History and philosophy have been my reading diet for years. This year the Vedic side pulled, and one concept stopped me cold: varna.

Varna is Sanskrit, literally “color” or “quality”. In the old Vedic model there are four of them: shudra the worker, kshatriya the warrior, brahmana the sage, vaishya the merchant. Centuries later the idea hardened into hereditary castes, and that’s the version most people know. I don’t think it was stupid. It was convenient: the people who froze the ladder were the ones already standing on top. But locking a person’s ceiling at birth kills the entire point of the model. The original is something else entirely: a map of what actually drives a person.

Read it next to modern psychology and it’s hard not to smile: a motivation theory, with stages of personal growth built in, written a couple of few years before Maslow drew his pyramid.

Each varna has a high register and a low register, and that’s the part most retellings skip.

The worker wants security. Salary, stability, clear tasks. At his best he’s a master: Stradivari claimed even God couldn’t build a violin better than his. At his worst he does the minimum not to get fired, blames the government, the economy, the boss, and dreams of retiring to a beach with a coconut. His growth lever is one word: responsibility.

The warrior wants victory. Territory, control, being the one who decides. At his best he’s the backbone of everything: pull warriors out of a society (army, police, firefighters) and it collapses within the hour. No pyramid was ever built by workers holding a meeting. At his worst he’s a tyrant: total control, nothing moves without his permission. His growth lever: discipline pointed at building, not conquering.

The sage wants truth. Understanding, and passing it on. At his best he’s a scientist, endlessly upgrading his picture of the world. At his worst he’s a propagandist: an intellect sharp enough to prove black is white, selling dogma by the hour. His lever is honesty: with the facts, and with himself.

The merchant wants growth. Systems, capital, things that compound. At his best he multiplies resources and distributes them, giving ideas the fuel they need to exist. At his worst his desires are infinite, and a man who always needs more is poor at any net worth. His lever: generosity.

The part that hooked me: you don’t get assigned one for life. You climb.

I checked the ladder against my own biography. It maps uncomfortably well.

The worker rung started for me before any real job. As a teenager I skipped school to make money on a labor job. My father found out and was furious. Then, after the scolding, he asked one question: did you do the work well? I said yes. And he praised me. That stuck for life: if you do something, do it well. Not for praise, not to get it over with. Well. So by my first real jobs, responsibility was already installed - parents and sport had done it before any employer could.

Then Russia, my twenties and thirties. A tech startup. A transport company that grew to 350 employees. A construction firm. And more ventures around them: I kept opening businesses because more was the whole point. Some grew. Some collapsed. I was spread across all of them at once. On paper, business. In psychology, pure warrior. More routes, more market share, more territory. Growth was the only scoreboard, and the goal was honest and simple: earn more. I never became the tyrant from the low register, but I lived on that rung for years (ask anyone who has managed 350 drivers). Sport saved me here in a second way: it brought discipline, and discipline leaked into every other area of life. A warrior without discipline is just aggression with a schedule.

The warrior didn’t end with some elegant insight. It ended at a trading terminal. After moving to Canada I sold the businesses and put the money to work: stocks, forex, crypto. The returns came. The meaning didn’t. Pure trading produces nothing - you’re taking money from traders who happened to be less sharp or less lucky that day. When that landed, it triggered the question that quietly ends the warrior: what if the point is not to earn more, but to make something good? Something people actually need.

For me the answer had a specific shape. People read less every year, and books are where the knowledge that moves us forward actually lives. Film is how meaning travels now, to where the attention went. One film calms someone down, another lights a fire, a third just entertains, which is also honest work.

Film was the old dream, the one that had been pulling at me even through the trading years. And here the ladder did something I didn’t expect: it sent me back to the bottom rung. New country, new language, new industry - so I became a worker again, this time on purpose. Production assistant. Grip crew. Driver. Electrician. Accounting. Actor. Every set position I could get into. I didn’t take those jobs for the paycheck. I took them to see the machine from inside: how a set runs, who decides what, where the money leaks, where I could do it better. My father’s question rode along on each one: did you do the work well? Well enough that people kept calling with shifts years after I’d moved on to producing.

That detour was my film school, and it opened the sage rung. I watched the best people on set and absorbed everything they did. English on top of it all. Then reading followed: the business of film, psychology, and lately, as you can tell, Indian philosophy. The questions changed from “how do I win” to “what is actually true here”. I won’t pretend I’ve finished this rung. I’m in the middle of it, and I suspect the middle is where you stay.

