How do people live with themselves if they fail?

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I hope you're maximizing your chances of success by running your plans by friends, mentors, industry people, and any other experts in that field that you have access to to ensure that your plans are as solid as they can be before you pull the trigger and take the gamble with your time, money, and energy.

I have run it by people and have gotten mixed opinions all the way from awesome to aweful. The opinions don't seem to change anything therefore, and it still feels like a big risk...

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Everything BIG is a big risk.

What about your plan gives you confidence that once executed it WILL BE successful?

Script? Actors? Location? Production? Promotion? Connections to have it screened? Reviews by others that say it's awesome?! (and who are these people? your mom may be biased, but an experienced filmmaker may be more valuable to listen to.)

And of those who say the plan is awful, who are they and Why do they think it's awful? What's their full feedback and constructive criticism? Can you use their input to refine and improve your plan, then re-pitch it to everyone you've run it by and gauge reactions again? Can your plan be improved to get near unanimous thumbs up across the board? If so, perhaps that will help mitigate risks of failure and ease your mind going all in on a risky venture.

Oh okay. Well one of the biggest problems is actors and locations and I wish I had more to choose from, and my worry is it will not look cinematic enough as a result, especially with realistic locations, that you are not allowed to repaint even, or have to compromise your shots because of how it's built, etc.

Can you audition more actors until you find the ideal fits?

Locations.. I don't quite follow - but if you need real world realistic locations and you're concerned about what they look like in terms of paint or architecture, can't you simply continue the hunt for better locations to shoot until you find something that's going to work as good as it possibly can without a massive set budget?

Well I can continue the hunt, but the more you continue, the more unavailable everything else becomes, so I cannot take too long and everyone else cannot wait for a long time of course.

The problem with most locations is they are not built for a cinematic look though. Most of them in real life, where I live anyway, have white or brown walls, where as the type of mood I am going for would call for more blue, cold walls, for example, and hardly anyone paints locations blue in reality.

These are for interior walls or exteriors of buildings?

If interior, a home? Office? What sort of set and quantity of rooms/walls?

Is painting things blue completely out of the question? Is it possible someone may allow you to paint things blue in order to have a fresh coat of paint? That'd be half the cost of painting blue and then back to brown again. If you had to revert it back to brown, is the amount of walls that require paint feasible to paint twice in order to have the ideal set colour?

Or, can the cooler blue colour "feel," be achieved in some other way? Blue lighting on white walls? A blue camera lens filter? LED's and projectors can change the colours of walls with nothing but light..

I don't know if this is a good idea or not, but maybe you could put it on youtube, would probably be risky but the band The Hu from Mongolia got big just by making their own music videos and putting them on youtube. I still think you should have a back up plan for how to make a living...but its not impossible you'd find some success.

Maybe distribution on youtube/streaming services is a possibility for him.

IIRC, he does have a job/source of income - that's how he's been able to save the $200K to consider going all in on his film producing dreams with. The trouble is that $200K is a shoestring budget for a feature film. It's POSSIBLE to be successful with that budget, and some films have done it for far less, but the Typical amount of money required to see a project through and get it sold and into theatres is more like 3x that as far as I've been told by some people who work in film.

One self produced movie I was at a private premier screening for with the crew and actors etc cost ~$350-400K to make. It was Okay, but had some flaws that I *personally* would have made different decisions on. Visually it looked like it cost 10x as much so they worked some real visual magic for the budget. Ultimately, afaik, the movie was not purchased by any cinema company nor sold to any movie channel etc.. meaning the people that mortgaged their home to make it feeling that they HAD TO make this story into a movie may have even lost their home doing it. After seeing the film, and then hearing the story for the inspiration of it.. my immediate thoughts were "The actual real true life story sounds significantly better/scarier. WHY did they alter it and make it hokey/cheesy??? The real life true story that inspired it would have made a better movie with a better ending that, IMO, would have had a better chance of success.." It seems they may have lived and learned, tried and failed. FWIW, the people with the movie inspiration had Zero film background, only a moment where they thought "This has to be made into a movie!" and then they ran with it and hired professionals to make it happen on as few dollars as possible.. but they made some fatal mistakes, IMO. Hindsight is 2020, perhaps they realize that now.

Oh well locations owners so far do not want their locations painted, even if you agree to paint it back. I asked DPs about blue lighting instead, but they said it would look fake and that the audience would know that it's lighting as oppose to paint, and it just won't look right they said, when I asked about that. A blue filter on the lens will also turn the actors skin blue-ish though, which is what I was trying to avoid though. Just want the backgrounds blue, but not the skin. The DPs before I asked said, the only way to make a color look natural is paint, if that's true.

As for budget, people tell me to do it for only 30K so I wouldn't have to spend so much and save myself less stress. Movies like El Mariachi, and Primer, were shot for less, but I cannot figure out what they did, and it doesn't seem to add up.

I see, I see.

If I were you I would continue my hunt for a location where someone would allow the walls to be painted. Paint is pretty cheap and entirely possible to revert back to the original colour with a few more coats of primer/paint.

What Type of location is it? Perhaps you could put an ad on craigslist or facebook or something to try to find an ideal set that someone will let you paint.

Probably a wise move to listen to others saying do it for $30K if you can pull it off. With all the planning and prep work, it may just be successful! BUT, if it "fails," your success may be learning Why and how to do it better next time.. and with the savings you still have, you could repeat the process 6 times over in your pursuit of cinematic success. 6 chances are way better than a one shot deal!

Who hasn't failed at least once?

How do people live with themselves if they don't try?

There are quite a few locations that I would like to paint but so far no location owner is okay with painting, just based on principle it seems.

I am trying to keep the budget low but everytime I do the math I keep going over 100K which I can do but not sure if I should moneywise. But at the same time, not sure how to get the cost lower, so I do not know how others do it, who have made movies for less.

Someone out there in a suitable location must be ok with a couple extra coats of paint.

As for your budget, how have you arrived at your numbers? Are your figures based on estimates/guesses? Are you guessing high? Have you gotten quotes and simply added them up? For any quotes you have gotten, have you negotiated lower prices or simply accepted the quotes as the expected cost?

I Know that there are many expenses in film that are quite negotiable. One example I overheard was from a young filmmaker talking about renting camera equipment/rigs from a local supplier for $x. A more experienced person in film heard what the equipment was and the quoted figure and told the younger guy that the price was very high and he should phone and offer much less. They knew exactly which person owned that equipment and that it would most likely just sit in his backyard making no money, and that the typical rental price was lower, so knew to advise the young man not to pay the asking price and to offer a lower rate.

Is it possible you're getting a number of vendors who are charging too much for their services seeing as you're a new client to them and they're trying to get as high of price from you as possible vs. dropping down to the rates they might give people who give them repeat business?

Or have you budgeted far too much for certain types of expenses? I know another error the young man in the above example made was wanting to rent some sort of special camera for an extended period of time, and the advice was that if he needed it for more than one day he was in crazytown because even major films only use that type of expensive camera for shoots for only one day. (whatever it was.. something for some neat cinematic effect.)

For the people who tell you that you should do it for $30k - are they industry people? Have you asked them how you can trim your budget to do it for $30k? If it's possible, you'd think they'd be able to go through your numbers and show you where you're overspending so much that it adds up to over $100k.

The people who told me to do it for 30K are not industry people but just people, who care to not want to see me throw more money in the risk.

I'm not talking so much equipment rentals, compared to paying everyone more so. A lot of people have their own equipment when you hire them but it's the pay rates that seem to knock this thing well over 30K, if I pay 30 dollars an hour let's say, which is still considered cheap to some. Some types of positions in the crew will charge higher though.