for recognition, validation, affirmation, perhaps even love, because those rewards all point back to the same underlying need to feel secure.
We want:
Stability of identity. I know who I am, and I’m good at this
Stability of material resources. I can pay my bills, upward mobility is possible.
Stability of trajectory. I can plan for the future, I know what’s coming next.
For perhaps as long as I’ve been alive, common sense was that if you played the system’s game, you would be rewarded into this kind of stability.
But this is the fairytale.
While those things can come from the system, I believe that kind of holistic stability is much more likely to come from making non-dependence a practice.
In other words, I believe:
The system is unpredictable and chaotic, and non-dependence creates much more stability than the system in the long run.
Shall we get into it?
Evidence of Stability in a NonDē Practice
Let’s investigate this wild claim a little more.
EVIDENCE: YOU’RE ALLOWED TO MAKE BAD WORK
True stability is the ability to fail forward.
Failure (paradoxically) is what builds the Stability of Identity. I know who I am, and I’m good at this:
In non-dependence, you’re not vying for one coveted opportunity to prove you’re a great director or writer or producer. You’re greenlighting yourself, which means no one can prevent you from taking another swing.
Because non-dependent filmmakers can’t deploy saturation marketing like a big studio, the truth is: most people aren’t looking at you. If you make a mistake, most people probably won’t see it.
Audiences have different goals than shareholders of big studios. Audiences are much more forgiving than shareholders because their goal is to find a movie they love, not make as much money as possible. Look at Showgirls or The Room. Audiences love those movies.
Making bad work is the only way to make good work. You can’t hit it over the Green Monster without batting practice.
Trying for something beyond your reach (an aesthetic, a storyline, a genre, a high concept) and failing to achieve it is an excellent way to refine your taste and skills by studying what went wrong.
EVIDENCE: YOU DIVERSIFY YOUR INCOME STREAMS
The average millionaire has at least 7 income streams because it’s not a financial plan to say “I’ll get this one gig and then be financially set”.
Diversification is what builds Stability of Material Resources. I can pay my bills, upward mobility is possible:
Non-dependence allows for a day job. Because literally who cares if you have a day job? There’s no shame in not making money from your art. As a non-dependent filmmaker, the day job is part of your master plan. It frees you from over-indexing on “market factors” when creating the work.
You allow yourself to grow multiple revenue streams at once. You may have a paid tier on Substack, consult on other filmmakers’ projects, teach, or speak.
In non-dependence, audience growth and revenue options compound hand in hand. This happens in part because you learn how to speak directly to an audience about their needs instead of speaking at them about your movie.
Through constant collaboration with other filmmakers, a broader infrastructure emerges that will create new jobs. You’re always innovating, looking at what’s needed in the ecosystem, and developing ways to contribute.
EVIDENCE: YOU FORGE ALLIANCES INTO A SAFETY NET
People are the connective tissue of any career (or life for that matter). When you are in aligned, generative, reciprocal alliances, truly anything is possible.
Alliances are what build the Stability of Trajectory. I can plan for the future, I know what’s coming next:
You learn a shorthand with like-minded filmmakers where you can share feedback, develop career or project strategies together, and make long term collaborative plans for growth.
In non-dependence, it’s collaboration over competition. You support each other’s projects, you work on collaborative marketing campaigns, you share/borrow each other’s audiences, and experiment together to extend your visibility. Your career’s surface area increases, and with it, its possibilities.
By connecting with aligned alliances, you meet new folks in their orbit, increase your opportunities for collaboration, and easily generate a consistently regenerative personal network.
In a non-dependent practice, you treat your audience as community and collaborate with them so you can take bigger risks and more divergent paths, knowing you are developing true relationships, not just transactional ones.
How to put non-dependence into an actual infrastructural practice
I believe we need both communal and personal infrastructure for non-dependence.
While communal infrastructure may be found in group projects like FilmStack Daily Digest, the NonDē 50 Films Project, or FilmStack IRL Meetups, personal infrastructure is more invisible.
I believe a good personal infrastructure includes five pillars that build a high quality non-dependent career:
Writing
Release
Revenue
Connection
Constraint
1. WRITING: Writing well creates visibility.
When you write well, you become visible. If you are writing (anything from your screenplay to your newsletter) with a distinctive voice, a sharp point of view, and an obsession with specifics, your tone becomes magnetic. Writing well is the foundation of your art, but it’s also the foundation of how you find your audience.
HOW TO PRACTICE IT THIS WEEK: Write a Substack post, take out all adverbs and reduce all general ideas into specific ones.
