Gary Hustwit on Maintaining Independence

Editor's Notebook

Jun 20

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit has established a model of independence that’s enviable in this business. Coming from the indie music world, he applied a DIY mentality to film financing and distribution. That’s enabled him to maintain control over his back catalog of titles including his successful design trilogy - Helvetica, Objectified and Urbanized.

In Producer’s Notebook #3, Kickstarter’s Elise McCave invoked Hustwit as an example for other filmmakers. So it was natural to make him the focal point for this follow up. Hustwit is currently finishing a new documentary about composer Brian Eno and he’s just launched a Substack newsletter called Chance Operations. Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers reached Hustwit at his home in upstate New York.

**Producer / Director:**

***Helvetica***
***Objectified***
***Rams***

Can you give an overview of how you've sought to keep control of your fundraising and distribution as much as you can?

Hustwit: I think it all goes back to indie record labels because that's what I was involved in before I made films. After college, all my friends were in bands. No major record labels wanted to release their music. So, we had to figure out how to get a CD made or press vinyl or send it to radio stations. We weren’t really thinking about the major labels and the corporations who didn't care about us. Instead we were concentrating on the community of independent bands, small music venues and putting our energy into those audiences.

So when I started to make films, I just never even thought about going to a distributor. Helvetica was my first film, and I got a ton of distribution interest when it premiered. But I already had a way to reach the audience. I knew the audience. I was part of that audience. So it didn't make sense to give up the rights to the film because I thought I could probably do a better job reaching the audience.

You once told me a story about the making of Helvetica that exemplified the power of using your mailing list in Switzerland. Can you tell that again?

Hustwit: So I was probably two months from finishing Helvetica, and there was an older gentleman who I'd wanted to interview in Switzerland named Alfred Hoffmann. His father was one of the designers of Helvetica. I’d been trying to track him down for a year, he had all these original materials, and he was about to leave on vacation for two months. So I had to get to Basel to interview this guy. But at the end of the production, I had no more money left. I only had frequent flier miles to get myself to Switzerland.

When I got to the hotel that I was supposed to stay at, it was nighttime and raining, and my credit card didn't have enough funds available to check in. So I was sitting there in the lobby with all my luggage and gear, trying to figure out what I was going to do. I had started a mailing list probably six months earlier to keep people updated about the film, because graphic designers and font nerds are obsessive about this stuff. I probably had 10,000 people on the list at that point. We had released some posters, art prints and T-shirts for the film, so while I was sitting there in the lobby I decided to do a flash sale. I blasted an email out to 10,000 people and then just waited. After a few minutes, a PayPal order came through. Then another, and another. And within like 45 minutes I had made enough to check in to the hotel.

I've been repeating that story for 15 years and I’m glad to hear it matches the version I’ve told.

Hustwit: It's true. It does show the power of connecting with your audience and including them in the process. That's something I've been doing for 20 years now.

Around the time Helvetica came out in 2007, I noticed other documentary makers growing interested in your model. But then a different trend took place, which was the rise of Netflix and other streamers who were suddenly offering bigger budgets than anyone in the documentary world had ever seen. And because of that dynamic, many people backed off developing the DIY model. Now there's this new market shift and it feels like more filmmakers are trying to figure out a version of your model again. Do you have a sense of those trends?

Hustwit: I think that the DIY model never really went away. Because even in the heyday of streaming, for 99% of the documentary filmmakers out there, they weren't getting huge checks from Netflix. It's a system that for the most part doesn't work. So independent creatives are trying to come up with alternatives. It's not a choice, it's a necessity. If the system isn't working, you've got to figure out ways to circumvent it.

I've naturally had an aversion to signing all the rights to my work away. So for me, it was never really a choice. It seemed natural to me to release the films myself. Sure, I can license them to Netflix or to whoever, but I do it for a limited term. I'm not signing away long term rights or in perpetuity or making films as works for hire. That ability to keep the rights for the past 20 years has enabled me to get them distributed in different ways. As the technology has changed, as the market has changed and as viewing habits changed, I can keep changing my model because I own the rights to the catalog.

Can you talk about earning revenue off of the back catalog? One of the hopes of having a long career is that you can earn royalties off the work that you did years ago.

