Show Us Your Shot: Interview with Filmmakers Michael J. Epstein and Sophia Cacciola

The filmmakers behind Clickbait, Michael Epstein and Sophia Cacciola (collectively Filmmakers), share some thoughts on their film and filmmaking.

Steven Gladstone: How long have you been filmmakers, and how did you get started?

Filmmakers: While we’ve each had a lifelong interest in film and filmmaking, we really started out being dedicated to music and songwriting. We toured in many bands over the years and, around 2008, we decided that we really needed to make music videos. At first, we worked with other filmmakers and had some great successes. In 2008, The Motion Sick’s “30 Lives” video was played on a number of TV networks, including some secondary MTV channels, and ended up in several Dance Dance Revolution games. In 2011, Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling’s “Episode 1 - Arrival” video ended up on Time magazine’s most creative videos list. After the successes with those (expensive) videos, we realized we needed to keep making videos, but also find a way to keep the cost as low as possible. So, we decided to buy a camera (an HD Panasonic camcorder) and just make videos for a few dollars and the kind participation of our friends. Even though they were much lower budget, we had pretty good success with those videos, as well.

For fun and practice, we started participating in film competitions like the 48-hour film project and, perhaps most importantly, The Brattle Theatre trailer smackdown. We made a fake trailer for the Brattle’s competition for a murder-mystery called TEN, which was fun to make and well received. A lot of the people who worked on the trailer decided that we should make the trailer into a full film. So, we scraped together some money on Kickstarter, watched as many behind-the-scenes videos as we could, and put 17 people into a mansion for 10 days to make our debut feature, TEN, in December of 2012.

TEN isn’t exactly Casablanca, but we got enough positive response and encouragement (and distribution) to push us to continue.

SG: Did you go to school to learn about filmmaking?

FM: We did not study film in any kind of formal way. There are so many books, video guides, and other resources available to learn anything you need to know. We probably both got our best education on set.

At this point, if you look at our credits, we’ve each worked a number of departments on many, many small productions, and there’s always something new to try and something new to learn!

SG: Is filmmaking a full-time job that pays the bills, or do you work other jobs, as well?

FM: We moved from Boston to Los Angeles, in 2016, so that we could make a bigger portion of our financial lives relate to film. Sophia, especially, very often works camera department (as director of photography or assistant camera). Michael does production and post-production sound.

We each also work a number of other flexible/freelance jobs, including Sophia doing web design, Michael teaching courses in research methods and statistics, and really just about anything that someone will pay us to do that does not interfere with our need for an open schedule to take on film opportunities when they arise, often last minute!

For our own features, let’s just say that the people who do the most work are typically the last ones to see any money.

SG: What is your working relationship like?

FM: It’s really a full partnership and support system. As we go, we have found better and better ways to allocate responsibilities and tasks to best suit our individual skills and interests. Sophia does a lot of the big-picture writing. Michael does more of the detail work. Sophia handles a lot of pre-production and art-design. Michael does the grunt work of post-production. During production, when we co-direct, Sophia manages the crew and technical camera work more and Michael works with the actors more. None of these are hard divisions, and we always share opinions and ideas. We are both capable of doing everything it takes to make a movie, so if a need arises, we can plug in to any gap, which is also an important part of our workflow.

We have been working together for so long that we rarely really clash on our visions for projects, and we can hash out disagreements quickly. Even when things become heated, which is pretty rare these days, we are good at resolving issues and moving on without carrying them forward.

In micro-budget filmmaking, it’s tremendously beneficial to be a two-person team rather than an individual trying to keep the train on the tracks! Also, we can very easily split and do multi-unit shoots when we need for efficiency.

SG: How did Clickbait come about?

FM: Clickbait was quite an unusual movie for us because it didn’t really come about in our standard project pipeline. We had just moved to Los Angeles in Fall 2016 and both of us were looking to work on productions to meet people and get a little more settled here. Sophia was already off as a camera operator on a feature about two weeks after we arrived. Michael was looking around at calls for crew and responded to a call for a cinematographer for a movie in development.

As many actors are doing these days, Brandi Aguilar was developing a movie to star in. She had worked with Jeremy Long to write the movie. Michael came on board as a cinematographer, but since he can’t stay out of trouble, he offered to help with some rewrites. Over the course of a year, during which not much happened with the movie, including the rewrites, we ended up just taking over the project completely and producing it. Michael did rewrites and we kept Brandi on, but shifted her from the role of Bailey to the role of Emma.

SG: How would you describe the filmmaking process?

FM: We’re working with very small budgets and very limited resources, so most of the time, we just have to get things right in advance, and then whatever happens on set, happens. We have very little control at that point. It’s pretty much steering a train that not only has gone off the tracks, but is falling off a cliff. You can maybe nudge it an inch in any direction, but once the train is moving, it’s going where it’s going.

