New Zealand-Australian writer-director James Morcan, whose directorial debut movie ANNO 2020 premieres on global streaming platforms this month, insists that 99.9% of films advertised as ‘indie movies’ are non-indies and dependent on the system.

James Morcan at the Victorian cinematic premiere of ANNO 2020 in Melbourne.

“So-called ‘indie films’ often have stars or major distributors on board from the get-go, including government finance,” he says. “Often you hear these stars or filmmakers talk about ‘the difficulties of shooting indies on such a low budget’ then you find out they had millions or even tens of millions of dollars and were backed by a major corporation like Disney!”

James says the labels ‘indie’ and ‘independent’ were hijacked decades ago as the major studios recognized those terms were being perceived as cool and audiences wanted more indies, or at least films sold as such, as they sensed artists had more creative freedoms in such films.

“However, if you go back in time, ‘indie’ originally meant completely independent and outside the ‘system’, as the word implies, and not beholden to anyone or anything, where rebellious, auteur-style directors could literally say whatever they wanted to without checking first with committees or government organizations or financiers or distributors.

“Well, my film Anno 2020 was self-financed for a budget of only $6,000 USD. It is a real, true, pure indie, I promise you. And we say controversial things in it that I assure you could never have been financed by anything within the mainstream movie industry.”

James, who adapted the ANNO 2020 screenplay from his novel of the same name, says as soon as h began writing the screenplay, long before pre-production, I knew it would get zero mainstream support and would have to be done as an old-fashioned indie against all odds.

“It was obvious that was going to be near impossible as we also had an around-the-world epic story in which we were to shoot in 17 cities on four continents in four different languages. Not to mention navigating shoots around the lockdowns and other Covid restrictions during 2020-2021!

“But despite all the hardships in filming this beast, never once did my team and I ever stop to ask ourselves , ‘Are we allowed to say that?’ or ‘Will we be offending anyone?’ or anything like that. Why? Because we were actually independent and so far outside the system that we may as well have been making the movie on the Moon!”

Following a limited but very successful interstate theatrical release in Australian cinemas last year, ANNO 2020 has its world streaming premiere on September 13 on TouTube and other platforms.

As director James Morcan says, “If you yearn for the return of actual indie movies, then you may like to check it out.”

Footnote: If you’d like to hear James discuss the aforementioned, tune into: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh41IAoVgo8

*************************************************************************