My name is Matt Knudsen. I was born in Seattle, Washington and began making video projects as an alternative form of book reports when I was 10 years old. I took to filmmaking so immediately and so passionately that I basically neglected all other school subjects that didn’t allow me an opportunity to use my video camera. As such, my grades suffered in basically everything besides English and Drama.
My GPA and test scores were weak and I had few extracurriculars besides directing plays and writing movie reviews for the school newspaper so I only got into one of the eight colleges I applied to. Luckily it was Loyola Marymount University where I flourished in the film department and made a close group of friends and collaborators who I still work with to this day.
After college I worked on set, mostly in the camera and electrical departments, and directed a few shorts and music videos. I attended the graduate film program at UCLA where I wrote, directed, and produced Cassidy Red as my thesis film project.
indieactivity: How did you get into filmmaking and screenwriting?
Matt: I was kind of a miserable kid until I discovered filmmaking. I was never particularly good at sports, I was basically ignored by all of the girls I was interested in, and I was angry with my parents for getting divorced and putting my sister and I at the middle of their ugly and destructive breakup. The one good thing that came from my mother getting remarried was my stepfather gifting me his remaindered Hi-8 video camera as an olive branch when we weren’t getting along.
I know it’s a cliché for filmmakers to say this but it was literally like a current of pure inspiration that shot through me as soon as I looked through that viewfinder. After that it was ALL I wanted to do. I would transcribe my favorite scenes from Raiders of the Lost Ark longhand to teach myself screenwriting. I would wire two VCRs together and do tape-to-tape deconstructions of The Empire Strikes Back to teach myself editing.
I would even watch The Good, the Bad and the Ugly with the sound off (a technique I picked up from reading an interview with Steven Spielberg) to understand cinematography. It was ALL I wanted to do and, to be honest, it pretty much still is.
Matt Knudsen on set of Cassidy Red_Directing
indieactivity: How can an indie filmmaker distribute their film?
Matt: This is my first experience trying to get a feature of my own distributed and was pretty much learning it as I went along. We were hoping to do an extended festival run with the film to try and gain some attention but we only got into a scant few. Luckily one of them was “Dances with Films” which is a Southern California regional festival that takes place at the TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood. The benefit of premiering in an “industry town” like LA is that many of the distributors are based there and our publicist and sales agents were able to get the word out to them that the screening was taking place. It was an enormous relief when we started getting offers almost immediately. We were able to take meetings with about a dozen different companies before we made the decision to go with Vision Films.
indieactivity: When should a filmmaker start to plan for distribution?
Matt: Unfortunately, probably from page one, word one of the writing process. The business is far too competitive and the economics are far too terrifying to not make an effort to get the film in front of as large of an audience as possible. If someone is independently wealthy and/or only desires to make films for themselves and their family members then perhaps they can afford to self-distribute or only show the film to select viewers. And more power to them if that’s their game plan! But I believe that the only way to make a living in this business and achieve the ultimate goal of getting to make more films is to try and direct as much attention as possible toward each individual finished product.
indieactivity: How do I get my film into theatres with an indie budget?
Matt: I wish I had an answer for that. Unfortunately our distribution agreement did not include theatrical exhibition so I’m not qualified to really sound off. I’m afraid the cynical but ultimately realistic answer is that the best possible way to position an independent film for theatrical distribution is to cast widely-recognized performers in major roles.
The set of Cassidy Red
indieactivity: How can indie filmmakers finance projects?
Matt: Crowdfunding, credit cards, donations, begging, borrowing, stealing… I think it’s the hardest part of the production process but somehow more and more low budget films seem to come along every year so clearly filmmakers are not deterred!
indieactivity: What films have you written?
Matt: I’ve made dozens of short subject, music video, industrial, documentary, and experimental projects over the years. Many of them can be viewed on my website. Cassidy Red is my first feature project as writer/director: www.cassidyred.com
indieactivity: What is your concept on collaboration?
Matt: It’s everything. This is not a revolutionary concept but filmmaking is the most collaboration-dependent of all art forms. I think you either need to get comfortable with this fact and give yourself over to it completely or you need to pursue a different art form entirely. Luckily I find the collaborative element to be the most enjoyable and rewarding part of the process. There will be plenty of bad days on set and much of the time might be spent in the unsuccessful pursuit of chemistry or proper professional rhythm sometimes it is elusive. But when it comes, when it clicks properly… when every department and crew member is working in total harmony and each element leading to that perfect shot comes together the way it is “supposed” to- from the physical logistics of the dolly move all the way to the most intangible, subtle nuance of the performance… well it makes me want to burst into applause right there on the set and it reminds me why this is the greatest art form mankind has yet to devise.
