1st THINGS 1st

You must determine which type of artist you want to become. If you want to make films like Jim Jarmusch w/ Dead Man, don't complain about it not making $. If you want to make films like Michael Bay, don't try to sell your films as a revolution in cinematic thinking. It doesn't matter if you want to be famous (i.e. rich) by being unconventional, or make counter cultural works that attack mainstream conventions. Determine all the things you want to do first. Then put them into a list. Then prioritize that list. Then determine the best plan of action to achieve these goals. DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT, start out by stating what can and can't be done, start with what you want to do, then figure out how to do it. People in the industry make statements like "you can't make a film for less that $35M". Well, that statement is only true if you are apart of the old system and established way of thinking.

Here's an example:
Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for $7K. He started out by saying "how can I make a $7K film look like $7M." He determined he would have to write, direct, edit, produce, and create the sound for the film, or it would have never been done. See where I'm going. If he started out by listening to industry insiders they would have said, "There is no way one person can write, direct, edit, produce, and create the sound for the film." He figured out what he WANTED to do, not what "COULD" be done.

MY ARTISTIC GOAL
I want to be an artist that makes entertaining films across every genre that appeal to a global audience on a cultural level. I want these films to be entertaining on the surface but have massive subtext if studied or dissected. I do not want to be didactic or preachy. I DO NOT want viewers to embody or become the characters that I create, but be aware that they are being told a story BY ME, the storyteller.

TASKS
1: In order to appeal to global cultural taste, you must understand global markets. There are 3 major markets to study. Asian, European, and American. Asian films rely more on mood and atmosphere. European films rely more on theme and character while American films stress character and story. All stories have all of these elements. The secret then is to formulate in the pre-production stage how to shoot scenes so that once they are edited for certain markets they can be tailored to that regions preference.

OPPOSITION
you may say that this is pandering or compromising as an artist, but it is not. My goal as an artist is to tell a story. If I go to Japan and talk about the cold winters of Chicago, bumpy roads and cold deserted streets they may have no clue what I'm talking about b/c they are immersed in a culture that has a winter but doesn't get sub zero temp. and the fact that large cities are so crowded the idea of deserted streets is hard to conceive of. Think of the opening scene of Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise. Everyone in America knows that NY is the city that never sleeps and times square is the busiest, most crowded place in the US, the fact that he wakes up to see it deserted with not one single person in sight was an amazing sight to behold and we all got the relevance of it. Outside of America this may have flown over the heads of anyone who has no idea what times square is like and it would likely require a line or two about how it is always overcrowded. It's all about how you tell the story, it's not pandering.

2: Playing both sides is extremely difficult, there are very few examples of films that have great entertainment value, but large subtext underneath. The best examples I can think of are The Matrix films, LOTR trilogy and the Planet of The Apes series. This leads me to believe that most films of this caliber are usually allegories and extremely relevant when they are created. Therefore my films must be extremely steeped in modern times and part of the zeitgeist.

OPPOSITION:
This may be difficult to achieve when it comes to "small" films. But then again it may just be determined by the theme and the storyteller discovering it's universal aspect for the world and relating it thematically.

3: Selling myself as an artist will also be difficult. The only few directors I can think of offhand who excel at this are Scorcese, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, and M. Night Shyamalan. This is b/c their films are all part of an Oeuvre. I must determine what my thematic oeuvre is and play to it. It is consistently said that viewers go to a film and "become" the character that they are viewing, and also that viewers don't want to "know" they are watching a movie. I do not want to achieve this, I want people to know that they are watching a story being told to them and that they similar to the characters, but they should not be role-playing. In order to do this I want to take them out of picture but engross them in it so much they can't take their eyes off of it. This is best achieved by transcending the medium of cinema as "real" and exposing its manipulation to the degree that it is accepted by the viewer.

OPPOSITION:
this can backfire with people saying my films are weird and/or stupid. The secret is selling myself and how I tell stories, that way when people go to a theater or buy my films they have already prepared themselves for something unorthodox. A good way of implementing this goal is to start with other popular works and put my signature on them, such as a comic book character or remake. This way I can acclimate my audience on what to expect in the future.