<p>@Drax12 - Being a sole filmmaker is rough. Because filmmaking is a fairly technical profession - placing cameras and managing a group of workers - the industry will always be supersaturated with directors who are quite good at what they do. At the end of the day, you really only need a decent director to make a great commercial, YouTube video, or music video. While award winning feature films do require directors with a little more artistic flair, the jobs most directors start out vying for (such as directing commercials) do not require that special something. They only need someone who can do the job, which leads to some stiff competition.</p>
<p>Most people (unless they’re socially crippled) can become very decent, even great, directors. It’s like becoming a great salesperson, or lawyer, or public speaker - it takes time, dedication, and practice, but with the right mindset, you can do it. Because of this, the pool of good directors for producers to chose from will always be quite large, and Hollywood will always be overcrowded with too many directors they don’t want or need. This is why standing out is so difficult. Writers at least have the upper hand because their service - telling stories - is mostly innate. Some writers are amazing without practice. And others will always suck, no matter how hard they work. Because writing is especially talent based, good writers will always be in very, very high demand. I don’t think Hollywood has ever faced the problem of receiving * too many * commercial, marketable, unique, high concept scripts. Though there’s a massive pool of aspiring writers out there, the number of writers who actually have the chops to write a film worthy of theatrical distribution is quite small. </p>
<p>I’m not saying it’s impossible or hopeless, but there are no ‘get-rich-quick’ shortcuts when it comes to starting out as a director (unless you have family already in the industry). We’ve all heard of the novelist who struck it big after their first book, or the screenwriter who optioned their first script for five million dollars. I (personally) have heard of very, very few directors who had that kind of overnight success. It’s happened before with things like the Blair Witch project, but some people claim that that model is dying with the improvements in HD. </p>
<p>As a director only, you have to work your way up from the very bottom. Unlike writers or producers, there aren’t many realistic ways to skip the bottom levels of the food chain. You know what they say - before you can run, you must walk, and before you can walk, you must crawl. Most (maybe 95%) of all directors have to start out at that crawl before they can get to the point where someone will trust them with even a commercial. If you have a lot of time on your hands and a lot of patience, your odds of making it in the end (even if that means success when you’re forty or fifty) are fairly good. It’s really just about weathering the storm and taking on one small job, then another, then another, until those small jobs lead to bigger ones. Most people don’t stick around that long. But who can blame them? Lots of sane people give up their artistic pursuits in lieu of something more realistic (yet equally rewarding), which isn’t bad or hard to understand at all. Only the slightly crazy ones stick with it long enough to stand a chance.</p>