CELESTINO:  As a young person enjoying film, the first element of filmmaking that I related to was the acting. I'd look at the actors as a kid, and I'd say, "Man, that's something I'd wanna be." I was the only 8-year-old kid growing up in Yonkers that sat in the theater all Saturday to watch three screenings of  The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. And I'd stay up to three o'clock in the morning when the old biblical films, especially Spartacus, came on TV. I was always watching something. I just never dreamed how these fantasies would become real. As a kid, you relate to these characters up on the screen, but you never think you'll be involved in that. 

When I got to be around 19 years old, I started to look more into it, to see who it was that did this. I found out it was the director, but I never knew what the director did. So I went to film school, watching twenty films a week, five films a day for two years. I would study each director one at a time. I would do all Hitchcock first, and he taught me about Dostoyevsky. Hitchcock loved Dostoyevsky, so I had to read it. And then I'd do Truffaut and he talked about Balzac. So that's how I learned about literature is through filmmakers. As I studied these other filmmakers more and more, I just developed this latent passion that flowered as I absorbed them.  

VENT!: What film school did you go to, and how important was it to you? 

CELESTINO: I went to the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, and I went to the Center of the Media Arts before that, but I spent most of my time at the New School. I made four shorts and a documentary, and then I started on my first feature while I was still there. In fact, one of my instructors at the New School was Phil Katzman, who produced Mr. Vincent. 

I went the film school route because there was nobody I knew who made films or had an artistic background. As a guy who didn't know anything about how to make a film, who had no one to talk to, no one to ask, the first thing that made logical sense was film school. So I picked up the telephone book yellow pages to see what's here. I then went to the Center of the Media Arts and they were all video. I didn't know the difference between video and film. I'd overhear conversations where they'd say they're making 16mm films at this place called the New School.  

I knew nothing, so I had to go to film school, and I got a lot from it. It was great for using the equipment and being able to shoot hands-on and discovering your problems. You really do need to get in there and attempt it before you can try to use someone else's money, before you really try to do something serious. You need to make all the mistakes you can, and film school is great for that. You get to test yourself. Almost everybody that I've ever met who wants to make a film comes in with this passion and this enthusiasm, and then they don't do anything as soon as they see how difficult it is even in that small realm. When you're making a 3-minute film, you're still going through the same process as Steven Spielberg. You still have to write a screenplay, cast the actors, rent the equipment, buy the film, develop the film, look at the dailies, cut the film, make a print. And along the way you lose 90% of the people just in that stage alone. From there, out of the 10% left, maybe 1% or a half a percent will get to actually make a feature. Then, once they make that feature, a lot of people don't want to go through that again, and not for a lot of the wrong reasons. The sacrifices and the attempts, the attitude and the passion that went into the film don't mean anything, because then you discover that the hardest part of making a film is when it's done, is getting it distributed. You used 110% of your effort and your life and of everybody around you just getting the thing made. You have less than nothing left. You spend every dime you have, and then trying to get the film distributed is another battle in itself, getting beat up and kicked around. It just becomes how many beatings can you take. So to want to do this again, you really get into that cliché of you have no choice. 

VENT!: How did you come to make your first feature film?  

CELESTINO: Candystore Conspiracy was a film that I had written after I made my last sync sound short film at the New School. It started off pretty much as a short film, and it just got bigger and bigger until it became a feature. I thought I should shoot it in Super 16mm, just in case anything happens with it, then I can blow it up. I know a lot of people say shoot in (regular) 16mm, that way you can get a 16mm print. My feeling was, if I'm going to burn my bridges, let me burn them all, because I knew going in that I'm not going to get any distribution whatsoever unless I at least have a shot to go to 35mm. And you do have a shot to go to 35mm from a regular 16mm print, and I knew that the blowup would cost me a lot of money, but I wasn't going to worry about that at that point. Let me go shoot the film, and I'll worry about it then.  

So the script was written, and that's when I started my collaboration with Frank John Hughes. I met him in a casting session, cast him right away as the lead in the film and we had a great working relationship together. We shot the film, I cut the film and then I went to DuArt for the blowup. Everything up until that point was fine with DuArt. All our dailies and all our processing, everything was done there- and then for the blowup they had given us credit. And then we missed our deadline for paying them back. We went through the credit cards, sold the house, borrowed every dime we could from everyone, so we really were in a situation where we needed something to happen with this film. I didn't even have a test screening. I went to print on my first rough cut, right from the flatbed, and I said, "this will get into Sundance, this is the greatest film ever made." I had no idea of having somebody come and look at it. My rough cut was my fine cut. I thought it was finished. 

