Filmmaker Stephen Meier on leveraging influencers and the creator economy to promote your film!
The California-based director cast Gen Z actor/creators for his self-distributed film WOODBRIDGE, developing a blueprint for "social-first" movie marketing emerging filmmakers can learn from.
Hey film nerds, I’m super excited to introduce a regular interview slot to the newsletter this week which I’m hoping will become a regular monthly feature! 🙌
My first guest is Stephen Meier, a California-based filmmaker (Encita, in North County - San Diego) whose movie Woodbridge came out on April 1 and is currently available to watch on KINEMA (full details below!)
Stephen has been sharing the journey of bringing Woodbridge to market with a 100% social-first campaign, leveraging an influencer / content creator cast and deliberately targeting a Gen-Z audience, with all the fascinating insights and learnings that entails - which we go into below!
Stephen has a lifelong passion for storytelling, nurtured by his father's bedtime stories and a love of classic literature. After publishing his first novel he found himself in Hollywood working as a screenwriter. However, as the aftermath of 9/11 disrupted the film industry, he took a detour into stockbroking. A diagnosis of heart disease prompted a re-evaluation of his priorities, and Stephen went back to storytelling and scriptwriting, as a script doctor and writer for hire - steadfast in his pursuit of creative autonomy. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic served as a turning point, fuelling a determination to write, direct, and produce his own films.
WOODBRIDGE is the result of this journey, a coming-of-age thriller set in 1988 Southern California, a project in which he had complete creative freedom and where he both instilled a collaborative environment on set, and learned a LOT from his young, influencer cast.
Here’s where we start our conversation…
(Editor’s note - this is an abridged version of our conversation. You can view the full video on Youtube here)
EJ: Hi Stephen, how's it going? It's the second day since Woodbridge went live on Kinema!
SM: It's going really great, to be honest with you. The first day was good, and then it got crazy at about, I don't know, 07:00 pm at night. Because two of my kids [referring to the actors] are really big on social media.
They did an announcement last night at 07:30 pm and it just went bonkers. Amazing.
If you follow our hashtag, or our Instagram. It just was ridiculous. So, yeah, so that jumped up ticket sales. Huge. And it's just growing and growing and growing. And the word’s getting out, reviews are coming in. Amazing. Especially for that demographic.
EJ: Cool! So I know you mentioned when you were approaching Woodbridge, you had fully formed how you were going to market it and distribute it. You were very clear: it's young people, that's who I'm targeting. They're going to be in it, and I'm going to leverage that, because it's going to help me. So, first of all what’s the background to Woodbridge, and what made you think ‘I'm going to market this differently than the traditional way.’
SM: So when COVID broke out these two friends who went to high school with my girlfriend’s niece and nephew asked me if I could help them write a screenplay. So rather than write it for them, I gave them homework to do weekly and we met up and went over it together and honestly, it’s a beautiful script. And I wanted to make it.
It's called Broken Eyes, very hard hitting, like ‘Kids’ meets ‘Less Than Zero’. And I said we could probably make this for $250,000 or something (their parents were very wealthy), and they were like, “all right, let's do it.”
And when I asked ‘who do you want to cast?’ they gave me a list of names and I thought “who the f*ck are these people?” I had no idea who these people were because I was on zero social media at the time. I was not on anything.
And I was thinking, I don't know who these people are. They're influencers. And obviously I'd heard of influencers, I'm not an idiot, but I was thinking, okay, this doesn't mean anything to me. But these are the kids that other kids look up to. It’s my target demographic. These are our stars, right?
So then it made sense. And it made sense to me from a financial level to mean we probably don't have to pay them what you’d have to pay Zendaya or Timothée Chalamet or whatever. So then I put out a casting call on email, and some of the bigger TikTokers ignored it. But a lot of them were all in, because a lot of these TikTokers and Instagrammers, they have to pivot, right? Because you can't keep TikToking your whole life.
And then my whole thing became: What's an influencer's true ability to influence? Can an influencer get you to buy a movie?
So as we were putting this movie together and casting they [the kids / actors] would always have their high school friends come by, to the garden behind my house during COVID and we'd all sit there having coffee and they would share things that we could put in the script. And I would always ask these kids, what's your favourite movie? Who's your favourite movie star? I always asked this, right? And the majority of the kids answered ‘mid 90s’ (dir. Jonah Hill, 2018). And I thought, oh, that's interesting. Do you like it because Jonah Hill directed it? And they’d tell me ‘we could care less that Jonah Hill directed it’. They couldn’t care less about Jonah Hill.
