J. Horton, Filmmaker/Youtuber/Podcaster: But I really wish somebody had
made it known to me that like you don’t necessarily have to be
Quentin Tarantino to make a living making movies. Film Courage:
What’s the one thing you wish someone had a heart-to-heart talk with you and said this is
what’s going to happen and this where it’s going to be hard and you learned it on your own and
I wish that someone had set me down and been more realistic in your expectations of what
your career is going to be or what it takes to make a living as a filmmaker? J.: When I
was starting out I had the same vision that most filmmakers do. I’m going to make this low-budget
movie and I’m going to put it in film festivals and it’s going to get discovered and some big
distributor is going to pick it up and it’s going to take off and I’m going to be Spike Lee or I’m
going to be Quentin Tarantino or I’m going to be Robert Rodriguez and that’s what it takes to
be able to make a living doing movies. But it’s not, there’s a whole sub-level of working class
filmmakers that are making movies that a lot of people would consider backyard movies, movies
shot for $10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 and there are people out there that are making these movies
and can make livings off of them. You might not be rich, I’m not on red carpets and I’m not getting
Oscars and awards and all of that but I’m doing what I love to do. I’m making a living at it and
to be really honest and a lot of people will say that I'm I'm rationalizing it because I'm not at
the higher level but honestly at this point in my career like I don't want to be much higher
don't get me wrong if I stumbled on a $500,000 budget as opposed to a 50 that'd be great i'd
love to do that but as far as like directing like studio films or tentpole stuff I have absolutely
no desire to do that any anymore I did when I started but not now but I really wish somebody had
made it known to me that like you don't necessarily have to be Quentin Tarantino
to make a living making movies it's interesting how people's desires for success change and maybe
you get tastes of it here and you realize what this is a lot of stress over here I kind of like
this realm where I'm doing my own thing I'm still accountable but I don't have to be there's a price
to pay I think for certain levels of a career yeah yeah totally and one thing that's always
been a not a problem but a a source of anxiety for me especially when I have outside investors like
I feel you know a moral and and of course a legal responsibility to return the money and when you're
making movies for fifty thousand dollars or sixty thousand dollars or twenty thousand dollars
most of the people that are investing in those movies are not super rich people because like real
like rich experienced investors they're not going to invest in a $60,000 movie and not
because it can't be profitable but because there's a ceiling to how profitable it can be
like yes sky is the limit but it's outliers for the most part if you do a hundred movies at 50 000
the most one of those is going to make in a year in general terms is like maybe a couple hundred
thousand and that's like at the tippity top so for a a regular investor somebody that invests
millions of dollars or they have big they're that's just not an exciting investment they're
like what I'm going to put $60,000 and two years later I'm going to get $150,000 back or maybe
$200,000 it's just not so it's so the people that are investing in these movies are usually
people like myself that we're we're making modest livings we have a good year we might have $10,000
or $15,000 that we can throw towards something and we do and but so then as a filmmaker when you get
that money you have all this you want to be able to return it one of my movies I produced back
in 2010 and it was a I think a $35,000 budget and one of the producers who i'd worked with for years
he had it it's finally our project to work together and he had come into some like family
money a family member had passed or something like that so he had a little bit of a nest egg
and he ended up putting like fifteen thousand dollars into that movie so eventually the movie
made its money back but it took a long time and and I felt that every day until that money
was returned that's just how I like like me as a filmmaker I can't take money and then
not return it and feel okay and I'm still my last narrative film which I know my tagline is I make
movies that make money but my last narrative film the campus death day it was a financial failure it
didn't make its budget back and there was quite a few like two and three thousand dollar investors
in that that they could really use that money and they never made it and I I’ll always feel
bad about that was there a moment jay when the Hollywood dream was no more you just wanted to be
a working-class filmmaker or a middle-class filmmaker I would say I would say it pro like
maybe around five years ago it started to occur to me that hey maybe like I'm
not going to be directing million dollar movies but but I still I still kind of hold on to it
still like that like that's the goal but somewhere in the last like two years like moving out to
Georgia and doing the documentaries full-time and and honestly doing my youtube channel
like I just I just realized that I don't I really don't even desire that anymore I like
I don't desire the red carpet stuff anymore or the adulation of millions or whatever it is it's just
it really became about the work and what I think what really changed for me for the better and I
recommend this for like all filmmakers when you stop making movies a hundred percent for yourself
and start making them for others is when things change at least it did for me
when I stopped thinking about my little precious passion project and I start thinking about like
with the documentaries for example I'm making a dog rescue documentary and I'm bringing
awareness to this issue and this this small little dog rescue that might be struggling like
that's what making that movie was about and then a byproduct of that it can be financially successful
or even I'm getting ready to do a horror movie craving my first narrative in a few years
and but totally this isn't just like hey this is my script that I wanted to make
the whole time I'm like what is the sub genre what is the audience expecting from the sub genre what
can I give them to make this better and and I think that that leads to more practical success
you had been in LA how many years 15 15. so you came here from Georgia
now when you came out here too okay so originally I was from Indiana I grew up in Indiana
and it didn't really seem like I was really into movies like I was a small kid I didn't really
play sports I just watched movies so but there was no like it didn't seem like that was a real
thing that you could do like I was shooting little videos and stuff but it never crossed my mind
before I moved out of Indiana that movies are something that I could do and make some money
at it's like you had to be in Los Angeles or New York or you had to be just famous and discovered
and I moved from Indiana to Louisiana I worked offshore for about a year and a half save some
money for college and then decided I was going to go to school and the university of New Orleans had
a pretty good film program and so I went there I studied communications and film and this was
right around the time that Panasonic released their dvx 100 the 24p mini dv camera yeah and
all of a sudden and in like what is it 28 days later it'd come out and I was like oh it's like
it's suddenly feasible to like shoot a feature film and so I started thinking more about it
as like a practical career and that right after I graduated college that summer we pulled together
a few thousand dollars and that's when we shot rise of the undead which was my first movie.