Hustwit: Well, it presumes that there is a demand for the work. On any given day, I'm still getting revenue from back catalog films. For instance, Helvetica is getting rented every single day on Amazon and Apple. Helvetica is on Kanopy for university and library streaming. Helvetica is on LinkedIn Learning. So there are multiple platforms. There is Vimeo On Demand that we do from our website. Anyone in the world who wants to watch Helvetica with a couple clicks and three or four bucks can watch it.

So it’s all these things, combined with merchandise. I've published books where I compiled the complete interviews from my films, I’ve released art prints, . We have a lot of assets as filmmakers, and I think most of the time we're not using them.

Many filmmakers still have this “all or nothing” distribution mentality: make the films and cross our fingers that a distributor buys it. And when that doesn't happen, we lick our wounds and repeat the process, which seems insane to me. It's a broken model. I think it's only rational to think of alternative ways.

My impression of your model in the early days is that 1) you were touring with your films; 2) you were selling DVDs and Blu-rays; and 3) you were doing transactional video on demand - aka TVOD.

All three of those things feel like they've changed in recent years. Certainly physical media has drastically reduced. I also sense that TVOD consumption changed as people became more used to their subscription services.

Hustwit: There still is an audience for TVOD. How many times have you wanted to watch a movie, something from 20 years ago, and it’s not streaming on Netflix or Max or whatever. You end up going to Amazon and renting it for $3.99. That's the deep catalog. I think Amazon has taken over that idea of having everything you could possibly want on digital, even if only a few people want it. You've got Prime on your TV and it’s easy to rent something if you really want to see it.

So you’re saying that TVOD still has life in it.

Hustwit: Yeah, I think so. Because we’re saturated with subscriptions now. We all hit that point where we’re tired of having six or seven different subscription services. That's causing all this belt tightening and stock price declines at the streamers, and the challenges that ultimately result in them acquiring less content. But I still think as long as a filmmaker has a pipeline into those TVOD platforms - Amazon or Apple - you'll still find people who want to watch.

Now what’s 100% real is that it's harder to get your film in front of people who don't know about it already. Because there's just too much noise. People are settled into what's on Netflix and whatever that algorithm recommends is what they're going to watch. And I think that's sad. That concentrates the decision making into maybe 20 people who are the buyers and commissioning editors at these places. There's got to be a better alternative to that.

I want to ask about communicating with your audience. A filmmaker was telling me that on Facebook they had accumulated tens of thousands of followers, but now Facebook won’t surface posts to their followers unless they pay to boost the post.

Hustwit: It seems insane. We helped build Facebook and these other social media platforms by bringing all our friends and putting all our content on it. Now they're charging us to access those people. So I’m trying to get back to having a direct relationship with the people who are into my films and want to help me make the next films.

Brian Eno in Gary Hustwit’s upcoming film

You recently started doing a Substack newsletter called Chance Operations, and I'm interested to know why you chose that model.

Hustwit: So there are three things that I'm doing with Chance Operations. One is I have this back catalog of footage - hundreds of hours of outtakes that are sitting on my hard drives. And most of it is amazing! So I wanted a place that was an online archive of my interviews with these designers, architects and thinkers. I always imagined that maybe an institution like the Cooper Hewitt or an organization like the AIGA would archive these interviews for future generations of designers to watch. But nobody has. So I decided I could actually do that and let people subscribe and support it. You can watch hundreds of hours of designers and artists and other people talking about what they do.

The second thing is I'm also interested in so many other creative people and their processes, whether they're painters or musicians or designers. But I can’t make a full film about each of them. So I wanted an outlet where I could interview artists about their creative process and release it as a text interview or a podcast or a short film or a photo essay. There are no rules. It's just whatever I think is interesting or whoever I want to talk to.

The third thing is I'm working on this feature on Brian Eno that I'm hoping to finish by the end of this year. And I've got a ton of stuff that I'm going to want to put out - excerpts, trailers and interviews with Brian. I've been working on the film for almost four years now, and I realized that it would be stupid for me just to give away all that content on Instagram or Facebook. So why not put all those things together and set it up so it's easy and affordable for people to access. So that's Chance Operations.

I really do think it's a great model. If I can get a critical mass of subscribers, I can have the budget to make things specifically for that group. I just want to have the resources to make the next film, and make filmmaking a sustainable career choice. And I think that's really what every filmmaker wants to do.

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