The classic model puts the sage on top. In my reading, there is no top. Each varna is infinite: a worker who loves his craft can go deeper into mastery his whole life and be below no one. Stradivari never needed to run an empire. The ladder isn’t a ranking, it’s a map of what drives you, and everyone picks the rung where they’re home. Mine turned out to be the sage and the merchant, and the merchant came last simply because that’s the order my life took.

In its high register, the merchant turns resources into fuel for ideas: truth, multiplied by capital, moved to projects that would die without it. That’s what producing films means to me now: finding capital and building systems so that stories aligned with my mission, the overview effect I wrote about earlier this week, actually reach the screen. Two films made, one sold to 40+ countries, investors repaid. Merchant craft in service of something bigger than the merchant. And honestly, I count myself early here: a small part of this rung walked, most of it ahead, on the merchant and the sage at the same time.

You never fully graduate a varna. I still train the worker’s responsibility, the warrior’s discipline, the sage’s judgment, the merchant’s generosity.

And you don’t get to pause. A fruit that stops ripening doesn’t stay where it is - it starts to rot on the branch. Ripening is the whole job, and a fruit ripens wherever it hangs: the worker’s rung, the merchant’s, any of them. The task is to be fully ripe by the time you’re picked. I’m nowhere near. Still climbing. Still ripening.

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In 1968 the Apollo 8 crew saw Earth from the outside, whole, for the first time in human history.

The photo Bill Anders took that day, “Earthrise”, became one of the most reproduced images of the century. But the more interesting thing happened inside the astronauts. Many came back changed. Borders looked invented. Conflicts looked small. The daily noise lost some of its volume.

Psychologists eventually gave the shift a name: the overview effect - a lasting change in perspective that comes from seeing the whole instead of the fragment. Astronauts keep describing it in almost identical words, decades apart, across countries and missions. Something about the view rearranges the viewer.

You can’t send every viewer to orbit. The ticket economics don’t work.

But a film can do a smaller version of the same thing. Two hours in a dark room, and you walk out seeing your own life from a slightly different altitude. Most films don’t attempt this. The ones that do are the ones people carry around for decades.

That’s my mission in one line: films that entertain, and quietly expand your horizon.

It took me three businesses and two films to arrive at that line. I came to film from a decade of running companies: a tech startup, transport, construction. Business taught me systems and discipline. Film gave the systems something worth carrying.

Every project I greenlight from now on gets filtered through one question: does this expand how the viewer sees their world, or just fill an evening.

A producer with a mission is a better bet than a producer with a spreadsheet. I say that as someone holding both. The spreadsheet matters: my last release went to 40+ countries and investors were repaid, and I build every film on that discipline. But a spreadsheet only describes the plan. It says nothing about what the producer does on the day the plan breaks.

A film takes years from first draft to screen. Over that distance every project hits moments where it would be easier to stop. What carries it through isn’t the spreadsheet. It’s a producer who knows exactly why this film should exist.

“Lookout”, the film I’m financing right now, is the first one built fully on this filter: a contained folk-horror that works as a genre film on the surface and lands as something bigger underneath. Commercial discipline below, perspective shift on top.

Commercial doesn’t mean shallow. That contradiction is my whole business.

The numbers side of this argument - how the discipline works, what the floor looks like, who recoups first - lives on the investor page.

In 2013, the budget came up $6M short. They were less than 24 hours from shutting the production down.

Eva Longoria wrote the check. $6M to save a movie nobody yet knew would become a billion-dollar franchise. No check, no John Wick. No Chapter 2, 3, 4. None of it.

The public version of film is the premiere. The real version is the money, and it almost never closes the clean way it looks on a deck. Financing moves late. A piece falls out. Someone has to hold their nerve in the last stretch before the camera turns.

So why does an investor write that kind of check, days out, on a first-time-director action film with a star doing his own stunts? Not faith. Math.

I’ve done this twice. My first film sold into 40+ countries and the investors recouped. My second hit US theaters this year. Both times, the structure is what closed it, not a great pitch in the room. I build the next ones the same way, with a small group of investors alongside me.

Because by the time you’re close to shooting, a film isn’t a script anymore. It’s a stack of de-risked elements: a tax credit that lowers the equity at risk, a bankable cast the international market pre-buys against, proven genre demand, a clean chain of title. Each one is a reason to say yes under pressure.

And the demand is the part people miss right now. A horror film made for $750K, “Obsession,” crossed $350M worldwide. A teenager’s web series became a studio-backed feature. Small, sharp genre films are what audiences are paying for, and the budgets are low enough that the math can actually work for the people who back them.

When those elements are in place, a last-minute gap isn’t a crisis. It’s a known move in a game with a known shape. The check-writer isn’t gambling. They’re pricing risk that’s already been engineered down.

