We Sell Lies – Why So Much of What We ‘Know’ About Film Production is Fiction

At the end of the 19^th Century a group of Paris’ most avant-garde citizens sauntered through the doors of the Grand Café on Boulevard des Cupucines, past the art nouveau decorations on the walls, the tables crowded with people trying to have a quiet cup of coffee, and down into the basement, to the Salon Indien – A tiny room, lined with ornate curtains,  and crowded with folding chairs. As they found their seats, the house lights dimmed, replaced by one very bright light at the back of the room. With a mechanical clatter, it sputtered into life, illuminating the silver-white square of stretched fabric opposite.

As the light flickered, an image of a train station appeared on the screen, a small waiting room on the left, a crowd of passengers on the right, and between them, stretching from the foreground into the distance, a train track.

To the watching crowd, it immediately became apparent that this wasn’t just a simple photograph. The passengers waiting on the platform were moving. And as they stepped back, they revealed a train approaching. Fast.

The crowd in the makeshift cinema screamed in panic. Leaping out of their seats they ran for the doors, terrified that this train was about to barrel straight out of the screen and crush them to death. Because the movie premiered to them that day – a short film called “L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat” by the Lumiere brothers – was too much for its simple audience to comprehend.

This is, as film historian Martin Loiperdinger puts it, is cinema’s “founding myth”. And as he points out in his 2004 essay for The Moving Image (albeit in far more polite terms), complete  bullshit.

In truth, the audience at the Grand Café were already familiar with the concept of film; the Lumieres had put on a program of ten shorts in the same venue a little over a month before, and the screening of “L’Arrivée” was itself part of a multi-film program.  

And to add another nail to the coffin of the myth, the first screening of this film wasn’t even in Paris, but instead at the Eden Theatre in Cliotat – about 4 kilometres from the station where it was shot. In all likelihood the first members of the public to see the film were entirely familiar with the station, and could well have been a part of the crowd on the platform.

But movies have always been a business as well as an art form, and stories of spectacle so realistic that audiences fear for their lives sell tickets.

And so a lie became a ‘fact’.

Very little has changed in the 129 years since “L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat” was released. Audiences still love spectacle, and those of us responsible for making money from movies are still unlikely to let the truth get in the way of a story that sells tickets.

That’s why so many actors ‘do their own stunts’ in spite of there being countless skilled stunt doubles on set with them. And why so many films ‘don’t use CGI’ in spite of their credit sequences lasting 25 minutes as the names of thousands of VFX artists scroll by.

But that’s only a part of why so much of what we all ‘know’ about film production is fabrication.

I’ve been in the film industry for pretty much my entire working life. As a reporter I’ve interviewed people from every strata and all areas of the business, be that Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, Gaspar Noé, Joe Wright, or some first time director with a £50k budget for a movie you’ve never heard of. Many of these people I’ve interviewed on multiple occasions and for prolonged periods. I’ve built up relationships, asked impertinent questions that should have got me thrown out of the room, and I’ve learned a lot from them.

Beyond that, as a producer and line producer, I’ve made seven independent feature films, as well as more short films, corporate videos and music videos than I can keep track of, and before that, I learned my craft by working my way up through multiple departments across countless projects.

In short, I know a great deal about how films are made. In one very small sector of the film industry – line producing British independent films with a budget less than £1m – I’m reasonably confident in saying I know about as much as anyone else alive.

But even still, my knowledge of how films are made is limited.

I’m a specialist in an industry of specialists. Most TikTokers know more about editing than I ever will. Your average YouTuber is better-versed in lens choice than I’ve ever needed to be, and while I might have opinions on costume choice or art direction, they’re not much more informed than the average person on the street.

And this works both ways. Most people on set (including, more often than I’d like, my clients) have no concept of what my job actually entails. But as long as the caterer is feeding everyone, the cast and crew go home in the same physical condition they arrived in, and everyone gets paid, they don’t need to.

