Filmmakers from the 2007 Sundance Film Festival reveal the risks they took while making their movies.

TOMMY O’HAVER (director–co-writer, An American Crime)

I suppose it’s obvious, but the biggest risk in the production of An American Crime was making the film in the first place. Although I had been obsessed with the story of Likens/ Baniszewski case for ages, I had certainly never before approached this kind of material as a filmmaker, and to be quite honest, I was scared.

I remember sitting down with Catherine Keener, somewhere in the sand of Venice Beach. She had just read the script and loved it. But she was a little wary of committing because she had never considered playing such an intense, complex character as Gertrude Baniszewski before.

My only reassurance was, “I’m scared as hell too. But that’s precisely why we need to make this film.” I told her not to worry — we had plenty of time before we’d ever find the money, and we could muster our courage in the meantime. “One step at a time,” I said to her.

Cut to two weeks later. I was calling Catherine, telling her that Ellen Page had signed on for the role of Sylvia Likens and that Killer Films had sent the script to First Look, which was interested in financing. They wanted to go before the end of the summer.

“I thought you said ‘one step at a time,’” she replied with a nervous laugh.

“One step has turned into 12,” I said. And for some reason I felt it necessary to apologize.

At that time, we all knew that An American Crime was a story that needed to be told; we just weren’t sure why we were being called on to tell it. We pushed ourselves into new territory creatively and emotionally. And now that the film is finished, I hope I speak for us all: the risk was more than worth it.

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DAN KLORES (director-producer, Crazy Love)

The biggest risk I took was in interviewing the two subjects of my film. Burt Pugach has been declared criminally insane, a psychopath, and he did 14 years in Attica. His wife, Linda, was blinded by him. I interviewed them separately for about 12 hours and together. I didn’t know how they would react, but I had to “go for it.” Could I see her without her glasses? Could he talk about his sex life in prison, his suicide attempt, his extramarital love affairs? Would she describe the moment she was blinded by acid thrown in her face and her desire to see Burt dead?

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TOM DICILLO (writer-director, Delirious)

I took the biggest risk on Delirious four years before I even made the film.

I took the risk without even knowing it: I wrote the script for Steve Buscemi in the central role. I told him I was doing it. When I was finished I had a screenplay with a character that I knew no one else in the world could play. I gave it to Steve.

He said no.

Later he said yes. If he ever does that to me again I will smack him.

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ANNIE SUNDBERG and RICKI STERN (co-directors, The Devil Came on Horseback)

There are so many risks when it comes to filmmaking. Sometimes the scariest risk is the moment when you decide to really commit and pursue a story. Timing can be everything. In the early spring of 2005, we were deep in editing on our film The Trials of Darryl Hunt (which played at Sundance 2006). We were in Washington, D.C., to do a fund-raiser for the film, and while we were there we decided to meet with a woman who said her brother had an amazing story.

We knew a little bit about this story; we’d seen Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times op-ed series that featured photographs about the crisis. They were horrible, riveting photographs — the first time photos had ever appeared on the New York Times op-ed pages. So here we were, sitting down in a dingy D.C. restaurant with Brian Steidle, a young ex-Marine who had been an African Union monitor in Darfur, Sudan, during the worst of the atrocities. He was the guy who was blowing the whistle — through explicit photographic evidence — on what was happening on the ground in Sudan. We were blown away.

It was horrible timing for us as filmmakers. We were in the weeds raising the last of our funding to complete Hunt, and we had a mountain to climb to edit and finish the film. But the Darfur story was so big and Brian’s perspective was so unique that we made the decision — took the risk — to double down and start in on this new film. We didn’t even have money to complete the film we were already working on at the time.

We took a creative risk in diving in to make a film about Darfur without knowing if we would be able to go there. We had all of Brian’s photographs and field audio recordings to work with, and 500 more from another African Union monitor who gave his prints to the film, but we needed more. We built relationships with independent journalists and renegade shooters to get the best footage we could from Darfur. We trolled the Internet for posts to see if anyone had new material, and we worked closely with NGOs and Human Rights Watch, and they were generous with their own footage from research missions in Darfur and Chad. We realized that we would have to tell this story without being able to direct much of the shooting and that we would have to direct it in the edit. We have an amazing editor, Joey Grossfield, on this project, who brought a great eye and poetic sensibility to the footage.

