Fourteen years ago, after making my first feature, Interview with a Hitman, I learned a fairly brutal lesson: making the film was not enough. If nobody knew it existed, nobody was going to see it. I had to learn to think commercially as well as creatively.
By 2025, something fundamental had changed. Generative filmmaking had begun to offer independent filmmakers production capabilities that had historically required substantial capital, crews and infrastructure. Not every kind of film, and not at every scale — but far more than had previously been possible for one person alone.
That shift changed the economics of independent filmmaking. For the first time, the cost and organisational complexity of production could be reduced radically enough for a filmmaker to begin thinking beyond simply making the film — and towards owning the entire route from creation to audience.
The deeper shift was one of permission. A writer-director could ask, “Should I make this?” before asking, “Who will allow me to make this?”
My latest feature, Okay, It’s Time to Go, tested that proposition. It is a dystopian film about a corporation that manufactures the “Stopwatch”, a consumer device that allows its wearer to end their life instantly.
Under the traditional model, the first question would have been obvious: who is going to finance this? That may still matter commercially, but it no longer determined whether I was allowed to make the film. I believed there was a film in the idea, so I made it.
But completing it revealed another problem. Production was only half the revolution. Once I had removed the gatekeepers from production, why would I automatically hand the finished asset back into another gatekeeping system?
That question led to Kirlian Pictures. Rather than license the film to a conventional distributor, I built a direct-to-audience platform around it. I own the IP, control the streaming and payment relationship, market the film directly and retain the customer relationship. My previous feature, The Last Boy, is now also on the same platform, with a dedicated Kirlian Player launching on iOS.
This does not make distributors irrelevant. Good distribution provides something extraordinarily valuable: reach. And reach remains the hardest problem.
Making a film available online is trivial. Making somebody care that it exists is not. A film can sit on a global platform, available to millions, while remaining functionally invisible. Shelf space is no longer scarce. Attention is.
Direct distribution does not remove that problem, but it changes what happens when you solve it. If I create awareness and somebody buys the film, that transaction happens directly with Kirlian. Advertising can be measured against sales. A headline either converts or it doesn’t, and I know within a day, not within a year, and not from a statement I have to take on trust. Failure becomes information.
Lowering the barrier to production does not make everybody a good filmmaker. We saw this when digital cameras and desktop editing arrived. Independent output exploded. Some remarkable work emerged, and a great deal of bad work. Access to a camera did not confer taste, judgement, storytelling ability or craft.
Generative filmmaking will produce the same outcome, probably at greater scale. Much will be technically impressive and artistically forgettable; a small amount will be exceptional. Nor should we romanticise the expensive era that came before. Plenty of terrible films were made when filmmaking required millions of pounds and large crews. Cost was never a guarantee of quality. Scarcity was never quality control.
As the barriers fall, authorship becomes more important: knowing what to make, what not to make, when to cut, when to hold, what performance feels truthful and whether any of it deserves somebody’s attention.
The means of production are being democratised. Taste is not. Judgement is not. The technology can lower the barrier to making the work. It cannot make the work worth watching.
My next feature, Cain, is now in production, using the infrastructure built around Okay, It’s Time to Go. That begins to look less like starting from zero and more like a very small vertically integrated studio.
When I wrote in 2012 that art and business belonged together, I thought the answer was to operate more effectively inside the existing film business. I still believe they belong together. What I no longer assume is that the business has to belong to somebody else.
The production gate is coming down. The distribution gate is becoming optional. The remaining battle is reach. And if independent filmmakers have to fight that battle themselves anyway, there is a compelling argument that they should own what they build when they win.
Kirlian Pictures is Perry Bhandal’s independent film studio and direct-to-audience platform, producing and distributing original feature films.
