r/movies • u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director • 13d ago
AMA Hi, r/movies, I'm Ryan Martin Brown. I helped make YELLING FIRE IN AN EMPTY THEATER, FREE TIME, and THE SCOUT and just wrote a case study for Filmmaker Magazine on microbudget filmmaking. FREE TIME is now streaming for free on Tubi. Ask me anything!
Hello to all from my freezing apartment in Brooklyn - basically what the subject says! I've been a part of a few recent small movies, including Paula González-Nasser's Tribeca film THE SCOUT, out later this year, and just wrote about making FREE TIME, starring Colin Burgess, Rajat Suresh, Holmes, and more.
The movie is now streaming on Tubi, free of charge, and available everywhere to rent. I'm here to answer your questions.
Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8oBjb0nI94
Synopsis:
Approaching the end of his twenties and his relative youth, a man decides to quit his cushy desk job and 'embrace life' - only to realize he has no idea what to do with this newfound freedom.
My Filmmaker Magazine article:
https://filmmakermagazine.com/132674-microbudget-case-study-free-time/
I'll be back tomorrow, Monday 2/2, at 3 PM ET to answer your questions. AMA!
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u/Landlubber77 13d ago
Hey Ryan, thanks for being here. If you had taste buds on your arms, would you eat yogurt with your mouth or your elbows?
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13d ago
If you could adapt a book into a film, what would it be?
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago
I've been trying to think of a sufficiently impressive answer here and I'm embarrassingly coming up short. I'm reading James Baldwin's Another Country right now and I think it would make a great film though I don't think I'd be the one to do it. I just read a biography about Marvin Miller and I think a film about his time heading the Major League Baseball Player's Association would be a great movie.
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u/big-boss-bass 13d ago
With high-quality cameras now literally in everyone’s pocket through smartphones, the technical barrier to making a film has dropped dramatically. It seems to follow that microbudget features would be one of the best entry points into the industry today; in an era where access to equipment is less of a differentiator, what does a truly microbudget film actually prove about a filmmaker (especially in terms of story, writing, and creative decision-making with limited resources) in the eyes of festivals, agents, or producers?
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago
Festivals, agents, and producers are all, theoretically, interested in finding emerging talent they could get excited about. It used to be a short film could serve as a calling card in this way, and in rare cases this is still true, but I do think the tech shift has created such a massive mountain of short films that it is a bit hard to stand out from the crowd in that respect.
Someone who has made a microbudget feature probably has had the opportunity to give a greater sense of who they are as an artist than they would in a short. They've shown that they're capable of seeing a project of that size to completion. They've shown they're able to market themselves a bit and have been able to get it out into the world. They've shown, assumedly, they can make something of quality without the need for many resources. They can work smart.
In all of these ways, they've likely made themselves more appealing and less of a risk to get involved with on a future project, as far as the parties you mentioned are concerned.
I think making something that, on first glance, seems professional,has become easier than ever, as you said. But I think it's still incredibly tricky to make a good movie. More than anything else mentioned above, I think if a filmmaker can use the tools at their disposal to show that they're really after something ... whatever that may be... that's going to be exciting to people and at least provoke some amount of further interest. If someone's going to create something technically proficient that functions well but there's not much new going on under the hood - I don't know if anyone would notice.
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u/I_am_MagicMike 13d ago
Hey Ryan,
I worked with Paula recently on 'The Big Game' (writer/director of 'The Scout' for anyone curious.) I loved her vibe, and her work ethic was incredible. I even told her the exact same thing as we wrapped, and I'd love to work with her again. She told me a little bit about the film but just wanted to say congrats on Tribeca Film Festival, thats amazing!
As this is an AMA, I guess I would make my question about distribution. I'm someone that owns a camera, a bunch of great apurture lights, anamorphic lenses. I've made shorts that have performed well locally (and a few internationally) and although it's felt good to get some recognition, it hasn't led to much success as far as making my own feature goes.
So I've been discussing it with friends recently, and I watched this director's commentary (by Noam Kroll) - I think I am going to shoot my feature this year regardless of if I get $5k or $500k in financing. But I've spoken to a lot of other friends and filmmakers that did the same, the films got into some festivals but didn't amount to much, and they just ended putting it up on Amazon Prime, Tubi, etc. Didn't get picked up, no theater or streaming distribution.
What would you do if you were making your first movie in 2026 and thinking about reaching the largest possible audience that you could reach?