Thankfully, we were able to film in Chad, but financial limits — and our own work on Hunt — meant that we couldn’t go ourselves. So we took the risk and sent a field producer-shooter and sound team to Chad to film with Brian and his sister Gretchen. Before the shoot, we had long conversations about style and visual approach, and we built a wish list of material for them to film in the refugee camps. While our film crew was on the ground with Brian and his sister Gretchen, we had limited e-mail contact only. The scariest moment came when we received calls from several NGOs asking if we had heard from Brian and Gretchen, as they were last seen in a camp that had been attacked. For 72 hours, we worried along with the NGOs until we learned that all our crew was safe.

The biggest risks of all in making a film like this are borne by those who assisted us on the ground in Darfur and Chad. Our translator who accompanied and aided Brian and the team in the refugee camps in Chad was arrested (and later released) shortly after Brian returned back to the States. Most importantly, every Darfurian who shared their story with us on camera is at risk of Sudanese governmental reprisal. We are profoundly grateful for their willingness to bear witness, and we hope this film will help to end the violence and bring protection to those still on the ground in Darfur and Chad.

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HEITOR DHALIA (director–co-writer, Drained)

I took every kind of risk when I decided to shoot Drained. First of all, no one believed in the script, a fun, dramatic story of a man who falls in love with a waitress’s ass... and okay, I can’t blame them. There was also a financial peril; both me and my producers invested money out of our own pockets in making this film. It was risky to shoot the film with so little money, since we were only able to raise about $150,000 to put the film in the can. And the last risk, and the craziest of all, was that I convinced the entire crew to become co-producers of the film. If the whole thing did not work out, I would certainly have an angry mob chasing me through the streets of São Paulo....

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CECILIA MINIUCCH (writer-director, Expired)

Risk-n. The possibility of harm or loss; danger.


Risk-v.  To expose to a chance of loss or damage.



As I consider the different kinds of risks (creative, financial, physical, lifestyle, etc.) that making a film entails, it seems the biggest risk of all is the actual making of the film itself.  It is almost a life-threatening endeavor, especially in the independent world, as the actual life of the filmmaker can totally depend on the outcome of the film. Most of us dive into the unknown, blindfolded, held together only by a thin thread called hope...hope that the script you wrote and decided to turn into a film is the right one. Hope that the cast you chose will give the best performances for your characters. Hope that the film will provide somewhat of meaningful and relatable journey. Hope that you can make it through both physically and emotionally. Hope that the people who believe in you will not be ashamed of such an association. Hope that the people that bet their money on you will not lose anything. Hope that the film will be seen and that maybe, for the next couple of years, you can sleep on a nice bed instead of on a lousy old couch. So maybe the biggest risk, within taking the risk of making a film, is to keep hoping. But what would life be without hope? We must embrace all risks and go for what our heart tells us while letting hope always smile and wink at us with a deceptive smirk on its face.

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DAVID SINGTON (director, In The Shadown of the Moon)

I think I always felt that there was a risk — or perhaps presumption is a better word — in a British director and a British production team tackling arguably the greatest American story of the 20^th century. Could we really get inside this narrative? But, as so often in filmmaking, what seemed like a problem turned out, I believe, to be an advantage. It ends up this film is all about seeing from a distant perspective — the Earth from the Moon, the Sixties from today, youth from age. Perhaps our London vantage point helped us to see this quintessential American achievement as a human, rather than a merely national, triumph — and in so doing communicate its true emotional power. I hope so.

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JESSICA WOODWORTH (director-co-writer, Khadak)

Khadak is the first fiction film to be shot entirely in winter in Mongolia where temperatures range from the bone-numbing to eyelash-freezing.

We used prototype ARRI cameras that were winterized and sent via Moscow’s dreaded airport to Mongolia. (8000 kg by air!)