We did the blowup and we had our first screening at the IFP market (IFFM). We did real well there. We had a sales rep from London come in who handled the film Metropolitan. He loved the film, and he was going to handle all the debts, everything that we owed. We did some re-cutting on his nickel, and he almost guaranteed me about Cannes. He wound up calling me a couple of months later and said he was going belly up, and he'd like to be able to keep the film for a year. I said, "I'm 29 years old, I gotta do it before I'm 30." A year to me was an eternity. He says, "if you want to get out of the deal, you can take the film back. This is my problem, but I'd like to be able to keep the film. I'll reorganize and I'll be ready in about a year." And I said, forget it.  

Now DuArt started saying they were going to auction the film. I had another sales rep at the time who just thought it was a joke, that DuArt says this to everyone, it started with Spike Lee, they're not going to do it, they just threaten all the filmmakers. And I said that's exactly why they are going to do it. This is '91 and everyone's laughing at them. They say they're going to auction, nobody takes them serious. They're going to set precedent, they are going to do this. The date came and I got a Chapter 11 in four hours before DuArt was to have actually auctioned the film off. With the Chapter 11, they couldn't have the auction because I was reorganizing my company. At that point, I went three years into court, and for that $30,000 that I owed them, it became now $100,000 because I owed $70,000 in deferred payments. In order for me to get out of re-organization and get settled again, I had to come up with something like $100,000, which was impossible. I had people coming in who were going to put up the $70,000, but when they got into the courtroom, they found out if they waited until this thing went into bankruptcy, they'd have the whole film for $30,000 instead of having a little piece of it for $70,000. My case was the only time when the court was full. I had all sharks, whoever they were, wanting to take the film. Even the judge said, "you people should be ashamed of yourselves, you're just waiting for this guy to go under so you can jump on his movie." And then the judge says to me, "there is nothing more I can do. After three years, you gotta pay these people."  Ultimately, DuArt wound up with the negative of the film. I still own it aesthetically- I wrote, produced, directed and edited the film- but they have enough elements (the 35mm interpostive and negative) that I can't do anything with it.  

In the interim, while I spent three years trying to get that film back, I went to a friend of mine who had this little video store for taping weddings. I walked in there one day to try to do some re-cutting on the film, and he throws on a 16mm feature film that he made for $5,000. It wasn't a great film, but here I just went through $150,000 of all my own money. This was still at a time when getting a film made for $200,000 was unbelievable. I see my friend's film- there's action, cars racing by, guns, special effects, and I say, "how the hell is this possible that you can make this film for $5,000?" Well, they went to video dailies, never made a print, did this and that. I walked out of that shop scratching my head saying, this is it! I gotta get myself out of this rut, I gotta go on. I had to let Candystore Conspiracy go. I looked at the scripts that I had (in that time I wrote eight scripts- it was the only thing that kept me sane). Mr. Vincent was a real character piece, and I felt if my friend can make his film for $5,000, I could make Mr. Vincent for $10,000.  

I had just spent four years in film school, two years before that I made a series of music videos in Nashville (I was subsidizing a lot of this stuff, and I still do that). Since the age of 19, I'd always shot at least something every year. And here I am, four years had gone by and I hadn't shot anything. At that moment, I said I'm going to make this film. I'll raise $10,000 somehow. If the gods are there, they gotta show up for this one.  

VENT!: So what did you do to get Mr. Vincent made? 

CELESTINO: At that point I called a couple of friends of mine who I'd been with through the years. I first got in touch with Brian Smyj, one of the producers, and I said we gotta raise this money. He brought in a friend of his, a composer who wrote the original songs for the film, and between the three of us we were able to scrape up $10,000. We thought that was enough. Then Phil Katzman came in. I talked to Frankie (Frank John Hughes) and he wanted to do the role. When we sat down and really put this thing together, we saw we could do it in 19 days, and we were gonna shoot it in Super 16mm and in black & white. But there was no way- just for film stock, locations (without insurance) and equipment, it came to $20,000 to get it in the can. That was Phil calling in every favor he had, I'm calling in every favor based on the experience I had from my last film, and the quality of professional people, like we got Dick Fisher (The Brothers McMullen) to shoot the film. But we said fine- we had raised $10,000, we were going to get the $20,000.  