They liked it because it's a slice of life movie that they could relate to. And it cast up-and-coming names of a lot of professional skateboarders, which - if you're not in the skateboarding world - you would have no idea that Sunny Suljik is a professional skateboarder.
So that was really fascinating and my wheels were starting to turn. Thinking…What if I did Woodbridge? I’d written that script twelve, thirteen years ago. What if I did Woodbridge and cast these influencers? These up-and-coming kids? It's a slice of life movie.
Because I know Hollywood's been broken for a while, I thought, what if that was a way to go, to cut Hollywood out? I had done a movie during COVID called The Surprise Visit that we sold via the traditional route to vertical entertainment. We did the whole Apple, Amazon, Tubi, blah, blah, blah. And I know those deals. And I come from a business background, so I marry the business side with the creative side. And this time I thought, what if I could cut all that out and go straight to these kids? So that's where the idea formed.
The Broken Eyes movie never got made, but some of the kids we’d cast for that I really liked. And I wanted to use them. So when it came to Woodbridge, I reached out to three of them right away, and they were on board and we formed the project around that with their friends. But I was always, always going to do self-distribution, to go directly to them.
Once we had cast the whole movie, we had this unbelievable table ready. So we read through the script, and I opened it up to the kids, asking them ‘Okay, how can we make this script better? What personal insights do you have? Do you think you can make your character better? And I allowed the kids to change the dialogue, to add things. Like, there are two scenes in the movie that are completely written by the girls in the film. And I gave them credit for that. So, yeah, they made their characters better.
This comes back to this Quentin Tarantino thing that he learned from Harvey Keitel. Harvey Keitel said to Quentin, listen, when someone comes and auditions for a role, do not tell them how to read it. Let them read it their way, because you'll never know what they might bring to the table. I gave my kids a lot of freedom.
And they all felt they were really involved and respected. That I wasn't this director going ‘it’s got to be this way, or that way.’
EJ: They had agency in it.
SM: Yeah, they were so involved. Our rehearsals and our behind-the-scenes from our rehearsals are so much fun. And the energy and chemistry on set, because a lot of them were friends, was mind blowing, it was just so much fun.
EJ: Amazing! When in the process did you consciously start documenting behind the process, with the view of ‘I’m selling this film before I'm officially selling this film’? Was there a plan at the beginning? Or were you just kind of ‘share, share, share’?
SM: So that's a really interesting question. I right away wanted to share, share, share. I had a TikTok page, an Instagram page, and I was like, ‘we're sharing everything!’ And the kids were saying don't do that. Because my kids, some of them, are really big on social media…
[Side note: Jackson Passaglia has 3 million followers on TikTok and 365,000 followers on Instagram! Mitsy Sanderson has 4 million followers… to give you an idea!]
And they told me kids are like gnats, they're just gona forget about it unless it's coming out right away. And that's why last night our social media blew up because the movie was finally out. Two of our biggest stars were always saying, listen, we can't do anything until it's out because their followers, there’s SO much content that comes at them. Too many things all the time.
So if you’re filming and sharing stuff from a movie that's gonna be out in a year (filming started in November 2022) no one gives a sh*t in a year. They might like it right now, but they're not gonna remember it.
So that was an interesting learning for me because I was documenting everything and I was wanting to post, and was wanting them to post right away, but then they didn't. They kept telling me: You're not doing it right. Stephen, the format's not right.
And the stuff I thought was exciting, they told me that's not exciting. People don't care. So you learn a lot from these kids. I realised early that if I don't talk to these kids but instead I have an ego, like ‘ I'm the writer director. We're gonna do it this way’ then we’d miss the boat on their audience. Because they know their audience better.
So I learned a TON, and the girls took over our social media during filming. It’s all something I'm learning for the next film, how we'll do it.
EJ: So what was your pre-launch window on social media? When did you start driving it?
SM: I think we really started about a month ago (4th March). A slow drip, and then we started increasing on the 18th because that's when we dropped the trailer. And we had this whole strategy because we have twelve individual teaser trailers for each character.
So those started to drop in and now that the movie’s dropped there’s a whole different bunch of other stuff that we're doing.
One of the big parts of the strategy and why I chose Kinema, is because Kinema as a platform allows you to host your own virtual screenings. So my kids can do that and interact with their fans, and some of my cast have huge fan bases.
One of them just did a video that has 47 million views! It’s bonkers! Those are crazy numbers. So the ones with the really big followings announced last night they were doing a watch party, Friday night, on Kinema.
And they're taking 50% of that income from the online watch parties. So I'm trying to empower them and also allow them to profit off of their own names, if they’re successful and they sell the product. I keep telling them, how great would it be if there's a headline that says, “Indie actor makes $50,000 back in without theatrical and streaming?”