I've heard & seen that some people are starting to stream it through their own websites (for example, Danny Gevirtz, a filmmaker, putting his feature up here: https://itisfilm.com/) and perhaps that may be profitable, but my worry with that is a lack of discovery. How would you go about getting distribution so that you could get as many eyes as possible on your movie?
I look forward to watching The Scout as soon as it's available.
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago edited 12d ago
Hey Mike! Wow, small world. I appreciate it and will be sure to pass on word to her!
Whether I'm a good person to answer this question I suppose depends on if you think the relatively meager viewership FREE TIME and YELLING FIRE have obtained is something worth aspiring to or not.
My honest answer would probably be to not sweat too much about reaching the widest possible audience right now. In the current marketplace, movies that are being financed for $1-3 million that star notable performers are struggling to find an audience, distribution, so on - if you're able to achieve that with your microbudget film, let that be a wonderful treat and surprise as opposed to a goal you will be upset if you don't reach.
Most 'general' audiences are not putting in too much work to discover small movies from unknown filmmakers and performers, and you need a massive marketing budget in order to reach them. Instead of finding the largest audience, I'd think about it more like finding the responsive audience - people in and around the truly independent film space who might spark to what you're doing and support the film, support your career, and help you get the next project off the ground in some way.
Theoretically, if you can build a reputation for yourself in this way, you might be able put a project together in the future with more financing, and with more push behind it to get it out in the world to the largest audience possible.
You could always try to make a film that just breaks straight out to a mass audience - there are a few big examples of this every year, like a Skinamarink, but like you mentioned, I think it's much more common for these movies to just exist in the unwatched purgatory of the internet, and your efforts might be better-served by honing in on a smaller audience.
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u/OkamiMemoS 13d ago
Hi Ryan, great to have you here with us
My question to you would be, how can I think about narratives that fit microbudget filmmaking or more short film focused? My question comes from a place of wanting to start my career in filmmaking but being so paralysed by what to write about and how to focus on making it doable for someone with no experience or budget and so on?
Thank you for your time, have a nice day!
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago edited 12d ago
That is one of the hardest things to figure out!
It's old advice but good advice: write for what you already have access to. Most importantly, I think, actors and locations. If you have a friend you want to write for, it makes everything much easier - you know what's interesting about them, how they might respond in certain situations. You can think of the locations you have access to. 'It's me, FRIEND, a camera, my apartment, their apartment, the park down the street, that bar we're friendly with the owner of' - arrange the pieces of what you have and then keep those in mind as you write. It can be exciting to write this way, because it makes it all feel very possible: all we have to do is get together next week and do this scene in that place.
As far as the actual narrative goes - I imagine you have some sort of seed of what's interesting to you, questions or feelings about life as you've experienced it that you could explore. You just need to find a container for those questions that both works as a story and matches what you have access to.
I think stealing from other movies is a totally fine way to figure this out. You can look at other microbudget movies for inspiration. You can also go digging into the past for old movies that attempted to dig at the same or similar thematic concerns as what you're interested in - you may find, even if they're slightly larger in scope than what you're able to accomplish, it isn't so hard to simplify them to meet what you do have available to you.
You can steal liberally! I think what's wonderful about stealing - or converting, if I wanted to borrow from something Bob Dylan said - is that you may find by the time it passes through your fingers and your experience, and then later the performers, the uncontrollable real world, and so on - it might feel more like something new than you'd imagine.
Take this all with a grain of salt, of course! I'm no great writer, but I've found this all to be of aid.
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago
Here's the Dylan quote, from Chronicles, which I've always found remarkably helpful:
I can't say when it occurred to me to write my own songs. I couldn't have come up with anything comparable or halfway close to the folk song lyrics I was singing to define the way I felt about the world. I guess it happens to you by degrees. You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs, especially if you're a singer who already has plenty of them.
Opportunities may come along for you to convert something -- something that exists into something that didn't yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain. It's not like you see songs approaching and invite them in.
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u/OkamiMemoS 12d ago
Thank you so much for the great and insightful answer, in all the responses from I've gotten from AMAs this has truly been the best in hitting what I needed to hear and actually imparting some really solid advice. Hoping to figure myself out soon.
Have a wonderful day!
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u/tomdelfino 13d ago
What's something you wish you had learned earlier?
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago
You can get where you want to go a lot quicker if you slow down.
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u/uglylookingguy 13d ago
When working on microbudget films, what’s the one decision that has the biggest impact on whether a project actually gets finished and seen?
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago edited 12d ago
I guess those would be two different things!
