Justin McConnell’s Clapboard Jungle: Surviving the Independent Film Business is a film about the harsh realities of indie filmmaking as we follow McConnell’s trials and tribulations while he endeavors to get his project greenlit through a five-year process. Navigating the current film business is more difficult now than ever before: rapidly changing technology and an overcrowded marketplace have led to an industry in which anyone can make a film, but few can make a living.

We watch the intrepid filmmaker as he explores the struggles of financing, securing talent, working with practical effects and selling the finished product in the hopes of turning a profit. The documentary features interviews with a range of industry luminaries including Guillermo del Toro (Crimson Peak), Sid Haig (Spider Baby), Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator), Mick Garris (The Stand), Dick Miller (Matinee), Tom Holland (Fright Night) and George A. Romero (The Crazies), alongside a host of others – not only are technical aspects and interpersonal skills discussed but also the emotional stamina, along with little-known tips needed to survive in the low budget film industry.

McConnell’s previous work as a director includes Skull World (2013), Broken Mile (2016), and Lifechanger (2018).

How did you come up with the idea for Clapboard Jungle?

Towards the end of 2013, my previous documentary, Skull World, had just been released, and I was trying to come up with an idea for a project that I could make for no money. I figured any of my narrative films would take a while to get to the camera and I didn’t want to be just sitting on my hands. So, I thought I should just make another documentary using whatever resources I could pull together and any bit of side money I could get from the business that I run, which is a post-production company. I hadn’t really seen a documentary that follows the indie side of the business, from development all the way to how you actually get a movie financed and get one going. I figured that since I’m already going to be going to markets and festivals anyway and trying to do this for a living, I might as well try and merge two ideas into one and make a film about that while tracking myself as I do it and simultaneously getting as many interviews as possible. And I largely chose to turn the camera on myself for practical reasons. I just couldn’t afford to shadow somebody else’s life for several years because I would be living their life and not mine and it was all kind of out of my own pocket anyway. 

Do you view Clapboard Jungle as a cautionary tale?

I don’t know about a cautionary tale as much as a litmus test. I made the film for young artists, young filmmakers starting out to watch and get a reality check of the way the business goes for a lot of people. And when they watch it, they will probably come to one of two conclusions. Either they look at it and go, “That looks really hard, but I want to make films for a living and no matter what, nobody is going to tell me no.” In that case, they have a guiding light of an approach. On the other hand, if they watch it and go, “Yeah okay. I’m not doing that, that’s way too much work,” then they’ve also got their answer, that gut-check moment. So, I built it like a weathervane, I guess. (laughs) So that people can watch it and decide sort of if it’s right for them. And I’m not saying that this story applies to every single person – everybody’s approach is going to be different – but I at least wanted to show a case study and back that up with as many knowledgeable subjects as possible to get the stuff across that film schools don’t necessarily tell you. 

How did you get into the film business? Was it a lifelong dream or did you fall into it?

A lot of it was my dream from high school and I just pushed myself in that direction. But how I got in initially was that I went to York University in Toronto for a film program, dropped out of that, went to a different trade school, I dropped out of that because there was a big teachers’ strike and I lost three months of classes and I was paying basically to sit in my room. I went to a trade school for post-production and from there I got a job editing commercials for a record label in the early 2000s, Warner, Universal, Rhino, through a third-party post-production company. I branched into music videos and then started self-producing short films and a feature documentary that got some okay distribution in early 2000. It was really just a gradual process, and I still think I have got a long way to go. But coming from Canada, coming from nowhere and living in Toronto, you are not exactly able to walk into a studio and pitch something because they are not there, they are in LA. So it’s a little bit divorced from the Hollywood system, it’s much more on the independent side.

Even though you had some experience, it’s a big leap to decide you’re going to be a director. That takes a lot of knowledge and confidence.

Yeah, I think that was always my goal. From the time I was really young, my dad used to sneak me horror movies when I would be sick at home. I was sick a lot in my early teens and young adult life so he would bring home Rated R horror movies and I’d get exposed to that stuff, which made me want to make films. I was already directing short films by the age of like 15 or 16, backyard shorts. And I think it was always my goal to push towards directing feature films, but the reality check was that I didn’t have any clue on how to actually do it. So the first few things I did were just scraping together whatever I could with whatever resources I had available, and even writing the scripts around whatever resources I had available. The family had a hunting camp, so that was written into the script. I made my first feature film in high school actually, which nobody has really seen, but it was really just that I had a summer job and I bought a Handycam and I made a film with friends and teachers.  So it was always definitely a path that I wanted from a very young and it was more than just trying to figure out how to navigate getting other people to pay for it, (laughs) was always the challenge. 

You must need nerves of steel. This career is a roller coaster ride full of extreme ups and downs. How do you get through the down phases?

I absolutely have lots of down moments and moments of doubt, and moments where I feel like things couldn’t get any lower, I’ve had plenty of those in my life.  But I also have the philosophy that you need those down moments to show who you really are as a person, and you can rise up out of those. The hope is that you can rise up and become smarter and more knowledgeable or better able to handle whatever comes at you in the future if you take stock and step outside of yourself for a second to figure out how you got there, or figure out how you can get out of it, or what you can do differently next time to learn from whatever mistake you made. I realize that even in my most down moments I am still in a rather privileged position even when it doesn’t feel like it, other people have it worse.

Was it a particular movie or a director that sparked your interest in filmmaking? As you say, you didn’t come from a showbiz family. 

Yeah, I think from the earliest point it was The Monster Squad, (laughs) which is an 80s horror movie about a group of kids who fight knockoffs of Universal monsters. The reason I think that had an impact on me, I still remember walking into a video store and it being on a top shelf and me pointing at it and my dad renting it for me and my mom letting him rent it for me. And as a kid, you are thinking, “Wow. You can actually put magic on the screen, you can create something that doesn’t exist in real life and tell a story on a tapestry that …” I mean these are not the words I would have used at 12 years old, but you can tell a story on a tapestry that does not have to be within the bounds of reality.