Thomas Schatz speaks to this duality with respect to the indie film movement of the 1990s and the success of indie writer-directors perpetuating this notion that indie cinema is a “fundamentally director-driven movement” that is “particular amenable to an auteur approach.”  Schatz warns of the perils of “dogmatic auteurism” and delineates these perils as “the failure to recognize the industrial context for its enabling as well as its constraining factors; the failure to adequately acknowledge the collaborative nature of feature filmmaking; and the failure to consider the complex ‘work flow’ in which certain individuals other than the director are vital creative contributors to successive stages of the filmmaking process.”  However, Schatz goes on to call the director the “primary authority” over everything from writing, production design, costumes, makeup, performances, sound, camera work, lighting, and other areas, adding that this “authorial designation [is] only if the director is actively involved in the writing stage and presides over pre- and post-production as well, thus maintaining creative control of the enterprise.”  

There is no doubt that, as writer-directors in charge of pre- and post-production such as the ones Schatz describes, Jenkins, Chazelle, and Nichols are the “primary authority” of their films.  But all three of these filmmakers also depend heavily on their growing units of cast and crew members to create their work.  Nichols brought 52 cast and crew members with him from Midnight Special to Loving.  Chazelle brought 56 with him from La La Land to First Man (2018). And Jenkins brought 25 with him from Moonlight to If Beale Street Could Talk (2018).  Considering the small budgets of these films and thus the smaller crews and contributors hired, these are relatively large filmmaking units. And yet despite the immense contributions of these growing filmmaking units, we can’t ignore that the writer-director’s vision is the consistent driving force behind all of it.  As the quotes by Schatz suggest, the duality of indie authorship is that working in conjunction with the “vital creative contributors” of the filmmaking unit is the “primary authority” of the writer-director “maintaining creative control of the enterprise.” 

As the “primary authority," indie writer-directors have also become the center of the media and critical discourse.  It can be argued that this selective attention with respect to indie auteurs has always been a part of the industry.  As Alisa Perren notes, “A key consequence of this heightened attention on a certain strand of ‘American indie auteurs’ was that critics, journalists, and industry executives began to conceptualize the low-budget film scene within ever-narrower terms.”  Perren also lays out how indie companies like Miramax relied on this strategy of marketing auteurs after theatrical disappointments like Reservoir Dogs (1992) caused it and other studios to acknowledge that “the director should have been foregrounded more extensively in the film’s marketing” and they should increase promotional press tours that present the director as the singular voice of the film.  Thus, while the concept of a duality of indie authorship between a “primary authority” writer-director and a filmmaking unit’s “vital creative contributors” may have emerged in academic scholarship, this nuance is largely missing from the output of indie film marketing departments and industry discourse.    

In fact, it can be argued that filmmakers that center their public discourse around collaborative filmmaking, as Jeff Nichols does, suffer the results from it with respect to industry recognition.  In interviews, Nichols says things like, “That’s how much I depend on these people,” “We’ve developed together,” “We’re getting better,” and “(I’m) locked with them.”  And while referring to his unit as “family” and saying things like, “My success is theirs” may sound like modesty, it’s important to note that both Nichols and his producer Sarah Green conceived of the need for a filmmaking unit from the beginning of their relationship and have gone about constructing it into a reality with each successive film. 

But has that mix of honesty and modesty helped or hurt Nichols?  He was largely excluded from the marketing blitz leading up to the 2017 motion picture awards season and wasn’t even nominated in the categories from which Jenkins and Chazelle took home Oscars. Whether these differences in reception between Nichols and filmmakers such as Jenkins and Chazelle are due to Nichol’s Southern aesthetic or the quiet nature of his films is impossible to know, but the differences may also be due to the fact that Nichols has always produced and promoted his films as a team effort. An interviewer once asked him, “So I take it you’re not out to build a brand as some kind of idiosyncratic indie auteur?”  Nichols responded saying, “Anyone who knows anything about making movies knows that that’s not how it works.” 

That may not be how it works, but that’s how indie films are still marketed, as the creation of a singular writer-director (and usually a man) with a vision, despite the contributions of the cast and crew.  Examining the contributions of these specific below-the-line crew members is something John T. Caldwell states is a way to ask “to what extent can ‘authorship,’ aesthetic ‘control,’ and ‘expressive creativity,’ be said to function below the level of management?”   Caldwell notes that while these crew members are indeed under director and producer oversight, “once production is underway, many of these same workers inevitably face many openings and gaps—unanticipated in the control schemes of producers and directors—into which they inject their own stylistic ideas and technical solutions as part of workplace habit.”  Thus, while the aesthetic and vision originates with the writer-director, the execution of this vision by the cast and crew members helps fill these gaps and shows how the duality of indie film authorship, which seemingly sounds like a contradiction, is the reality of indie filmmaking, where collaboration to realize a vision is paramount.   

Works Cited