Now what happens is, once you start to get the ball rolling and the momentum going, you know you're going to do it. We went and cast the actors and had the crew. Everybody was set for a certain date. A week before that date, all we still had was that $10,000, and we were picking away at that for our expenses, going here and there. The nature of independent filmmaking, especially at this level, is that if you set up a schedule, a start time and a shoot date, and you start delaying that date, right away everyone says it's not going to happen, especially the crew. They sympathize for you like everyone else, but so what? They gotta know that this is going to happen. Plus, one of the actors was getting called away for another shoot. It was just the time that we needed to shoot and there was nothing that we could do about it. I still owed $100,000 to the credit cards and everybody else, I lost my house, I'm living in my father-in-law's upstairs apartment with my wife and son. There was nowhere I could go for money. I had to make that date. 

So we're sitting in my office and Brian says to me, why don't we go to Atlantic City and put it all on the black? And he starts laughing. I had the assistant director there, she starts laughing. And I know, because I have another script based on gambling sheets and stuff like this, that when you're desperate you can never win gambling. I looked at Brian and I said, "this is what we gotta do." 

Cut to him and me in his Ford Explorer driving from Yonkers down the Jersey Turnpike to Atlantic City. The only thing we said was that we weren't going to talk about it, because we didn't want to take the chance of changing our minds. My wife Rita didn't even know where I was going. We just walked right out of the house. We were going to go into the first casino we came to, go to the first roulette wheel we came to, take the full $10,000 and put in on the black, and just put it in the hands of the gods. It was my belief at this time, after all these years and everything I went through, that "ready or not, the gods will come." It was more than just the $10,000. It was my career as a filmmaker.  

So we went to the first casino we came to, went to the first roulette table we came to. The bills were in fifties and twenties. I walked up and threw all the money on the table. I asked the dealer, what's the highest denomination chips you have? She said five hundred. I said, give me all five hundreds. So she counted down the money, she pushed the 500's over, and you should've seen her eyes when I just pushed it right back, right over the black, the whole $10,000 in one shot. She says to me, "do you want to get rated?" And I just said, "spin the ball." And this is where it really becomes like a movie, because the ball started spinning and spinning. If you know anything about roulette, you know that it takes a little while for the ball to settle. But the ball actually did settle in the red, enough for me to look at Brian and him to look at me like, this is the way it's gonna be. And I'm telling you, it was like a finger came out and took this ball and popped it right into the black. Brian just started screaming, and I had tears in my eyes. $10,000 is a lot of money, but it's nothing when you're talking about your life and your career. I knew at that moment that I had Mr. Vincent. 

In making Candystore Conspiracy, everything was hard. The actors were wonderful, but I had a hard time with the crew because I was wearing the producer's hat also. We had all the passion and all the desire, but we didn't have a good balance. Everybody wasn't going in the same direction. With Mr. Vincent, not only did we have a great crew and a great cast, with everybody working together, but we also had the right people all going in the same direction, knowing where they have to go.  

And there also was a luck element that made this happen. We had another actress cast for Lisa at the time. Ironically, we didn't start shooting a week later because Frankie got cast for a $40 million film, Bad Boys. I said to him, "you gotta go do the film. You're talking about big money, big exposure. I'll wait for you." In that interim, it gave me the chance to go look for another actress. The actress I had was great, but she didn't have the chemistry going with Frank, the two of them did not fit perfectly. And that's when I found Lisa LoCicero. Also, I had a DP who got chicken pocks. I couldn't wait for him to come back, thus I found Dick Fischer when I saw his ad in a filmmaker magazine. This was after he had shot and edited The Brothers McMullen, but before it was at Sundance and anything had happened with it.  

It was a beautiful shoot, and I cut the whole film myself again on a flatbed. When we were ready to send it in to Sundance, we were after the deadline. We sent it anyway. At the festival, one of the programmers whom Frankie and I met there pulled me to the side and said, "I gotta tell you something." All of the slots there were already picked, but there were eight films in a box left over that no one was going to see because they missed the deadline. Our film was one of those films. She had it on her conscience, so she looked at our film that night. She then brought it in to (festival director Geoffrey) Gilmore, and the rest of the day she was saying to him, "you gotta look at this film." They made an extra slot for my film. If that's not luck...  