The camera crew on Cassidy Red Setting Up camera for a shot
indieactivity: How do you find the process of independent filmmaking?
Matt: I’ve never worked in a studio environment or at least have never directed anything at that level so I don’t really have much of a basis for comparison. I find the independent process to be exhilarating from a creative standpoint and I definitely thrive on the scrappy, put-on-a-show gumption of many of the indie crews I’ve worked with. But I also am deeply troubled and occasionally mortified to continually ask people to work for less compensation than they deserve. I detest having to ask for favors and bristle at writing another email that starts with “So sorry to have to ask you for this but…” I know that conventional wisdom is “mo money mo problems” but I would be interested in facing those problems someday if it meant that I could compensate the crew properly.
indieactivity: Describe your recent work?
Matt: Cassidy Red is a Western, romance, period piece about the fallout of a torrid love triangle, the body count that piles up in the wake of it, and the toll that it takes on a small town in Southern Arizona. It’s set against a sweeping desert backdrop but is ultimately an intimate period piece and character study that spends much of its time around a smoky saloon and bordello, in a murky jail cell, and at the hangman’s gallows.
The film was developed as my thesis project while I was a student in the graduate directing program at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. I wrote it in a screenwriting class, I developed it with my faculty thesis committee, I hired almost exclusively enrolled or recently-graduated students for the crew, and the first handful of test screenings were done in our editing classes. It’s a period feature film with a cast of 50+ and a crew of 100+ that took nearly 3 years to complete. But ultimately it is a student film production, first and foremost. We shot the film in 18 days outside of Tucson, Arizona.
Matt Knudsen setting up camera
We also did 3 days of “pickups” and inserts in Santa Clarita, north of Los Angeles. After that I worked closely with our editor, John Lange for over a year before we locked picture. John and I had gone to college together and he runs his own post-production facility in addition to being a full-time editor. He came on as our lead editor but the constraints of our budget coupled with his responsibilities at his company necessitated mostly night and weekend editing sessions- hence the 13 months of post. VFX were also handled by John’s company,
The Sandbox Media House. Color correction, delivery, opening titles, poster design, and DCP production were all done at UCLA by current students. All marketing materials besides our preliminary poster were coordinated by Vision Films after we signed our distribution agreement with them.
indieactivity: What are you future goals?
Matt: I’ve got a few feature projects that I’ve written and would love to start developing before the end of the year. One of them is a Western that’s very different in tone from Cassidy Red but also features a complicated woman at the center of it. One of the scripts is a “supernatural comedy” set at a couple’s retreat in Baja. It’s kind of The Big Chill by way of Freaky Friday.
I also have pilot scripts and series proposals that I would be interested in exploring one of these days. It would be fun to bounce back and forth between feature and “television” projects (or whatever word we’re using to describe serialized work these days) every couple of years. Who knows which way the industry winds will be blowing as early as tomorrow?
indieactivity: What does an indie filmmaker need in today’s world of filmmaking?
Matt: For better or for worse, aspiring filmmakers today need to be prepared to take on a lot of responsibilities besides just “directing”. The days of beret and jodhpur-wearing fops shouting into a megaphone are uniformly OVER. A successful filmmaker today, even one working at the highest studio level, is likely proficient not only with the ins and outs of the camera interface (at least the Arri Alexa and Red systems) but also a nonlinear editing platform like Adobe Premiere or Avid Media Composer.
Most of the “successful” independent filmmakers I know are almost always moonlighting as editors in between directing gigs or at least cutting their own reels or web materials. I’ve done most of the web design and social media branding for Cassidy Red myself which is not something I ever felt qualified to do or desired to learn. But the reality of today’s marketplace is that it’s very difficult to find an audience without a vociferous web presence and much of the material that will be populating said web presence, in addition to the finished film, will likely need to be generated by the filmmaker themselves.
indieactivity: Briefly write about your career?
Matt: I I’ve worked virtually every single job on a film set- from the lowliest PA, dragging trash bags through the mud while being abused over the walkie talkie by a belligerent AD, all the way up to getting to direct my own feature. All of that time and all of those sets taught me a lot of humility and made me realize that there is absolutely NO excuse for an unpleasant or disrespectful work environment. Production days are just too long and the physicality is too taxing to add an uncomfortable workplace on top of that.
Whatever else I do or achieve in this business, I have made it a personal mission of mine not just to continue collaborating with and providing opportunities for the people that I love, respect, and enjoy being around, but also to ensure that any set I’m managing is safe, pleasant, productive, and professional. I love filmmaking with all of my heart but if I found out tomorrow that the only way to make a good movie is to put a crew in potential danger and mistreat them with a hostile workplace then I think I would go find something else to do with my life. Movies are just too important for us to allow the making of them to be miserable.
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