From begging for freebies and maxing out credit cards to luxury trailers and expense accounts, a growing list of filmmakers have crossed the road from independent film to big studio picture. Journalist Michael Fox examines the trend of doing “a lot with a little” and “a lot with a lot.”

Twenty years ago, a young filmmaker invited to premiere his or her first feature at Sundance fantasized about one of two career paths. If creative control and independence were paramount, his role model was Woody Allen, who made a movie every year from his own screenplay, with a cast of his choosing and no interference from anybody. If our young director wanted access to all the filmmaking toys and resources in the world —and also aspired to make quality movies with a degree of autonomy—well, Steven Spielberg was the biggest star in the studio solar system. Barely a handful of filmmakers went on to enjoy anything resembling either career, but we’ll lament that fact another time. The point is that it was a hard-and-fast, either/or world. In the last few years, however, more and more directors are finding it easier, and often necessary, to slide and glide between the two worlds.

The ever-growing list includes studio hitmaker Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Thirteen and the indie piece Bubble), up-and-comer Angela Robinson (D.E.B.S. and Herbie: Fully Loaded), Sundance prodigy Darrin Aronofsky (Pi, The Fountain), writer-director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Kinsey, Dreamgirls), Texas vet Richard Linklater (Slackers, School of Rock) and Taiwanese-born, L.A.-based director Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift).

Lin is a timely Exhibit A, because Finishing the Game, his indie follow-up to the summer ’06 blockbuster The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, was recently released. The pragmatic Lin cheerfully embraces the new fluidity in American filmmaking, and pulls back the curtain on the mysterious, labyrinthine process through which features get financed and made.

“With every project,” he reports, “that’s the one very clear thing: Within a week of taking it around town, you’ll see where it stands. They’ll react according to the market. As a filmmaker, you’re trying to find your sweet spot.”

A reality check is always helpful to the filmmaker—except when the people he’s taking a meeting with have construed the word “independent” into something different than it used to mean. There are stories of Hollywood producers saying they want to make an “indie action movie;” they’re not describing a stylistically innovative project but a formulaic genre picture done on a small budget. That’s not indie; that’s just wanting to make a movie on the cheap.

Similarly, a polished film with an A-list star backed by one of the studios’ arthouse subsidiaries is worlds away from a shoestring production with an iconoclastic vision, but in the vernacular of the bigger festivals they’re both “independent.”

“It’s a big hole to climb out of,” Lin notes, “because you’re not making [your] films on a level playing field with other ‘indie’ films.”

There’s a lot less confusion between studio movies and truly indie films, of course. But to many filmmakers, the lure of mainstream films has very little to do with content and everything to do with the challenge and the experience. When Herbie: Fully Loaded came out, Angela Robinson told an interviewer that she’d grabbed Disney’s offer to direct because she wanted to work on a large scale. “When you're doing an independent movie, you're trying to do a lot with a little,” she explained. “When you're doing a big movie, you're trying to do a lot with a lot.”

The appeal of having a bigger box of toys to play with is easy to understand. For many people, it’s a natural progression from the baling wire and Scotch tape of indie films to the catered luxury of studio projects. But plenty of folks are convinced that working in Hollywood means you’ve sold out, and tossed away your artistic independence.

As with anything involving the movies, the reality is far more complicated. When Justin Lin was making The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift—a popcorn movie aimed at adolescents and opening on some 3,000 screens in the U.S.—he included a three-dimensional Asian American character. He wasn’t trying to be subversive or politically correct, but he thought it would be neat to provide 10-year-old Asian American kids with a positive screen image that he didn’t have when he was a boy. Lin’s ploy made bigger waves than he could have imagined. Not only did the character receive unanimously favorable scores in the studio’s requisite advance testing, but the actor, Sung Kang, became a star. “That’s a reach that independent cinema will never get to,” Lin declares.

So the charge of selling out has to be applied with some care. One of the trends at Sundance that’s provoked debate over the years is the studios’ use of the festival as a scouting trip for directing talent. The studios look for new and unusual voices, but not with the intent of backing their next offbeat film. They hire them instead to helm mainstream projects. Are the filmmakers being completely and hopelessly co-opted, or once they’re inside do they influence Hollywood to make more daring and provocative films? Read more