SG: How did you get the Video-On-Demand distribution deal? And congratulations, by the way.

FM: Thank you! No real secrets there. We fielded a fair amount of interest through festivals and reached out to a dozen or so agents and distributors to try and find the scenario that made the most sense for us and for the movie. It’s an extremely complex decision because we probably would have made the most money by self-distributing it, but we thought the profile, film-market activity, and specific deals that ITN offered were the best fit for Clickbait. Of course, we won’t know how that decision went for a couple of years now.

For anyone looking for distribution, the best thing to do is ask around and see how people are being treated by their distributors. We all typically sign non-disclosure agreements about specific money details, but you can at least get a sense of whether movies are being handled well or not. The VOD stats for indie films these days are quite depressing, and making any money at all is tough, which is why we are currently sticking with certain kinds of budgets.

SG: How has the bit-torrenting of your film affected it? Has it been a bonus, or a detriment?

FM: This is a really hard question to answer. In a way, when you make a movie, you really most care that people see it, and this movie has been torrented a ridiculous amount. We’ve never had such a big response. That said, we absolutely lose money as a result. Based on comments by torrenters, there is a vast, vast disconnect between the way they think the indie film industry works and the way it actually does. They have a sense that we are just rolling in money and that basically, they are entitled to the movie because we are just rich people who don’t need their money anyway. The reality is, we just sit with our fingers crossed hoping we’ll just break even on the movie (or mostly break even) so that we can scrape together the money to make another movie. A lot of the torrent sites are also making money on ads on the backs of all of us. There is even a Russian site where they dub the movie (talking over the original dialogue as they have no access to the dialogue-free music and effects version that is sent to legitimate foreign dubbing agencies) and insert ads right into the movie, both pop-up and video breaks. They make money on it.

The biggest problem with torrenting, however, is the entitled attitude of the people downloading the movies. From their perspective, our movie is no different than an Avengers movie, and many of them seem to have the spare time to go and leave trolly reviews for every movie that gets torrented. So, for example, two weeks after our movie was out, our IMDb score fell to 2.4 because of several hundred foreign trolls who may or may not have even seen the movie. There was no way for them to see it legitimately. If and when they left reviews, they just said things like, “I watched five minutes of this. Worst movie I’ve ever seen. Would give it zero stars if I could.” While we don’t really care, this has a huge impact on legitimate buyers who look at the movie on Amazon and see a low IMDb score. We had to rally people who have actually seen the movie to go and help score it everywhere to get the ratings back up. As more people legitimately have seen it, it also has come up quite a lot. Even still, right now, on IMDb, we have a 6.3 rating for US users and a 4.3 rating for non-US users. Virtually every non-US user is seeing the movie illegitimately. Also, interestingly, the top 1,000 IMDb voters (they have made the most votes on movies), who IMDb looks at as influential are just people who torrent and rate every movie without watching and give us an average of 2.3. Same sort of thing happened on Letterboxd.

We also faced an apparent movement to attack the movie from people who didn’t like the feminist and progressive politics of the movie. Honestly, it’s pretty mild, but a lot of the torrenters apparently did not find it to be so.

In summary, it’s great if more people see the movie, but most of the people stealing the movie probably are not the audience for it. So, we’d almost rather they didn’t see it if they are going to just leave negative reviews and low ratings. We’re fine with negative reviews from legitimate viewers, but if you look at this group, it’s just a pattern of reacting that way to every small movie they get their hands on.

SG: What is next for you? What films or projects are in the works?

FM: We can’t say too much about most of them, but we have four micro-budget feature film projects that seem to be going forward. Money is always the challenge and always the piece that can fall apart easily. The one we can talk about is a documentary currently mostly in post-production about women’s experiences in rock music, as part of the Women of Rock Oral History Project, for which we’ve been shooting video interviews for years. The others are a film collaboration with an interesting character / narrative-based band and a pair of complementary movies paying homage to classic horror and looking at how performers who appeared in classic horror are celebrated now. With some luck, all of these will be in production by the end of the year.

For more information on the Show Us Your Shot series, click for Guidelines and Frequently Asked Questions. You may also return to the showcase page. For links to Michael J. Epstein’s and Sophia Cacciola’s work, see the links below.

Sophia Cacciola and Michael J. Epstein (of the film company Launch Over) are Los Angeles-based directors, actors, writers, and musicians, known primarily for low-budget horror and sci-fi feature films layered with modern sociopolitical commentary, including the social-satire-horror Clickbait; 1970s Euro-vampire Blood of the Tribades; psychotronic-sci-fi Magnetic; and the avant-mystery TEN.