Ken Meyer, A Conversation on Independence, Culture, & The Craft of Getting Films Made

Ken Meyer does not introduce himself with titles, yet his path is hard to miss. His career spans studio and indie worlds: he served as executive producer on Anora and has spent nearly two decades working on Steven Soderbergh’s independent titles: producing, executive producing, or co-producing six of them, working as the Chief Operating Officer of the production entity on three other films, and for a time he handled the day-to-day operations of Soderbergh’s domestic distribution company Fingerprint Releasing. After getting an undergraduate degree in anthropology, Meyer began his film career in Paris, working at first as a production assistant and then as a 2nd Assistant Director on French and international productions shooting across Europe and North Africa. In the mid-1980s he moved to Los Angeles and joined the Directors Guild, spending the next decade working on sets large and small while, between production jobs, he got writing jobs, wrote spec scripts, and joined the Writers Guild. Eventually though, Meyer put the brakes on everything, feeling that he was only working on parts of the whole that he wanted to create, finally adding a law degree to his resume at the age of thirty-nine.

Is there a right path?

“I wouldn’t have had the career I’ve had without becoming a lawyer,” he says. “It allowed me to get onto a film from the beginning and remain on the film to the end, seeing the entire playing field. Knowing what I will need to do at the end of the film, as part of delivery and then marketing and distribution, has made me a better and more efficient operator at the beginning, during the financing, deal-making, and pre-production phases,” he says. The end of his work on an independent film on which he’s a producer or executive producer, he says, is “never.” “First and foremost,” he says, “I’m a film guy who’s also a lawyer, as opposed to being a lawyer who works in film.” Legal training never pulled him away from production; it simply changed the kinds of problems he had to solve. And though his first few years out of law school were focused entirely on the legal aspects of the film business, representing producers, foreign sales agents, small distributors, and indie financiers, he eventually found himself advising clients not just about legal issues, but also about production.

Eventually Meyer started to finance and executive produce ultra-low budget films himself. These were “festival pictures,” he says, some of which got only limited distribution as they were mostly productions without movie stars, often with first-time directors. Eventually the films got bigger, with actors who were instantly recognizable, and directors who were known throughout the world. Though his filmography of the last 15 years includes a long list of films that were financed and produced independently, most have gotten major studio distribution. One of the big differences between a truly independent film and a studio production, he says, is that on a film made for a studio, the production team has the benefit of a studio’s permanent infrastructure, with departments to handle business affairs, legal, finance, incentives, accounting, insurance, production, facilities, post-production, human resources, delivery, localization, participations, and anything else that might come up. A truly independent film has the same need for infrastructure, but it must be created from scratch. One of the main things Meyer contributes to a production, he says, is “institutional knowledge of knowing what will be needed before it’s actually needed.” As Meyer progressed in his career, he developed systems to make what he does on each film more efficient, particularly as to the establishment of the needed infrastructure.

Although he has also run studio films, most of Meyer’s projects over the past ten years have been financed and produced without studio involvement, with distribution rights licensed territory by territory in conjunction with a sales agent. During our conversation I was curious to know his thoughts on curating films for a specific audience. He noted that the “audience changes depending on what step of the filmmaking process you are on” but stresses that there is no single correct path or formula. “Whatever works is the way to do it,” he says. The easiest audience to think about, he adds, is the “retail audience,” i.e. the movie ticket-buying and streamer-subscribing audience, but there are important audiences that come before. Although emerging screenwriters frequently focus on the audience of agents, managers, and producers, what they perceive to be the quickest way to connect with someone who will buy or place their script so as to generate needed cash for their work, in the independent world, writers would be well-advised to steer themselves towards the audience of emerging directors, he said, because the subject matter of an indie film is not likely to lead to a high priced screenplay studio sale, but what does get people’s attention is when an indie film actually gets made, and for that you need a good director because a good director and a good script may lead to good actors.

A festival journey for independent distribution from an EP’s perspective.

Meyer stresses that a festival slot is only one stage in a much longer climb. “If someone who’s unknown gets into Sundance, that’s certainly a good thing,” he told me, but with many more films being made today than ever before, even festival films that win awards can have trouble finding distribution. As studio franchise titles dominate screens, independent cinema has become that much more important given the kinds of stories they tell: novelistic in nature, they are human stories, works built on emotion rather than spectacle. Living part-time in Paris, Meyer sees audiences happy to revisit a beloved film the way they might return to a cherished painting, each viewing in a new space or context revealing something fresh. That capacity for renewal, he stresses, is where the importance of film as culture becomes more evident, and why the puzzle of financing and delivering independent features remains worth solving. His advice is to try your best to understand everything, from the script breakdown, schedule, and budget all the way through delivery, and to seek new challenges that will allow you to gain skills.

In an industry where access to tools and audiences has made it easier than ever to get a film made, Ken Meyer’s journey is a great reminder that understanding, hard work, and creative persistence are essential. His career moves across disciplines to better serve the one goal of making meaningful films possible. Whether this means, building from the ground up or navigating the studio projects, Meyer’s work reflects a commitment to filmmaking as a cultural and artistic practice that we can only be so lucky to continue experiencing again and again.