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Tips from Ruba Nadda
- Actively lobby for donations and free services
- Look for alternate ways of paying for services
- Make it easy for people to say "yes"
- Hone your film business savvy with short films
- Accept you have to "pay your dues"
- Find a respected mentor-executive producer
- Be flexible and do what you can yourself
- Look for media news angles in your work
- Keep in touch with reporters
- Make sure your web site is up-to-date
When she set out to make Sabah, she contacted them and they helped her. In Germany, for example, she is so well-known from her exposure at festivals that Sabah started its run there in 50 cinemas.
The shorts also taught her financial lessons. For example, she joined the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT), where she was able to get "very cheap but good" camera equipment.
She also found that sometimes it's better to move on to a new film rather than spending money finishing one that isn't your best work. She spent "thousands" of dollars on her first film, a 23-minute short, and never showed it.
She learned, however that it cost the same to make three five-minutes shorts as it did to make one 15-minute movie. So she would walk into a lab with three shorts and "grovel" her way into getting enough time to deal with all three. After the first several shorts, she learned that she could negotiate to pay only for the lab's out-of-pocket costs, not the profit the lab would have made, and then credit the lab as a producer.
Keep an eye out for deals
and exchanges
Crews were family and friends, who got experience if not big pay cheques. Nadda worked full time as an administrative assistant and poured her own money into her films. She was known for doing everything herself, including designing the sets, buying costumes, picking up the equipment and even cooking for her crew.
Nadda was catapulted further into the world of feature-film making when she was fired from her full-time job in 2001. She was in the middle of making her second feature, Unsettled (which, like her first feature, has not been widely shown), and had no savings. Her whole career seemed to be in jeopardy.
Finally, her mother stepped in, advising her to take her filmmaking even more seriously. "She said: this is also a business and you need to treat it as a business."
"You need to treat filmmaking
as a business"
At about the same time, a staff member from Telefilm Canada called, saying that she loved Nadda's work and that she wanted to be a mentor.
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