It’s not a perfect system, but like any complex task, it’s impossible for one person to understand all of it with any degree of depth. We bury ourselves in silos of expertise, and trust that our colleagues have done the same thing. This is even more true when it comes to major Hollywood productions, where labour budgets are the GDP of small countries, and each department consists of hundreds of people.

But it also means that when someone tries to distil that knowledge down, to share with the wider world – whether that’s a producer or director writing their memoirs, a journalist writing a behind the scenes book, or a lecturer teaching a class of media students – they don’t have the full story to share. And so details get missed, or glossed over, or misremembered, or made up.

And often, these misunderstandings get repeated, passed from one person to the next, becoming further distilled and twisted as they go along. And in the end people accept the distortion of an anecdote as a ‘fact’. A good example of this happening is the role of a producer.

In actuality, the job covers a lot of different bases – from developing the script and finding finance, to logistics, and eventually, to selling the project. It’s such a broad role that most films of any scale have multiple producers with differing responsibilities. And because those responsibilities happen at different stages of production, in many cases, there will be producers on a project who never actually meet one another.

Of course, while that level of nuance may be relevant to a handful of nerds, for most people – including many with an interest in the film industry – it’s more information than they care to ingest. As a result, the general belief is that producers ‘have something to do with money’. And over time, that’s become the idea that producers are the people who pay for a film to be made. Which is the main reason why, about a decade ago, we went through a spate of films posted to Kickstarter where backers were given a producer credit.

Generally – apart from hurting my professional pride – this particular false assumption hasn’t really had much of a negative impact. But that’s not always the case, and I’d argue some of these things are genuinely damaging, both to the discourse around movies and TV shows, and to the way independent films get made.

One example of this was the discussions around the various Star Trek spin offs that were originally financed by Netflix, and subsequently moved to Paramount Plus. From the outset a group of creepy incel dudes complained that the show was ‘too woke’, but over the years this discussion moved from “I don’t like the show” to “no one watches the show and it’s going to get cancelled”. And while the rumours of cancellation were complete lies, they gained traction because the general public have no real concept of how TV shows are developed and made, and how much information Netflix was sharing with Paramount about viewing figures.  

In reality, not only was Discovery popular enough to run for five seasons – at a reported budget of over $8 million per episode – but it also led to the commissioning of six more Star Trek shows (including two direct spin-offs), and a TV movie.

Those of us who had been paying attention were aware that Netflix rarely published viewing figures – or even the metrics they used to determine ‘success’ – so instead we relied on soft-data, like the level of social media chatter about the show, and the popularity of Discovery-related ancillary products, to get an idea of how well the show was doing. Unfortunately general audiences didn’t fully understand that method, and so frequently fell for clickbait articles from unscrupulous grifters, talking about ‘cancellation’, and replacement of lead actors.

Similar conversations have happened in the last couple of years in relation to the live action TV adaptation of popular wargame (novel & computer game) franchise, Warhammer. Games Workshop, the company that owns the property, announced in July 2019, that they had signed a licensing deal to make a TV series based on one area of their IP. That licensing deal, with X-Files veteran, Frank Spotnitz, covered adapting one particular series of books, and unlike most deals of this sort, which are usually kept quiet until they’re close to something tangible happening, was announced shortly after it was signed.

Although this announcement didn’t lead directly to a show, another announcement was made in December 2023 that the company had signed a development agreement with Amazon for the studio to hold exclusive rights to make shows and movies within the setting. While we don’t know what happened with the Spotnitz-led project, it seems reasonable that Amazon took an interest while Spotnitz was shopping it around, but wanted the whole ‘pie’ rather than just a ‘slice’.

Regardless, with excitement already in place, based on the announcement three and a half years before, there was a great deal of speculation amongst fans as to what was going to happen. But as this deal was once again announced very early in the development cycle – so early, in fact, that the arrangement in place was to spend 12 months laying out ‘creative guidelines’ between the two companies, rather than a full development deal – everything went quiet. And fans began to speculate again.