2. RELEASE: Everything gets a release.
You do not post. You do not share. You do not throw it up on the internet. You release it. What is it? Everything. That’s not to say everything deserves an opening night party and a velvet rope. Life is lived on a spectrum, my friend.
Releasing work simply means having an intention for it. You’re not dogmatic about doing “what works” for the algorithm — you’re dogmatic about knowing
a) what the best outcome is for your content/art, and
b) how you can hedge for that outcome.
HOW TO PRACTICE IT THIS WEEK: Define the unique metrics for success of your current project before you share it with the world.
3. REVENUE: A non-negotiable financial system.
Building revenue streams gives you data, market knowledge, and endless opportunity to financially sustain your work.
There are a million ways to generate revenue, and aiming for 7 helps you spread out the risk. I shared 52 ideas for indie artists to make revenue here. This was a human-generated list of ideas based on experience, research, and trend-spotting. However, it didn’t take me long, so if you sat down and dedicated one hour a week to thinking about revenue generation, you would 100% discover revenue opportunities in your work.
HOW TO PRACTICE IT THIS WEEK: Make a list of revenue opportunities and notice what feels most exciting and fun to you. (FWIW: AI lists are generally pretty boring & not as fun as what you can ideate on your own.)
4. CONNECTION: Possibilities arise from high quality relationships.
Lateral connection is high quality connection. Getting in touch with people in adjacent sectors with similar values is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s from these high quality connections that you will start producing better work, stumble into the coolest serendipities, and enter a new artistic era. But a lot of people don’t do it. The practice of community-building in the non-dependent era is an essential one. Join the NonDē 50 Films Project here to start.
HOW TO PRACTICE IT THIS WEEK: Reach out to one writer on Substack whose writing you enjoy and let them know what you like about it.
5. CONSTRAINT: Working with reality deepens the work.
Artistic constraint is valuable. Putting limits on your projects refines them. One time I wrote a 30-minute pilot in 24 hours because I told myself that’s all the time I had. I wrote a full-length feature in 3 days because I told myself it should be bad/finished, not good/unfinished. Constraints are often wise. They are often self-aware. They are guardrails to make your project 800x better.
HOW TO PRACTICE IT THIS WEEK: Only allow yourself 30 minutes to write your Substack post this week. Or write a shitty first draft of a new script in 7 days. You don’t have to publish or share anything, but notice what it does to your inner editor.
Summoning Stability and Your Innate Walk-Away-Power
If you start practicing these five infrastructural pillars every day, I believe your non-dependent career will get so much further ahead and feel so much more stabilized in just one week.
If you start doing this, even if you decide you want to play the industry game at the same time, you’ll be in a stronger position.
Why?
Because you’ll have what Chappell Roan calls “walk away power”.
The industry wants you to believe the power is in the prestige, but it’s not.
The power is in your ideas.
When you walk away from a bad deal, a toxic collaboration, an impotent agent, or the crumbling industry at large, you’re taking your original ideas with you.
And not only do you take those ideas, you take your future ideas as well.
This is true power and stability.
Power and stability that I believe is built in a consistent daily non-dependent practice.
PS. You’re invited to next week’s TOWN HALL: How to Identify Your Audience
ICYMI, the format of a town hall is:
Small presentation of a concept
Workshop of your individual projects 1:1 in front of the group.
If you…
want to grow your audience by the 100s, not the 10s
need stand-out market positioning for grants or investors
want to get out of the social media algorithmic pay-to-play trap
…this town hall will help. Upgrade here to join:
Feeling NonDē curious? Quick Ways to Get Started in the NonDē Film Movement ahead »
Subscribe to FilmStack Daily Digest and start getting your analysis and breakdown from thinkers on this platform with independent voices.
Try non-dependence one of these 64 ways.
Read about the New Film Criticism and subscribe to a swath of amazing film critics who don’t just introduce us to new work, but also help us think and write about films in an altogether fresh, original, personal way. Check out Film Soup Zine run by KLA Media Group and C. C. Simmons who will be reviewing specifically-NonDē films.
Join the NonDē 50 Films Project by signing up here and checking out the dashboard here.
Start talking about it. Let’s bring these ideas into the conversation. At first people will say we can’t do it. That’s fine, let’s talk about it. Let’s bring these big ideas into the rooms with us.
Discuss with your team. Be the leader on your production team and bring non-FilmStack filmmakers into the fold. Share resources and posts with them about how to do things differently.
Share about the NonDē Film Movement far and wide. A better world is inevitable if we make it so.
Read the entire NonDē series:
This hits: most people don’t lack skill, they’re just over-dependent.