Film Courage: Was 1BR fully finished by the time you got Netflix to look at it?
Alok Mishra, Producer: It premiered in 2019 at Fantasia [film festival] and we’ve gone on a festival run for six-seven months all over the world. It was completely finished at that point. They showed it to him twice and they rejected it twice until they finally said yes because the VOD numbers were very good when we debuted in April of 2020.
Film Courage: How did you get that initial meeting with Netflix?
Alok: Your distributor does it for you. Netflix will never talk to you as an independent filmmaker. They need someone else they can trust and talk to someone who they perceive is going to deliver the product in the exactly technical perfection that they’re looking for. They don’t want to have to deal with some single person. They want to deal with somebody they’ve dealt with before who has other products with them (let’s say projects/products). It’s something where they have to take it to them. It’s very few people who can directly go to Netflix…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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