Inevitably, the same sort of creepy incels who insisted Star Trek would be cancelled, started spreading word that the Warhammer/Amazon deal had fallen through because of ‘woke’, somehow, and equally inevitably, people believed them. In spite of the fact that in early autumn 2024, Amazon announced a show called Secret Level, which would feature an episode set in the Warhammer universe, and due to be released in December of that year.

On the day Secret Level premiered – almost 12 months to the day after the creative guidelines agreement was initially announced – Games Workshop and Amazon jointly announced they’d signed a full development deal. Quite obviously choosing to hold off on publishing the news until the positive response to Secret Level would ensure it had the greatest impact.

These are just two examples, based on discussions that I have personally seen. I could easily have referenced similar spurious nonsense in relation to Star Wars, or Marvel, or The Boys. And I’m certain anyone reading this can think of examples I’m entirely unaware of. Because this sort of nonsense exists throughout every corner of culture. And part of why it can spread so readily is through people’s lack of understanding. If your entire experience of these things is that a development agreement gets announced, then a few weeks later, a show goes into production, anything outside of that paradigm is going to seem ‘off’.  Similarly, if you have spent your life seeing viewing figures published and heavily publicised, it’s hard to understand why a studio, network or streaming platform wouldn’t want to do this.

I’ll be the first to accept that grifters making money from spreading lies about films and TV shows is relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but it’s not completely without effect. There’s a prevailing culture of negativity in the way people discuss entertainment online, a culture which is definitely having an impact on audience engagement with films and shows, and which is driven – at least in part – by these sort of lies.

But as I mentioned earlier, the discourse around movies is only one part of why misunderstandings about film production annoy me.  Far more frustrating from my point of view, is how many people who either work in production, or aspire to do so, have strange ideas about how films are made.

I’ve touched on this with regard to ‘selling’ producer credits, but there are a number of other ideas that I come across fairly regularly that frustrate me a great deal. Before I go on, it’s probably helpful to clarify that the majority of projects I’ve worked on are made entirely independent of studios and public funding bodies, and are essentially made ‘on spec’, with a view to selling them to distributors on completion.

This is a standard process for the majority of independent films, and it has lots of benefits, although a healthy share of downsides too. One somewhat neutral effect is that a lot of the people I work with – particularly when it comes to producers – don’t have a great deal of experience in film production. Some come from other disciplines in the industry, like casting or camera, others from similar industries like TV and advertising, but the majority are complete outsiders. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Generally I’m of the opinion that fresh ideas and new approaches can be helpful, and that I’ve met just as many good producers who came from outside the industry as I have people who built their careers on set.

With that said, quite a few of those people come in with completely false ideas, gathered from how-to guides, received wisdom, and rumours they’ve heard at networking events or internet forums.

As an example of this, a few years ago Netflix published a list of ‘approved cameras’. All distributors and streaming platforms have ‘delivery requirements’ – minimum technical standards that they want films to meet when they buy them – and Netflix’s ‘approved camera’ list was a handy guide to some of the cameras that met those requirements. Frustratingly, amongst a certain type of producer, as well as DoPs looking to get their first choice of camera rig, this list became a bible. In spite of us having access to perfectly good camera systems not on the list, for a lot less money, I ended up in countless conversations about those cameras not being ‘Netflix approved’, even though other aspects of the shoot would never meet the delivery requirements that were demanded of us. It even became a conversation I had on short film projects, which had absolutely no hope of getting a Netflix deal.  

In truth, a lot of this idea of ‘the right camera’ was already in the mix long before Netflix codified it. There is a desire amongst low budget producers to be seen as ‘professional’ – I’m not going to go into why I think this might be, as I’d be here forever if I tried to analyse the mindset of independent film producers – but this desperate need to be seen as doing things the ‘right way’ leads people to make decisions that are simultaneously baffling, and also damaging for the project. It’s film making by imitation, but without understanding.

