To start, let’s ignore the exceptions for a moment and focus on those production and distribution companies that don’t have “Sony” or “Disney” on their org chart. This includes America’s first indie studio United Artists – created to free silent stars from the early clutches of the big studios – a company that gave us most of Chaplin’s best, Rebecca, and 12 Angry Men.
More recently, A24 has been curating much of the best indie talent in the digital age and has brought us such incredible films as Uncut Gems, 20th Century Women, Waves, and Eighth Grade.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Drive were also made and distributed with no studio interference, but our favorites here come from the era of the indie, which fall right into the ’90s and 2000s. This was a time when mini-majors like Miramax, New Line, and Lionsgate ran the show with classics like Buffalo 66, My Own Private Idaho, Night on Earth, and our first pick: Reservoir Dogs.
Reservoir Dogs’ post-heist-hole-up-gone-wrong was an indie sensation. Capturing festival-goers and mainstream audiences alike, it landed like a firecracker in 1992 with its plot out of order, its dialogue rattling off the eaves, and its tension bursting at the seams of its mostly single location. In many ways, it launched indie filmmaking towards the ’90s mainstream.
Originally planning to shoot it himself on black and white film with no-name actors, Quentin Tarantino’s script found its way to Harvey Keitel, who helped raise $1.5 million for the film. Miramax scooped it up after its premiere sensation and distributed it to iconic status.
To this day, the energy and vigor and differentness of Tarantino’s feature is distinguishably “indie,” which is ironic given how he famously modge-podged it together from a video-store worth of influences. But there was then – as there still is now – a certain something to it that the world was very much hungry for.
9: Independent by NOT the MAJORS – Lost in Translation
In the wake of the successes of films like Reservoir Dogs, the majors eventually said, “Hey, we can make some money with this indie racket,” and they created a bunch of different niche house brands like Focus Features and Fox Searchlight to scoop up the best of the festival circuit and sell them to fans of The Shins.
Today, plenty of independent filmmakers make something incredible and are rewarded with lots of money and wide release by those studios without ever getting told what they could and could not do. So, maybe independent distribution doesn’t matter so much when it comes to “indie” classification.
They’ve brought us Brokeback Mountain, In Bruges, Whiplash, Call Me By Your Name, Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, Garden State, Before Sunrise, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and so many more.
However, our favorite independent film that went this route has to be Lost in Translation.
Sofia Coppola’s sensitive sophomore film about loneliness in Tokyo and an unexpected connection between a young woman and an aging star is a perfect example of indie filmmaking’s delightful contradictions.
On the one hand, she took great pain to make the film her way, including recruiting Bill Murray directly from his personal 1-800 number, signing him on with no contract, and just taking him at his word that he’d show up in Japan. She also chose to shoot the film in a run-and-gun, natural-light, improvisational, frequently unpermitted style with a small crew, and purposefully chose not to pre-sell the American distribution rights so that no one could take away her final cut.
On the other hand, she’s Sofia Coppola, the daughter of Francis Ford, whose American Zoetrope is one of the heaviest hitting “indie” film studios of all time with more connections in Hollywood than a QAnon conspiracy.
So, it’s fitting that it ended up at Focus Features, the indie arm of a major film studio, for distribution. But they knew exactly what to do, promoting the film to theatrical success and wins at the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards that it very much deserved.
8: Self-Funded Only – Night of the Living Dead
Of course, after our last category, you might be thinking to yourself, “Hey, wait a minute. Aren’t those major studios that are spending tens of millions to buy the best of the indie films actually exerting indirect market pressure on the savvy independent production companies that are financing them because they would really like to make a profitable sale, making them technically NOT independent?”
And uh… yeah. They definitely are.
So, maybe real indie films have to be self-funded and made entirely by first-time filmmakers, new companies, or students outside of the tidal pull of Hollywood’s incentive system.
Films like Hoop Dreams, Evil Dead, Blue Ruin, Bad Taste, John Carpenter’s Dark Star, Chris Nolan’s Following, David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and our favorite classic of the self-funded indie films: George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
George Romero and his friends pitched what would eventually become Night of the Living Dead – the godfather of all zombie movies – to an industrial video company out of Pittsburgh for $6,000 dollars. And their approach was just as homemade.
The film was costumed by Goodwill, it was shot in a building set to be demolished so they could destroy it, and the entrails were made from donated ham. This film was designed to capture audiences with horror exploitation, but it succeeded also on account of its grittiness as the black-and-white film stock and early hand-held aesthetic gave it a flavor of documentary and reality that seriously heightened the terror.
Audiences were treated to something that looked both shocking and believable, which helped it on its way to being the most profitable horror film ever made outside the studio system.
7: Indie by Low Budget – Slacker
So okay, maybe money is just bad news. Maybe the only real way to get free is to use as little of it as possible. Maybe good indies all come out of massive creativity in the face of budget restrictions.
That was certainly the case with Eraserhead, Primer, The Blair Witch Project, Napoleon Dynamite, Tangerine and El Mariachi. And it certainly had something to do with our number seven pick, Richard Linklater’s debut feature, Slacker.
Made on a shoestring budget of just $23,000, Slacker’s 16mm tour of Austin, Texas’ resident bohemian weirdos – arranged along one seemingly-continuous thread of criss-crossing intersections – is a low-budget indie revelation.
Inspiring an entire wave of independent filmmaking including Kevin Smith’s Clerks, Linklater’s second feature radically challenged what parts of cinema were most important. With little traditional plot to speak of, the film floats from one eccentric character to the next without ever seizing upon any particular throughline other than just… sharing the time.
And it doesn’t just work; it’s astounding. Linklater balances dozens of unusual personalities without ever slipping into easy trope or caricature, ensuring that each moment has a peculiarity alongside its serious authenticity.
6: Independent Movie by Sundance/Festival Rewarded – Sex, Lies and Videotape
Thinking dollars and cents has been all well and good, but Plan 9 From Outer Space was made for nothing and we’d never call that “indie.” Everything Everywhere All At Once, on the other hand, had double-digit millions and that’s an independent movie to the bone. Clearly, we’re missing something here: This is art we’re talking about, and it can’t be made or broken solely based on whose ledger we’re making entries in.
Art is a matter of taste. And fortunately for Indiedom, there’s been a preeminent tastemaker since 1978 separating the avant-garde wheat from the manic-pixie chaff in the form of the Sundance Film Festival.
Sundance has brought us films like Heathers, Moon, Brick, In Bruges, Calvary, Hereditary, Donnie Darko, Almost Famous, Fruitvale Station, The Witch, and so many more. And probably their best pick ever is also our number six: Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape.
If Slacker was a revelation, Sex, Lies and Videotape was a wildfire. Soderbergh’s…