You can't afford to be just good in this business, you have to be the best there is. When people are submitting 800 or 1200 films and they're picking 40, you gotta be great in someone's eyes. It doesn't mean you are great, but someone's gotta think you're enough for that 4%. That's a requisite, that you need. The luck element is what surpasses that, and we had that going right from the time we made that bet out in Atlantic City. It's just such an irony that in 1989 I make a film for $150,000 (plus the cost of the 35mm blowup), and in 1994 I put Mr. Vincent in the can for $20,000 (total budget came to about $100,000 with blowup, raised over a two-year period). And the film is on a much superior level than my first film.  

VENT!: What did you do to prepare to shoot such an ultra-low budget film? 

CELESTINO: I storyboard every single shot. I do complete shot lists. I'm prepared in every element. But then when you get to the set you throw 50% of that out the window. You never know completely what you're going to do. The best part is dailies, because you're seeing what you got for the first time. At that point, it's raw and it's real and it hasn't been tampered by the edit and the music. But, to me, what we did on that set never transcends to the film. The intensity, the passion, and the emotions that are at work on the set keep everybody in awe. And it keeps everybody in these positions who are working so hard, like the crew, feeling that they're doing something significant so they want to work those 16-hour days for a slice of pizza.  

Don't pay anybody. That was the mistake I made on my first film, and those people that I was paying turned out to be the worst ones of the bunch. The difference between making a $150,000 film and a $20,000 film is paying people. Get everybody to work on deferred payments. You're not gonna get Dick Fischer or somebody who has shot four or five features, but you may get someone who wants to move up in that type of capacity. Really the only thing that you should pay for in shooting a no-budget film is film, food and equipment. If you really look, you should be able to get a DP who has his own equipment, and maybe you pay him a little something for the rental but he's not getting his fee. Naturally, when you get into post- production, they got you. They're gonna give you discount prices, but when you go into an editing room or you go into a laboratory, you're going to pay.  

VENT!: What success have you had with film festivals like Sundance and Berlin?  

CELESTINO: I remember when we sent the film in to Sundance, we knocked it out. Sundance is like Cannes- you just send it in even though you believe it's not going to happen. Phil Katzman had gotten the call, and he called me up from the New School and says, come down here right away. When I got there, Phil was teaching a class. He took me out and says, we got Sundance. And you're thinking of all these stories that you've heard, you're gonna be that film, you're gonna be that one. It was like a dream come true for us. Part of that dream is that you're going to go out there and make it, but in the midst of that dream was still a lot of naiveté. My other film never had a chance to get a distributor, so I had no idea about publicists, about getting yourself ready. What we did was we made hats and posters. We never got a publicist, and when we got out there it was the biggest mistake we could have made because we were the only film there that didn't have a publicist. People were actually walking over me to get to David Lynch or Kevin Smith because they had their world premieres going on.  

I really felt like I blew Sundance. When I was out there, I was putting up posters, trying to get as many people as I could. We wound out selling Germany there, so we pretty much broke even right away. I met my agent out there, and he really championed the film, but I was hearing all these reports that this was the worst year at Sundance with no good films, and none of these people had seen my film. This was the year to have a film there because you could've stuck out, but without publicity, you really have to be crazy. Everybody's out there with major publicists, really working this thing like it was a big Hollywood- type studio deal, and here I am thinking I'm in a festival where they're going to cater to me and that it was up to me to do my own work, which I wanted to do. I just didn't do it to the strength that it had to be done. But I can't complain. Because of Sundance, I'm getting ready to shoot my next film. We have the money people in place. We're beyond that. We're now doing some revisions on the script and we're about ready to start casting.  

We were not in the actual festival in Berlin. We just went out there to be in the market, so we didn't get the prestige of Berlin. We then sat for a while not doing anything, kind of licking our wounds over what we didn't do at Sundance. Then, when Neil Friedman, my agent at William Morris, came in, he started pushing the film and got us involved with other festivals around the world. The film is being seen by the people who need to see it to get me to the next place. I went in knowing this was gonna be a film that was just going to act as a catalyst to something else, and that's what it has done. Right now, we're in the process of making a Bravo/Independent Film Channel deal. Everything that this film needed to do, it did in a big way, bigger than I expected.  