And everyone in Hollywood will talk about that. Everyone.
Because you name me one independent actor or independent film that's paid back into an actor like that. Right now, you could say maybe Jason Blum did purge and, you know, Ethan Hawke got paid $14,000 for that movie, but now he's made $50 million from that franchise.
Sure that's a little bit of a bigger budget, but I think that model works.
And again, I was always intrigued with this kind of model from the early days of when Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman tried to make Quibi work. Quibi was a brilliant idea, but they didn't go and talk to the kids. They didn't talk to their target demographic. If they would have talked to the target demographic and asked, like, ‘do you care if Martin Scorsese does a 20 minute TV series with Chris Hemsworth?’
The kids would be like, ‘no, we don't give a sh*t’. But if you would have told them we're going to do a drama with Emma Chamberlain (youtuber and influencer with a combined following of over 25 million across social media) the kids would have broken the Internet.
So I am kind of mind blown by that because you have two very intelligent people, and the think tank behind them, the board of Quibi, but no one saw that potential.
EJ: Yeah. I mean, I hate to say it, but my limited view is that, to put it bluntly, we don't listen to the kids.They're running YouTube which is still this largely ignored platform (by Hollywood), even though it is breaking box office records by a mile.
SM: YouTube is now being viewed more than Netflix. I have said this so many times on LinkedIn. YouTube is a big sleeping giant that Hollywood has ignored and they can't ignore it now. And every one of my kids in my film - there's 18 kids in my film - every one of them watches YouTube, wants us to actually put the movie on YouTube, and we probably will very soon.
We did the Kinema thing simply, honestly, because their CEO is great. I love her. I like the concept a lot. And I love the interaction that the actors can have there. I can't get that on YouTube right now.
But, yes, I will 100% put this on YouTube because that's where my audience is at. And in Hollywood they’re just trying to hold on to this system that's broken because otherwise a lot of jobs will be lost…
EJ: So your kids kind of took ownership of the marketing strategy in terms of getting it out on social and leveraging their own networks, etcetera. But you were sort of separately doing your LinkedIn thing as well. There’s three very different strands for the Woodbridge socials, it’s very well thought out.
TikTok is very much one kind of coverage, more scrappy, BTS, unpolished. Instagram is a bit more polished, more driving the watch parties, etc. Then you're kind of doing the director profile building on LinkedIn talking to the industry as a thought leader, sharing the process from your position. And it all inter-meshes really well.
I know you’ve shared a few surprises you had or things you thought were going to work that didn't, or things you were completely just taken aback by, if you could just share a couple of days, because they're quite interesting.
SM: Sure. So last week a good friend of mine (in private equity) was telling me that when you're making a deal, there's always 5% of the deal that’s just unknown. He was talking about this vertical farming deal that they were trying to do in Dubai that made all the sense in the world, right? Everyone's going green, blah, blah, blah. You could put these farms in all these cities around the world, right?
And he goes, you know what happened? No one cared. No one cared. Everyone's talking about going green and doing this and doing that for an environment, but no one cared about this vertical farming thing. And it made me think about my strategy, where, quite simply, some people just don't care. They say they care. They’ll say ‘oh, we’re rooting on you!’
It goes back to this whole idea of, what is an influencer’s true ability to influence? I don't care about likes and comments. I had this idea that everyone's going to care about what I want to do. But, they don’t. So that was a surprise.
Another surprise was my kids. Some of my kids have gotten so big that maybe they've gotten too big. And they have different views because they have social media teams now that curate what they're going to put out. So, going back to TikTok, our TikTok presence is not nearly what I thought it would be. Not even close to our Instagram. And that made no sense to me because we have some monster TikTokers.
Now that might shift because the movie is out now so the two kids that are really big on TikTok say they can now do more content, so we'll see. But that was a big surprise.
Another thing. This movie made all the sense in the world for sponsorships. I said ‘I’m going to go out and get sponsors for this launch party’ because I can get 200 million impressions on TikTok or Instagram for a sponsor. All my kids have worked with major brands, like Guess jeans, etc. We were going to go to them and say, would you like to sponsor the party? I thought that'd be a lit.
Citibank, from day one they were in, and then Citibank did massive layoffs and everyone got fired. But here's the thing, none of those brands have come through, which was… wow. And that's one that I'm really kind of surprised by, to be honest.
I mean, if you look at the guest list for our party, there are some huge names, not just in the TikTok influence world but celebrities. We have some of the cast from Wednesday and Euphoria coming and I mean, if that's your target demographic as a brand, I’m going to have the biggest party in Hollywood on the 11th.
