A Melbourne film school grad and former editor of Oz cinema mag Inside Film, Michod shot to prominence through a series of compelling short films. Many were made with frequent collaborators, such as Susser and Edgerton, with Michod also writing for and acting in their respective shorts. Michod’s award-winning short “Crossbow” was invited to the Venice fest in 2007 and to Sundance the following year. from Variety
Crossbow was recently mentioned as a short film that was good enough to land Michôd an agent. He followed Crossbow with Animal Kingdom, his first feature which won the World Cinema Jury Prize at Sundance in 2010.
Whether you like it or not, Crossbow is an incredibly accomplished work, both narratively and visually.
Many film students drive themselves mad figuring out how to get an agent, one of the major steps to getting into paid feature film directing. I’ve heard this question asked of a number of people at a number of Q&A sessions since I’ve been here. The answer is always the same:
Create something amazing enough to be worth an agent’s time, and they will come.
The end goal is not getting an agent, but having a career making good movies. How do you have a career and not a one-off? You develop your craft as extensively as possible.
Hal Ackerman, a screenwriting professor here, says that success is when luck meets preparation.
There are many horror stories passed around here about students who manage to get a film into Sundance, have a lot of acclaim, then have no feature scripts or pitches to turn that acclaim into a career.
Luck without preparation. You can’t decide luck, but you can decide how prepared you are.
This means:
1. Constantly writing, rewriting, filming, editing, reediting.
2. Being brutally honest with yourself about what you’ve already done.
3. Writing good features or being attached to a writer who does.
4. Learning how to pitch those features. By pitch I mean tell your story in a brief and compelling way. I recently heard a story about how Paolo Sorrentino, a native Italian speaker, wowed a producer here with a low-concept pitch for This Must Be the Place, his first American feature starring Sean Penn. He did this before he wrote the screenplay. I wish I had had to do the same for some of these features I am killing myself rewriting.
5. Getting a lot of feedback on your films, writing and pitches.
6. Networking; meeting people who you’re interested in and who are interested in you and could someday help you down the line.
7. Putting your work out there through festivals, blogs, youtube, vimeo etc. .
Then when you get into the festival with your great short, you will have a few great features and great pitches to back it up. You have helped plan the trajectory of your career. What agent wouldn’t love that?