VENT!: You used a professional casting director for both films? 

CELESTINO: Yeah, her name is Sue Crystal and she's wonderful. She has a keen eye for character on a two-sentence description. I'll tell her this is what I'm looking for, and she'll bring me a hundred head shots and call in all these people. She's got a lot of experience, she's been around for a long time. This is what she does for a living. She found me Frankie for Candystore Conspiracy, and I plan on working with her many more times in the future. She was paid on deferred payment because she loved the project. If she believes in the film and the filmmaker, she'll work with you.  

With a casting director, you get a certain level of actors. Not a lot of great people are gonna answer those cattle call-type ads or open calls. If you have an established casting director, she'll call them up and say what has to be said beforehand, so when these people come in you have a history. When I first worked with Sue I didn't have any history. She was referred to me and we developed a friendship based on mutual respect. It's great to have a casting director to help fill up small roles to create atmosphere. Anybody can call themselves a casting director, so look into what their background is, their experience, and look at some of the films they cast.  

VENT!: Why did you decide to shoot Mr. Vincent in black & white? 

CELESTINO: When I did my first student work, I didn't care if the walls matched with the color of the car. I never in a million years would think that this color sticking out distracts from the scene. Now I know I have to have my actors be bigger than the distraction in order to just overcome it, and then I'd lose all my subtlety. That's the reason why we shot black & white. It was a practical decision. I couldn't go out into an open field and pull the greens, not for the budget that we had. With b&w you only have to worry about shadow and tone. So now I was able to control the shadow and tone based on the art direction and the cinematography, and really focus in on what the actors were doing as opposed to having a green shirt sticking out in the middle of nowhere contrasting against a brown guitar. It just throws you off. I couldn't be subtle. So black & white for me was pragmatic only in terms of aesthetics. It had nothing to do with saving money. In fact, I think you're better off with color. 

VENT!: How did you approach distributors?  

CELESTINO: One of the first things that was said to me was that, by shooting in b&w, we could forget about Europe. European television will not touch b&w, and if we shoot b&w I'm gonna blow major markets. They said Germany will not take b&w for TV and that's a big market, but ironically Germany was the first distributor we sold.  

So we make a deal with them, and the money comes in increments. You give them this, and they'll give you that much. But as soon as you give them enough to make TV, you may not get the rest of your money. That's what happened to us in Germany. We made a deal and up until half of the money came in, they said to us that they needed this element to go get the money to pay us, that they would get the TV money by us giving them a PAL master. We thought, the film is still in English, they're not going to be able to burn in any subtitles on that, and they won't be able to do any dubbing because they don't have the M&E (music & sound effects) tracks. If they're going to show this, they would have to show it in English on TV, so we kind of felt safe. But as soon as we gave them that master reel, we never heard from them again. We were supposed to get a theatrical opening originally in September, then it went to October, then January, now they're going to open it up in March. As far as I'm concerned, if they haven't done it yet, I'll believe it when I see it. I think what happened is they already showed it on television. I had a friend of mine from Germany who called me in December and said he heard my film was going to be on TV there next month in January. Everything figured. They had enough to make the television deal, so we got only half the money owed us in that situation.  

Distributors are really prejudiced against black & white, against no names, against films that aren't really genre related. If you can't tell them on the phone what the film is about and it doesn't match this formula that they have, they say right away it's not going to work. Then they come and look at the film and they watch it all the way through, and they're not shaking their legs. And I say to them, what about that formula? They sat there in the theater with 300 other people watching the film and, whether they hated it or loved it, they weren't bored with the film or indifferent to the film. In Montreal I had a woman attack me. She hated what she saw, but I rather have her hate me than be indifferent. So now the distributors see that people are paying money to go see the film, and afterwards these people are talking about it, having stimulating conversation. It's doing all the things that a story is supposed to do. It's not the story that the distributors put into their formula, but there is a story there. They don't believe their own eyes, because they have so much at stake. If they put up money and they lose it, and then their jobs are on the line, I have no sympathy for that. If that's going to be your job, your job is to see. All I can do is make them look at my film. I can't tell them to like it, or to buy it. That's up to them. These are people whom it doesn't matter how much you knock on their door and say "look at me, look at me." They gotta come and see you, and usually somewhere like Sundance is a good place for that, or one of these high profile screenings to get a review. That happened with Mr. Vincent and it opened up a lot of doors. 

