Funding a Film with Credit Cards

How A Filmmaker Self-Financied His First Movie

May 28, 2009
Joe Lam

...Around Movie Still - David Spaltro

Director of the low-budget film ...Around, reveals how he took a chance to fund his own movie and the numerous obstacles he encountered during production.

Suite101 interviewed Director David Spaltro about how he self-financed his first feature film ...Around with 40 of his own credit cards.

Suite101: David, can you describe what it took to make this feature film, especially given that funding the film was done with credit cards?

Spaltro: A wing and a prayer. It was a constant, bloody uphill war. Talk to anyone in the industry, regardless of their position or time spent in it and they’ll confirm that making a movie is damn-near impossible. Finishing one is remarkable. Marketing it, getting it out there is one step above a miracle. Being a first time feature filmmaker with such an ambitious project, shooting in 190 different locations in a film that sorta spans 13 years, a multitude of characters and extras all in 21 days for 175k that was either balanced transferred or swiped from a multitude of credit cards at the dawn of the worst fiscal credit crisis we’ve ever seen? Whole new shade of green.

Suite101: What other obstacles did you encounter?

Spaltro: We had hiccups that could have destroyed any other project; lost locations, crashed vans, lack of time and money, but our line producer Lee Gillentine and 1st Ad Grant DeSimone worked and controlled the atmosphere and amazing cast and crew that banded together to overcome those hurdles. Our original sound-mixer did a very low-quality job, sort of took the money and ran and it took an additional six months to find Carlos "Storm" Martinez and composer Vita Tanga to overhaul and save the film in post-production, all while balancing credit card minimums and low paying-jobs. With the way of the economy now and forevermore changed, I don't think anyone could ever do what I did again... nor should they, probably.

Suite101: Do you have plans for another film?

Spaltro: I'm finishing up a final draft of a small follow-up to ...Around called Things I Don't Understand that I'm going to be shopping around for financing and getting a few names attached to help with that. Ideally I'd love to shoot it later this winter in Brooklyn. It deals a lot with life and death, the relationships we keep and our faith or lack of it in something greater than what we see around us. It's got a lot of the same feelings of my first film and while not at all autobiographical, it's possibly more personal. I'm also putting together a couple of other specs to take out with me for a move to Los Angeles at the end of Summer and developing a TV pilot about low-budget film sets.

…Around: The Official Website