Our stars had never acted before.

It was our first fiction film ever.

I co-directed it with my husband.

We only raised 70% of our budget.

We left our two-year-old daughter behind for three months.

The film could be interpreted as an indictment of the government’s policies but they were distracted by their own collapse during our first week of shooting so they granted us nary a glance.

Mutton for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Sleeping in a sanatorium with resident mice.

One ailing crew member had a plane sent from Europe for an alarming medical evacuation.

We shot so efficiently that we finished ten days early and, so convinced we had shot all that we cared to shoot, we returned home with 20% of our film stock unexposed.

We raced through our sound mix in order to make Venice and, once there, breathless, we won a lion for Best First Fiction.

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JENNIFER BAICHWAL (director, Manufactured Landscapes)

The biggest risk I took making this film was witnessing the places I am responsible for but never normally get to see. That experience has deeply changed how I think, and by extension, how I live in the world.

We started out filming in Monterey, California. The subject of our film, Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, was getting an award from the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference (a gathering of ultra-progressive minds convened to contemplate the future of the planet). We stayed in a fancy hotel because it was the hotel adjoining the conference — a luxury, given the small budgets we usually work with.

I came back to my room mid-afternoon the second day and there was a huge cardboard box with a bow attached to it on my bed. A little lurch of anticipation gripped me as I opened it. What could it be? A gift? Some swag from the conference that mistakenly made its way to my room? I lifted the lid, rooted around and found, nestled inside voluminous folds of tissue paper... a pair of socks. Black socks, clean, neatly folded: mine. At one point I ran out of socks and had, in a moment of weakness, sent a pair to the hotel’s laundry service instead of just washing them in the sink. And this extravagant, absurdly large gift box was the vessel used to return them.

It made me think of how luxury demands waste, that the very definition of luxury means using up so much more than our share. Why? Why do those two things go together? Why do we feel like we’re “living” when we’re wasting?

The same day, I listened to one of the TED speakers, William McDonough. And he said: “Remember when ‘away’ went away.” Remember, that is, when there was no longer such a thing as throwing something away, because there was no “away” to throw it to. And I experienced this, indelibly, when we went to China with Burtynsky for the principal part of the shoot.

Fifty percent of the world’s e-waste ends up in China. Computers, electronics — anything with a circuit board or a chip. It gets recycled secretly, in people’s yards and inside their homes, because the process is illegal. It is illegal because it is extremely toxic: the monitors are smashed and the boards are burned to get all the valuable metals off, thereby releasing tons of toxins into the environment and destroying the soil, the water table, the air. It is a thriving cottage industry.

When I stood in a recycling yard in Xiamen and faced enormous piles of motherboards myself, the relationship between luxury and waste came back to me. How quickly the most coveted objects become garbage in the electronic world! As soon as there is a thinner, smaller laptop, a sexier iPod, an “updated” PDA, your own version loses its caché, shifting from coveted object to obsolete and undesirable in a moment. And then when you actually buy the updated model, yours (and the myriad accessories that accompany it) instantly becomes garbage. Nothing else has changed: it isn’t broken, it is the same size and weight. Only the definition has shifted — from useful tool to garbage, and then eventually to somebody’s front porch in a Chinese town where water has to be shipped in because the groundwater there is classified as “toxic to the touch.”

Towards the end of the shoot, we spent some time in a factory that makes 20 million irons a year. It’s a staggering number, and scale is the issue you keep facing in China (in the Yueyang Shoe Factory, for example, 90,000 workers rotate through three shifts, 24 hours a day). But what overwhelmed me most in this place was a group of women off to the side of the main conveyer belts, bent over the most intricate, minute work imaginable. Each had her own station and was repeating one tiny action over and over again, thousands of times a day, millions of times a week, billions of times a year. At first I couldn’t figure out what they were doing. And then I realized that they were making and testing the irons’ spray mechanism: that button you push to squirt hot water onto your shirt to smooth a stubborn wrinkle.