It has become easy to sell a film with Robert DeNiro and it doesn't have to be good. That's just the nature of the business. It also makes it very easy for you to start producing a lot of shit. I'm turning out what I feel is good stuff, but it's being rejected because it's maybe a little dark. You really got to either want to fight everybody on this particular story, or you got to move on to something else. I see how it's possible for a filmmaker to get a shot at making a crock of shit for $50 million. I now realize he probably came in with a great idea, and they just turned it and twisted it, and he wanted to make the film so badly that he went along with it- now his career is shot. So I would say the better thing to do is put that idea away and start on something new. Give them what they want but don't fuck up what you've got. Save that for later when you're in a position to go back and make it.  

VENT!: How did you get an agent at William Morris to represent you? 

CELESTINO: I was connected with William Morris after I got finished with Sundance, but there was six month window where my agent was just getting involved in the company and I was kind of struggling on my own. In that time, when I went to Berlin, I met with a sales rep who just started seducing me. She grabbed me on the plane and said, "I'm going to sell your film." We pretty much weren't getting any bites from anywhere else. When we went out to Berlin to try to do it ourselves, it was murder. We couldn't get anybody into our screenings. When we got back, this sales rep wouldn't stop. She showed us all her credentials, everything that she's done for other films. Finally we just said, nobody else is doing it, let her handle it, at least she'll take the film to festivals. It turned out, as soon as we signed with her, nothing happened. We even found out festivals in Scotland and in Portugal had told her that we were invited, and she never even told us. I think she packaged like four or five films and said to them, "if you want to take this film, you got to take the rest of them." She had even said on the phone to us, "None of our films got accepted to that festival... I think they wanted yours but they didn't want the other ones." And I said, "What does that mean to me?" We figured at least she would make some sales at MIFED, but when I called her to see what was going on, she says we're not going to MIFED. And I said, "well, I'll take my film back," and there was really nothing she could say. So we got the film back, and Neil (my agent at William Morris) was very happy because now he completely took control of the film. And he's not just using the film for sales, but he's also using the film in terms of my career, and what we're going to do with the next film. Once again, I got lucky. 

VENT!: What progress are you making with your career?  

CELESTINO: I'm now developing my new film and everything is going real smooth with that. (Financing) is being set up from Neil through independent sources that he has. It's not a studio setup. We met with the money people and really the only thing that's holding us back from the next stage is just me touching up the script. There's money being spent at this time for expenses and the rewrites, and that makes me feel good. As long as they're spending money, I feel there's a commitment going on. There's no contract signed, so they can pull out any time they want, but I don't believe that's going to happen. I'm very optimistic in a business where pessimism is the norm.  

VENT!: What other advice do you have for aspiring filmmakers? 

CELESTINO: The screenplay is your gold. You got to be able to see it on the page. You have to have a story. It should have real characters having strong, interesting relationships. It's not hard to get a script to go into production- you just have to have a killer script. Something that really works works, and anybody can see that. So if you have that type of confidence (in your script), if it astonishes you enough to be on the project for two years, you should be able to get people to work for you right from the beginning because they should be able to see it on the page. 

I'm working with a couple of young filmmakers now, and my feeling is that I'll give them as much as they'll take. If they're not going to come after it, I'm not going to give it to them, not because I know any more than they do, but I know it's a business where tenacity and passion are a requisite. You have to ask yourself, is it worth it? Is it worth it to put in these years, to have to work 24 hours a day when other people are partying, enjoying love and family and sports? Is it worth it when there's nothing else? You don't live your life. You live your films, and that's a big sacrifice. You can't have it both ways, not in my opinion. And forget the limousines, the fame, the big house and the money. Don't get me wrong- I'd like to have all those things, but that's not what it's about. The ultimate reward you're going to get is looking at those dailies. That's as good as it gets, it does not get any better than that. So if you can really answer yes to "Is it worth it?" then go ahead and try it. I wouldn't recommend any filmmaker go to Atlantic City and put it all on the line. You have to be where I was at that time. But I do believe that the shit gets filtered out, that who's supposed to be there, gets there, and nobody gets it easy. Spielberg earned his way. Tarantino had his filmmaker's plight. The odds against you are such that you got a better shot at becoming a congressman than to make films on a steady basis. I'm not there by a long shot, and there's still so much to do, but I'm in striking distance.