Selling Yourself
Adam Lacey talks to Shimmy Marcus about self-distribution.

When it comes to the process of self-distributing your films, Shimmy Marcus knows exactly what he’s talking about. The 41 year-old Irish director turned his hand to this process when his 2003 movie, Headrush, was snubbed by a slew of distribution companies, despite its mostly positive reviews and a gaggle of awards to brag about. He enlightens me regarding the hard graft and heartache of this approach, and it’s clear it irks him still.

‘The reason we did it was because nobody else would do it in the first place. Y’know, we were winning awards at festivals all around the world. We were getting pretty much strong reviews. Anytime we were coming up against Intermission at festivals we were beating it so we thought that it made sense for us to put it out and that it should get an Irish release at least. I mean, I don’t see the point of making a film if you’re not going to try and get people to see it. But some of the distributors here wouldn’t even return our calls. One of them said that they liked it but there were no stars in it so they’d pass. Then another distributor, Eclipse, said they liked it but they couldn’t put any money into it. So we asked them if we raised the money would they get involved. There was a fund that the Irish Film Board had at the time but they told us that since we weren’t an official distributor they wouldn’t give us the grant, which was obviously very frustrating. I don’t know what that means, that you have to be an official distributor! Then we went out to the private market and we managed to raise €50,000 through friends and people we didn’t really know, went back to Eclipse and said: “We have this money so can we get the Film Board grant now?” The Film Board came back and said no, that Eclipse have to put money in it themselves. To me that’s just technical bullshit. So in the end we just had to go the long way ourselves, which is what we did.’

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 122.