Luxury and waste...in the painstaking, soul-numbing human effort that goes into creating everything: not just the high-end computer or PDA but even the things we consider to be disposable. I can’t buy anything now without thinking of the person, very far away, meticulously assembling and checking millions of Spider-Man heads before they are attached to their Spider-Man bodies and then packaged and shipped halfway across the world to my local dollar store. And that Spider-Man action figure ends up in a birthday party loot bag and its head is broken off half an hour after the child gets home and is then thrown “away.” And the cycle continues, eventually sending that small coloured piece of plastic back to China to a recycling yard where it will get sorted, treated, and turned back into another Spider-Man.

Of course, we also have to consider the staggering amount of energy used to make that 99-cent toy, send it to the store, into my shopping bag then into my garbage can and eventually back to the recycling yard. The whole dubious process would grind to a halt without oil, and, as we all know, the world is running out of it.

There’s no easy answer here. And that’s what is most powerful about Burtynsky’s photographs: they explore the complexities of the question without preaching a simplistic resolution. Stunning and disturbing at the same time, they let us experience the marginal places we otherwise never would encounter yet are all responsible for. In that, they manage to change our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it. They’ve certainly — and, I hope, in a lasting, meaningful way — done that for me.

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NINA MENKES (writer-director, Phantom Love)

Making Phantom Love was a total risk, on every level. I don’t want to make a film unless I risk all...it’s a leap of faith into darkness, into the Self; a sort of trust that if I give all, something very special will come back.

Filmmaking, as it involves many people, usually a tight shooting schedule, and many other concrete restrictions, demands, for me, a unique discipline: to be fully present to the physical reality on set while simultaneously acutely aware of the spiritual and emotional truth inside me and within the scene unfolding in front of me.

 For example, in Phantom Love I worked with a fabulous d.p. Chris Soos, who was in charge of the beautiful lighting design while I operated the camera (a 35mm ARRI 535B). I like to set up a dramatic scene but then film it and observe what emerges as if I am shooting a documentary, in this case: a documentary of interior space. It means walking a tightrope between control and surrender, at every moment. It’s risky because you can fall off, but when it works, it’s beautiful.

As a director, my job is to create a magical container where secret and hidden matters of the heart can become manifest. Because I work with a script and visual style that is completely unconventional, I have to risk that the unique logic of my inner psyche will be powerful enough to override convention on every level. In Phantom Love this trust has been deeply rewarded.

 I can’t finish without saying that I shared the risk of making this film with my genius producer, Kevin Ragsdale, a superlative cast: Marina Choif and Juliette Marquis, and a brilliant d.p. We all took the leap together, with love, and that very key ingredient, along with those mysterious cinematic forces always hovering nearby, guided us right.

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JOACHIM TRIER (director–co-writer, Reprise)

Neurotic as I am, I had many worries as we approached the shooting of Reprise. Will I be able to shoot a technically ambitious film on location in Oslo and Paris, only having a small budget? Will I be able to combine serious themes with at times rather silly comical scenes? Will I be able to keep people interested for almost two hours with a story that constantly avoids classical conflict dramaturgy, and trails off on digressions all the time? Just to mention a few of my anxious late-night thoughts as we approached the shoot.

But having to name one particular risk with this piece, I think it was the casting. The story required a huge ensemble cast with mostly characters in their early 20s. Because of the age group and the rather theatrical tradition of screen performances in Norway that I wanted to avoid, we knew that we had to look for mostly non-professional actors to fill the roles. As the shoot drew closer we started a huge casting process where we saw almost a thousand young people. Some of the ones we found had never done any acting at all.

But the biggest risks can bring out the best results, and as the film worked out I am very proud of the cast and particularly the bravery of the young leads who had little to no formal acting training before doing Reprise.

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S. WYETH CLARKSON (director-co-writer, Sk8 Life)

“Only those willing to risk going too far can find out how far they can go.” — T.S. Eliot

Filmmaking is a lot like skateboarding; it boils down to two things: Risk and Commitment. Risk, b/c if you think about it too much you’ll never make the film/attempt the trick; and Commitment b/c if you do it half assed you’re a lot more likely to make a crappy film/get hurt.