A while back I would’ve told you a filmmaker is someone who picks up a camera, wrangles a crew, and spends three years of their life turning an idea into ninety minutes of finished footage. Simple. Everyone agreed on the definition, even if nobody agreed on much else.
I don’t think that definition holds up anymore, and I’ve been sitting with why.
The blur
Somewhere in the last few years, “content creator” and “filmmaker” stopped being two separate species. A bloke I follow does 90-second vertical clips five days a week and just wrapped a 40-minute documentary shot entirely on his phone. Is he a content creator having a filmmaker moment, or a filmmaker who also does content? Genuinely don’t know, and I’m not sure it matters.
Then there’s the AI question, which everyone wants to turn into a culture war. Someone writes, directs, and edits a story using AI tools from start to finish, never touches a camera. Is that person a filmmaker? I keep coming back to the same answer: I don’t care what tools someone used. I care whether they finished the thing, and whether it’s actually good.
Nobody interrogated Scorsese’s camera choice before deciding if Taxi Driver counted as cinema. The tool question is a distraction dressed up as a serious debate.
What actually changed
Here’s what I think is really going on. The barrier used to be equipment, cameras, editing suites, distribution deals, all gate-kept by money and connections. Then the barrier moved to distribution, you could shoot something on a phone, but getting it in front of people still ran through festivals, sales agents, and streamers who took the lion’s share of the value.
Now even that barrier is wobbling. You can build an audience before you’ve made anything. Crowdfunding isn’t just a way to raise money anymore, it’s a way to prove a story has legs before you spend three years on it. The old sequence, make the film, find the money, find the audience is flipping into build the audience, then the funding and distribution follow.
Which means the actual scarce thing left isn’t equipment, and it isn’t even reach. It’s craft, finished work, and the ability to hold an audience’s attention for longer than a scroll. That’s a much harder skill to fake than owning the right camera.
The label problem
I keep wondering if “indie filmmaker” as a label has gotten so broad it’s stopped meaning anything specific. It used to signal something concrete outside the studio system, low budget, festival circuit. Now it could describe someone with a six-figure Kickstarter and a distribution deal, or someone editing alone on a laptop who’s never submitted to a festival in their life.
Maybe that’s fine. Maybe the label was always doing less work than we gave it credit for, and what actually matters is the same thing it’s always been: did you make something worth someone’s time, and did you find a way to get it to them without giving away everything in the process.
I don’t have a tidy answer to what a filmmaker is anymore. I think the question itself is more useful than any definition I could land on because every time I try to draw a hard line, I find someone doing brilliant work squarely on the wrong side of it.
If you’re building toward something long-form right now, camera or no camera, AI-assisted or fully analogue, I’d genuinely like to hear how you’re thinking about it. It’s part of why I’ve been building Indikin infrastructure for people making long-form work who don’t want to hand over ownership just to get it seen.