That’s the side of film I build on. Low budget, strong genre, built as an asset before it’s art. I’m financing my next one now.

The script gets you in the room. The structure is what gets the film made.

Longoria didn’t save John Wick because she loved the pages. She wrote the check because the math let her.

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Most indie producers never attach A-list talent. Not because it’s impossible, but because they don’t know the actual mechanics.

Here’s the strategy. I’m running it right now on my next project.

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Step 1. Get your package ready first

Before you contact anyone, know your budget, shoot dates, location, director, and have a visual deck.

Agents and managers will ask all of this in the first 30 seconds. If you don’t have answers, you’re done.

Step 2. The correct contact order

Personal connection - ideal, but use it strategically as the “cherry on top” once there’s already professional momentum. Not as your cold opener.

Casting director - your most powerful tool if you don’t have personal connections. They have daily relationships with managers and agents. A $5k casting director is worth more than months of cold emails.

Manager - if no CD available, go here first. They’re closer to their clients. They know what the actor actually wants right now - what roles, what schedule, what they’re looking for career-wise.

Agent - only when you’re ready to make a formal Pay-or-Play offer with real terms and money attached.

Most producers do this in reverse. Cold email to agent first, with a half-baked package, no director attached, no real money. The agent sees that email for thirty seconds and it goes to trash.

Step 3. What talent actually cares about

In order:

1. Story - never stop polishing your materials

2. Money - and do they need it right now?

3. Schedule - shoot days, consecutive or split?

4. Location - LA shoots mean actors go home to their families and sleep in their own beds

5. Director

6. Perks

Research the actor. Watch interviews. Know what they care about. Personalize.

The producers who skip this step send the same generic package to thirty actors and wonder why nobody bites.

Step 4. The director question

First thing every manager asks - “Who’s the director?”

A first-time director with no track record? You know the answer.

Solve this before approaching anyone.

Step 5. Follow-up without being annoying

Send materials. Wait two full weekends. Send a Friday reminder.

Still nothing? Send a non-exclusive letter:

“You’re still our first choice, but we’re moving forward with others. We’d love to hear from you.”

Then move to the next name. No drama. No burning bridges.

Quite often you’ll hear something back after this email.

The actors are not the bottleneck. The package is.

Get it right, contact in the right order, know what they want, and the door opens.

When I tell investors that the Canadian government will commit 35-50% of an indie film’s budget before cameras roll, the response is usually disbelief. Then questions. Then a re-examination of why they passed on film.

Most investors built their model on the wrong mechanics. This is the actual structure.

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The misconception

“Tax credit” means you pay less tax on your profit. That’s what most people think. That’s wrong.

A film tax credit is not a tax instrument. It’s production capital. Government money that goes into the budget - not against your tax bill.

The film industry term is “soft money”: tax credits, rebates, grants, co-production incentives. None of it touches your income tax. All of it touches your production budget.

Here’s the actual mechanism. The government agrees to pay back a percentage of your qualified spending. On a $10M Canadian production, that can be $3-4M from the province and another $1-2M from the federal program. Combined - 35-50% of your eligible budget is government-committed before you shoot a single frame.

That misconception matters because it changes how investors should evaluate film investment entirely.

If you think a tax credit means “producers pay less tax,” you think it’s irrelevant to your investment decision. If you understand it’s a government commitment to fund a significant portion of production costs, the risk calculation changes completely.

The transfer

Most producers treat the film tax credit as money that arrives later. It doesn’t have to.

The credit is transferable. You can sell it to a tax credit broker at 85-92 cents on the dollar and receive cash at greenlight. Not when the tax year closes. Not 18 months after delivery. At greenlight.

On a $2M credit, that’s $1.8M in upfront liquidity from the government before you shoot a frame.

For the financing structure this is significant. The transferable credit functions like a partial presale - committed, government-backed revenue that reduces the equity gap from day one.

The discount of 8-15 cents on the dollar is the cost of certainty. You trade a small percentage of the credit’s face value to know your floor at greenlight instead of guessing it twelve months after delivery.

Producers who know this build it into the financing stack from the first budget draft. Producers who don’t treat it as a backend bonus and carry liquidity risk they don’t need to carry.

Don Reinertsen famously said, “If you only quantify one thing, quantify the cost of delay.”

The credit is the same either way. What’s different is when you access it and what you can do with it.

The loan you don’t have to repay alone

You don’t have to sell the credit. You can borrow against it.

Once the government commits to paying you a tax credit, that commitment is a receivable. An asset. Like any receivable, you can use it as collateral.