Anyway, no one got involved except this tequila company, Superbird. I had a lot of companies willing to give free stuff, but I don't want to promote people’s products.
EJ: You want proper sponsorship.
SM: That was a massive surprise, to be honest with you.
EJ: Do you get the sense that might change in this second phase now that the movie’s out?
SM: I mean, 100%. Yeah, I think 100% it will.Especially because there's a virtual screening tonight. The two biggest TikTokers are doing one together and they’ve literally broken our instagram. We got a thousand followers overnight.
And truthfully you get a ton of support on LinkedIn. When I announced my movie on Kinema, I think I had 62 reshares. But those numbers don't pay out. And I don't know if people realise. I see the name of the person that bought the movie. Kinema gives you the name in the emails. But that could change and that's fine.
I thought there would be more people to sign up for my Q&A on Friday (details below), given the feedback I've gotten on LinkedIn, so that’s a surprise.
EJ: It might be a last minute one. I don't know. I feel like people are very impulsive these days. Everything's done at the last minute.
SM: You know, that's probably me too! I'm not probably going to sign up. I'll put in my calendar and then I go, shit, I gotta go buy a ticket.
So there's those couple of learnings and there’s things that I would do differently going forwards, on a new project.
EJ: Can you give me a couple of examples?
SM: Sure. Firstly, 100% lay out the complete strategy from day one. Day one. Write it down: Expectations. Here's what we're going to do. Here's how we're going to do it.
Second thing: Contracts with every person that have their specific amount of social media posts that I need from them on Instagram and TikTok, their socials. I assumed because they're big on social media that they would be excited to share everything. I assumed that when we said ‘we need x amount of posts’ that that would have no problem with that.
Now, going forward, just like they do with Dune 2, Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, In their contracts, it’s ‘you will do this, this, this and that’. I will do the same because as close as I am with some of these kids - I've helped them get onto other projects, etc, but that hasn't paid off the way I thought it would.
And that's a learning thing and that's fine. With the sponsors going forward, and the party hopefully being a success with some of the names that are coming, that people really covet, I will tell them, ‘we have this person, they're going to be there’. I don't know. Maybe people are hesitant because this is still new, let's see how it goes.
EJ: Maybe it’s a ‘we'll believe it when we see it kind of attitude’
SM: We'll watch what happens and then we'll jump in. I don't know. I'm guessing.
Well, it's branded entertainment, right? That's the new buzzword in Hollywood, branded entertainment. Everywhere I go, it's branded entertainment. And it's because how else do you reach this target demographic? Because they have no ads.
You have to put it in stuff organically. And I'm offering to do that for these brands. I don't know. Maybe because, again, it's an indie thing and it's not on Netflix, there seems to be this kind of judgment. There's still these people, when you go to pitch a show and you want sponsorship before you make a movie, the first question they always ask is, who's in it? What talent? Where's the distribution?
And if you don't say it's theatres, or it's on streaming, they’re like oh, but now what? If you can say, yeah, I can get you 200 million views on TikTok and on YouTube that should mean something. It still doesn't.
EJ: It's snob-ism. I think it's total snob-ism. [making air quotes] “This isn't real cinema if it's on a phone”... but hey, maybe it's not in your world, but if you're 18, they don't give a sh*t about if it’s real cinema.
SM: Thank you.
EJ: They care about people speaking their language in the way that they get.
SM: Yeah, they consume content in a whole different way. So for Hollywood to ignore that, it's funny. I think these big brands we've had these conversations with, seem very excited, but then it's like…. It's totally snobby. If I would have said we're on Netflix I could have probably been sitting on bags of cash right now.
And I just shake my head because I can tell you right now from the party alone, some of these kids, when they get together and they go instagram live or TikTok live, you're gonna see crazy numbers from them. And I'm going to send snapshots to all the sponsors and be like, that could have been your logo!
EJ: Yeah. Interesting! Well, I sadly have to wrap this up, but I could chat for hours about this. Thank you so much, this has been really interesting! I'll be watching this next stage now and I think it's great what you're doing, so good luck.
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Inspired by true events, Woodbridge, is a high octane, coming of age thriller about the loss of innocence. Set in Southern California in 1988, and taking place over the course of one night, it tells the story of four friends ages fifteen to sixteen, who set off on a five mile trek to confront the school bully.
WOODBRIDGE is available now for a limited time on Kinema.
You can follow Woodbridge on TikTok and Instagram at @woodbridgethefilm
Follow Stephen on Linkedin!
Stephen is hosting a Q&A about Woodbridge on Kinema TONIGHT - April 5th at 6 pm (PT) / 2 am (GMT)