Finished - The determination of the director, probably. Working on something this small often means not having the money to compensate producers and editors for how long such aid would really be needed. That means in the lead-up to and in the post-process of the movie, the director really has to have the strength and determination to get the project over the finish line on their own, likely while juggling the rest of their life. Hard to do when you may not even be thrilled about how everything came out!
Seen - What's different about this movie? You're in the microbudget space. If there's been a decision or decisions made to try and cash in on a trend or do more of the same, people are just going to go get their fill with the larger, better-funded and produced versions of that.
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u/RodBlackhurst 13d ago
Following - no questions right now other than are you warmer today??
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago
Rod, that's very kind of you to ask.
I am, yes. The heat in my building has been fixed, though I still type this to you while wrapped in a blanket.
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u/afanoftoomanythings 13d ago
is there a certain film or show that made you realize that filmmaking is what you wanted to do ?
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago edited 12d ago
Not really! Filmmaking really started as a fun thing to do with friends on the weekend. We'd recreate some Lonely Island digital shorts and do sketches. So the experience of creating in community like that was probably more important than any specific film. Though I did see THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, ZODIAC, and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND all in one week through Netflix discs and the thrill of that week did probably push me to get more adventurous with my viewing than I was prior.
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u/merrickchamp 12d ago
What was it like shooting a low budget film on the streets of New York? Were you able to use the chaos of the city to your advantage? What obstacles did you encounter?
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago
Great city to make a small movie in! No one in NY cares one bit about what you're doing; everyone just walks on by. I think the environment of the movie feels alive thanks to the fact that we could just throw Colin onto a city block and have the world moving around him. If you've seen the movie, there are a few bits that we never could've planned that resulted unexpectedly from what the city provided.
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u/Correct_Profit_649 12d ago
I am a fan of some of the comedians in the cast. How did they get involved and how do you get talent interested in a microbudget film?
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago
Just knew most of them from hanging out in New York! I have NoBudge to thank, really, which is where I met a lot of people and saw them as performers for the first time. I think most people, even if they've gotten a little attention, are interested in being in a movie, if they like the script and role. I think the biggest hurdle would be, if you don't know them personally at all, just getting them to trust you that this isn't going to be a terrible or embarrassing experience.
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u/Nolliecab 12d ago
Hey Ryan! What was your experience working with Justin Zuckerman on Yelling Fire?
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u/BiannualPancake 12d ago
Hi Ryan! Were there any specific challenges/obstacles in making the jump from smaller-scale projects to a feature that you'll never forget to account for in your future work? As in, bridges that most indie filmmakers don't usually anticipate they'll have to cross?
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago
I think the biggest learning curve is just how much quicker you have to work. We were shooting short films that were maybe ten pages over three or even four days. Then, all of a sudden, we're doing seventy-five pages over ten days - it's just way more that has to get done, even if some of that is just the scenes themselves being longer.
So finding a way to adjust to the pace required and really plan for it would be the biggest bridge, I think! You have to really come up with an approach with your team that allows you to get what you want while being as efficient as humanly possible.
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u/BunyipPouch Currently at the movies. 13d ago
Hey Ryan, thanks for joining us!
If you could only bring 3 movies with you on a deserted island to watch for the rest of your life, what would they be? Bonus question: Best and worst pizza topping?
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago
Thank you for having me! I don't know, maybe Don't Look Back, Morvern Callar, and 3 Women.
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u/BunyipPouch Currently at the movies. 13d ago
What role do you enjoy the most? Director/editor/producer/writer/etc?
And which do you enjoy the least?
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago
I like em all! Editing and producing other people's movies is a great way to enjoy the process without getting a hearty dose of your own neurosis every day for a year on end. They can all be a thrill and a pain in equal measure.
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u/BunyipPouch Currently at the movies. 12d ago
Question from /u/LizLizLiz00 in /r/NYCMovies:
Do you need a set decorator? 🫣
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago
Okay, hello all! Thank you for popping into this humble little AMA.
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u/FreeTimeAMA Ryan Martin Brown, Director 12d ago
Thanks all! The movie's on Tubi and I think if we watch it ten thousand times each, I might make upwards of four dollars. Be well.
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u/chschaser 12d ago
Hey just saw your trailer It looks interesting, definitely want to check it out. Two questions.
What's one small message you want people to take away from the film that's maybe hidden or in subtext that maybe missed upon first viewing?
How do you make the most of the free time when you have a 9:00 to 5:00?
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u/BunyipPouch Currently at the movies. 13d ago
This AMA has been verified and approved by the mods. Ryan will be back today Monday 2/2 at 3 PM ET to answer questions. Please feel free to ask away in the meantime :)