THR.com: Tandem Pictures Co-Heads Push for Sustainability in Indie Filmmaking
The producers of the new Aubrey Plaza film 'Black Bear' — who are joining the board of the Environmental Media Association — had no single-use water bottles or disposable plates and cutlery on a set that was mostly powered by solar energy
With their lower budgets, indie films individually have much less environmental impact than big studio films. But, as an overall entertainment-industry sector, the independent film world has great room for improvement when it comes to sustainability, say Julie Christeas and Jonathan Blitstein, the founder and COO/co-owner, respectively, of independent film studio Tandem Pictures, which has a strong array of green practices in place for all of its film productions.
“It’s so hard to get everyone rallying around it at the indie film level. If you look at the thousands of indie films and indie web series created every year, I would imagine it’s a very small percent that are produced sustainably,” says Blitstein.
Adds Christeas, “It’s not that our colleagues don’t want to behave in a more sustainable way when it comes to putting together their movies, but it is a big ask for independent film productions. Often they take forever — until they don’t. They get set pretty quickly and you’ve just got the hit the ground running.” At the major studios, by contrast, continues Christeas, “[They] have done a decent job of creating positions where they have directors of sustainability, where they have people who are looking at ways to improve.”