“The budget (for The Station Agent) was $500,000, and yeah, this being my first film did certainly make it harder to raise. Whenever you write an independent film that doesn’t read like a sellable Hollywood script, people get a bit nervous, and if it’s from a first time writer/director then people get nervous, and when you’ve got a dwarf in the lead role people get nervous. You put that combination together, and it doesn’t add up to fast cash. So, yeah, it took a while, but we were all pretty busy acting anyway – I was appearing on Broadway for a year, then I was doing a TV show for a year, so it wasn’t like we were just sat around in our living rooms thinking ‘Where’s the cash?’ When it actually happened, I was sitting with my agent, and I was like ‘Wow, that was easy!’ and my agent was like ‘Not really, it’s been three years’. I’d forgotten – it seemed like it just happened. I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to get involved because it is a lot of money, even though by movie standards it is pretty low, it’s a big gamble. We put together this financial package for the film and a friend of mine who is a banker and a lawyer structured this thing, and you read it and you get into the financial side of it all and you think ‘Why would anyone invest in any movie?’. It is just a horrible, horrible business. My brother is a financier and he was reading through it and he said ‘This is really well put together’, and he read the whole thing and was like ‘You’ve got to be fu@king kidding me! Who would invest in this stuff?'”
Writer/Director Tom McCarthy
Counter Culture Interview
The Station Agent was an audience favorite at Sundance in 2003 and according to Box Office Mojo made more than $8 million worldwide.
[…] “The budget (for The Station Agent) was $500,000, and yeah, this being my first film did certainly make it harder to raise. Whenever you write an independent film that doesn’t read like a sellable Hollywood script, people get a bit nervous, and if it’s from a first time writer/director then people get nervous, and when […] Original Source… […]
Thanks for the reminder that patience is such an important quality in this business!