A group of UK-based financiers touched down this week at Glasgow Film Festival’s Industry Focus strand where they weighed in on the state of indie film financing and, while they admitted the industry was still in a bit of a correctional period, the overall message for the future of the indie sector is a positive one.
“The independent film market has always been really good at adapting to change,” said Joe Simpson, whose Ashland Hill Media Finance has backed projects ranging from Berlinale Competition title At the Sea to upcoming Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy starrer The Magic Faraway Tree. “We are the people that have to be fluid and flexible and find opportunities and be smart and opportunistic.”
Simpson was joined on the finance panel with Goldfinch CEO and founder Kirsty Bell and Media Finance Capital’s Jonathan Gorner. Bell admitted that the indie sector has seen a “bit of a pivot” across the last few years.
“As a producer, the streamers gave us all a massive headache, and they also gave us a hangover,” she said. “They were buying all of our content in 2013 to 2015, offering the same amount of money for whatever content you could put in front of them. But what we didn’t know, is that they were gathering intel effectively to create their own content. So, we effectively gave them the ability to produce in this very binary way, and gave them the ability to produce their own content and steal all the best producers and to be part of that.”
She continued: “So, they created their own machine, but it left the independent industry in a bit of a difficult space, and that’s why I say hangover. I think now we’re in a period of morphing, so to speak, of reinventing the independent film industry to suit what we have now.”
Simpson agreed, stating that the indie business was currently in a “funny period of post-streamer land grab.”
“I think that in a couple of years’ time, when we have AI systems talking to each other and recommending movies and sending us to an online destination that has all movies, I think that micro payment business will come back,” said Simpson.
He added: “I think revenue from independent films will go up because more people will have more time and costs will come down. So, we have to be super flexible. We have to be in the market, and we have to be clever.”
Simpson pointed virtual stages as being one of the “cheaper ways of shooting movies” and that producers should be open to these options to bring their costs of productions down. “Part of our service and job is to assure the filmmakers and show them that they can achieve their creative vision, but in a very different and more cost effective way.”
When pressed about budgets and where the sweet spot for indie projects is in order to recoup, Bell said that “$1M in the elevated genre space is about right.”
“You can make it for less and you can make it for more, but I think in that space, $1M is what I would expect to see unless the cast demands it and you’ve got a presale to back that money that you’re putting into the cast.”
Gorner added: “I think for producers, the sales agents are their best friends. They are the ones that are at the coalface of the deal making between the distributors and the actual film and they will let you know whether the market will support a budget of that size with that cast. We’ve seen, for instance, films with budgets of $5M with a certain cast but they have only made presales for a budget of $3M and that’s where the market is telling you that you need to either improve your costs market value wise or bring the budget down.”
The Glasgow Film Festival runs February 25 – March 8, 2026.