Most commonly this manifests in an insistence on using the most expensive camera body conceivable, at the expense of every other department’s budget. Other common signs are having large crews, with each department packed to the gills, often with deeply inexperienced people, and a ‘starstruck’ attitude to actors, offering them treatment that goes far beyond anything agreed in their contracts. 

All of these things have their place, of course. There are times where a slightly better camera pays dividends, and extra crew in the right department lets you cram more pages into the daily shooting schedule, but on a production with limited resources, every decision will mean something else gets trimmed or cut, and inevitably those cuts do more damage than any of the benefits gained.

The converse is also true. I’ve seen people fight to keep things on the shoot that are entirely superfluous, just because they make them feel like ‘real’ filmmakers. Most commonly this will be equipment that allows a sequence to be shot in a particular way, but could be sacrificed at no cost to the finished product. For a while every shoot I worked on ’needed’ a low loader – the flatbed trucks which are used to film sequences with people driving cars, instead of using green screen or rear projection – in recent years the vogue has been for ‘virtual production’ – the giant video walls used by Disney for filming Marvel and Star Wars projects – which seems to come up in every conversation I have about projects, in spite of the fact that there’s almost no cost-efficient way for us to make use of them.

Much like swanky cameras, large crews, and going above and beyond for actors, there are times when these things are absolutely the right solution to getting the script onto screen, but all too often they’re just being used because someone controlling the purse strings really, really wants to use them.

In the best case scenarios, these sort of decisions just waste money, but all too often that sort of waste compromises projects. Producers assume their limited budgets go further than they do, commit to spending on superfluous distractions, then have to make hard decisions about genuine essentials when the penny drops and it becomes clear they can’t afford to cover the everything they want.

And the topic of spending leads us to another major issue with lack of understanding about the industry – the age-old advice given to writers to ‘write to a budget’. In principle this seems like a reasonable idea, there’s no point in writing a sprawling sci-fi epic if you know the production only has a few thousand pounds to work with. Unfortunately it’s also impossible. Budgeting is a significant part of my job in film, as it’s one of the core roles of a line producer. For every movie I’ve finished, I’ve probably budgeted eight or nine more, as a result, there are very few circumstances you might present to me in a script that I haven’t encountered before, and even fewer where I wouldn’t know who to talk to in order to get accurate quotes on achieving them. And yet, for all of that experience, I would struggle to write a script to a budget.

Although there are some things that can be included in a script that are always expensive – scenes with huge numbers of background characters, or scenes that require lots of VFX to achieve, for instance – there’s nuance when it comes to budgeting, and unexpected costs soon add up. That two-hander script, set in an isolated building might seem cheap on paper, but if you’re based in a city, and either have to drag your cast and crew to a remote location for the duration of the shoot, or replace every view through a window with VFX, it soon becomes far more expensive. And that’s just one very obvious example that came to mind. I’ve read plenty of ‘low budget’ scripts that would require the production to have complete control of a shopping street for days on end, or to have the art department work in every location for weeks before filming, and often those things only become apparent when conversations move out of the writing room and into production meetings.

Which brings us to why I’m writing this. Obviously I’m not so naïve as to think that the rise of terrible ‘media commentators’ can be solved by teaching people how the production process works, nor that the issues in independent film are solely due to the number of producers at the lower echelons of the industry don’t understand what a focus puller does. I certainly don’t think I’m the best person to teach people about these things. But for all the great stuff I’ve read about film, by writers who are better than I could ever hope to be, very few people are framing their pieces with a practical knowledge of production, and as I firmly believe there’s a benefit to doing so, I guess I might as well be the change I want to see in the world.

I aim to post pieces here fairly regularly, either discussing the production process directly, or using my production knowledge to frame an analysis of things happening in the broader culture and entertainment space. I’m aiming for at least one piece a month, so subscribe to the RSS feed, sign up to the mailing list, or follow me on Bluesky to keep updated.

And while you’re waiting, or if you want to support me directly, check out my art shop and buy some pictures.