In Canada, RBC, National Bank, and BMO all have production lending programs. They lend against the expected credit at low interest rates because the risk profile is near-zero. The government owes you the money. The bank is lending against a government obligation.

Typical structure: 90-95% of the expected credit value as a loan at closing. You deploy it during production. When the credit comes in - usually 12-18 months - you repay the loan.

Cost of money - 6-8% depending on structure and lender.

Compare that to equity, which costs you 20-25% of the back end at minimum, plus the 10-20% premium. Bank debt against a government receivable is cheap capital.

The paperwork is more involved than a standard business loan. But once you’re through it, you have cash in the financing stack before cameras roll at a fraction of what equity costs.

The credit didn’t change. What changed is when you access it and at what cost.

Stacking in British Columbia

In British Columbia, a production can access two layers of soft money:

• Federal CPTC (Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit) - 25% of eligible Canadian labor

• Provincial FIBC (Film Incentive BC) - 40-60% of eligible BC labor

If you qualify as Canadian content, you access both simultaneously.

The calculation is tricky, but on a $5M production with $3M in eligible BC labor: $2-2.5M, or 35-50% of the budget, before a dollar of private financing enters the picture.

Most investors don’t know this is legal. It is. It’s designed this way.

Governments use these programs to keep production local, employ local crews, and build industry infrastructure. The producer’s job is to capture as much of it as possible. The investor’s job is to understand where their capital sits in that stack.

That position is more protected than most traditional investment structures.

The full picture for investors

The common assumption about film investment - you put in money, the production spends it, you hope the film earns it back. Speculative. Dependent entirely on market performance.

The reality when soft money is structured correctly:

• Government commits 35-50% of the production budget as a receivable before cameras roll

• Bank lends against that receivable at 6-8%

• Private equity and pre-sales fill the remaining gap

The investor isn’t funding 100% of a speculative production. They’re funding the portion that government programs and distributors don’t cover.

The government doesn’t take equity. They don’t participate in upside. They pay a fixed incentive and exit. The equity investor keeps the full upside on the private capital portion.

That’s a different structure than most people imagine when they hear “film investment.”

The risk isn’t zero. Films still underperform. Distribution is still uncertain. But the structure I’m describing is not the “hope and pray” model that people assume when they picture film financing.

It’s engineered. It borrows from real estate and private equity structures. It’s been operating in Canada, the UK, and Australia for 30 years.

Most investors who passed on film did so based on the wrong model.

That’s worth knowing.

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My first AFM, I showed up thinking the package would sell itself.

First meeting. Thirty seconds in. “Who’s in it?”

That’s the day I understood I’d spent years learning how to make films and zero time learning how to sell them.

The three groups buyers see

Buyers divide every indie film into three groups:

1. Terrible films. Unwatchable in a way the general public never sees them.

2. Genuinely good films - real craft, real stories - with zero commercial viability. Not because they’re bad. Because they were made for the filmmaker, not for an audience. Nobody asked “who is this actually for” before the camera rolled.

3. Tiny sliver with real commercial and critical potential. Studios and streamers grab these. Indie distributors never see them.

Most indie producers are aiming at the wrong target.

What’s left for the independent market is group two - films that are just commercial enough to sell. That’s the actual target.

Genre is strategy, not creative compromise

The safest commercial bet right now is thriller.

• Affordable to produce

• More interesting characters than action

• More commercial than drama

• Tension translates across every language and territory

Add a sci-fi element if you can do it without blowing the budget. Primer is two people in a garage talking about time travel. It feels enormous. The audience’s imagination is free.

Horror - cheap, contained, language-independent, but caps at the box office.

Comedy - under-submitted to festivals so yours stands out, but dies internationally because it’s dialogue and culture dependent.

Drama - about 80% of festival submissions are drama. Crowded, cast-dependent, hard to sell internationally.

Action - huge international market, buyers pre-buy before you shoot, but expensive to execute well.

The production mistakes that kill deals

These cost nothing to fix. Most producers find out too late.

No unit photographer. Shoot your leads in costume against a white background. 50 shots each. High res. Talent-approved. Artwork is the first thing any audience sees and you have half a second.

No M&E tracks - music and effects separated from dialogue. Foreign territories dub, they don’t just subtitle. No tracks means no foreign revenue.

Clearances - festival clearances don’t cover wide release. This becomes your problem, not the distributor’s.

The cold email

Thirty seconds. That’s what you get.

• What territories are available

• Is it finished, and when if not

• Who’s in it

• Artwork

• Trailer or one strong clip

There are producers who make films to distribute. And there are producers who distribute to produce.

The second type is thinking about distribution from day one because distribution is how you fund the next film.

Film school never taught that distinction

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