Will and Haley Sampson are relentless in their quest to build a grassroots community around cinema in New Orleans.

The last time I met the young entrepreneurs, they were a year into this project, and had plenty of plans to make it grow.

Things have changed a lot for Indywood since then. They had to move out of their building on Elysian Fields after outgrowing their space. They have spent a few-months as a homeless theater still finding ways to screen movies with bike-ins that were a success.

And at last, Indywood found a new home last September, a two-story building on Saint Claude avenue, big enough to welcome the wildest, most ambitious dreams of the dynamic siblings. Two theater rooms, a bar, a coffee shop, a film library, and maybe down the line, movie studios.

Will and Haley are reaching out to the community and have launched a Kickstarter campaign to gather the necessary equipment to launch the new project: projectors, sound systems and new chairs.

“There have been many Kickstarter campaigns to save theaters, because there’s been this transition to digital which has put a lot of old theaters out of business, and we started out digital,” said Will Sampson about the campaign. “So this is more about building a new cinema. So I’m hoping to get people to engage around that idea.”

Meanwhile, the new place has already welcomed a screening of the Fats Domino documentary The Big Beat, and will host a local film night, screening Louisiana short films that have been showcased in the New Orleans Festival.

Will, pragmatic, lucid, and yet incredibly ambitious, sat down to talk about the state of cinema in New Orleans and the dreams that keep him and his sister working on the Indywood project.

 

 

How did the transition from the Elysian Fields location to Saint Claude happen?

We never had a real lease at that place and we grew big enough that we had a thousand people a month coming. Our land-lord was like ‘Aaah! this is such liability issue!’ And it was actually a good thing. If you go back to our old pictures, you see we started very much as a pop-up thing.

We actually started at the Red House, which two years ago was an artist coop type of thing, and we ended up getting kicked out of there because the kids there were really anarchists and we were trying to make some money so that was a conflict.

Then this guys was very nice and had this building. So we rented it for a year and a half and it became a very big thing. Beyoncé came, Louis CK showed up, so it started to be in the news a lot. So [the landlord] just said ‘this is a real enough thing now that we’re gonna have to renovate the building and bring it up to code, or you’ll need to find a new place.’

We were growing quickly, a lot of people wanted to book events and our space was too small. We had multiple film festivals that were in there and were just way too big for our space.

So it pretty much was a natural thing. I’m the type of person that really thinks that the universe talks to you, and everything happens for a reason. So everything was like a nudge from the universe, saying ‘It’s time for you to jump off the cliff, and see if you can fly.’

 

 

How long did it take for the Universe to provide this place for you?

It was some hustle man. We looked at a bunch of different places. Everywhere in downtown New Orleans was either too small and boojie, or too big. It’s typically landlords who are very detached from their property and are just sitting on it, waiting for the property value to go up. So all these warehouses would’ve been something like a 5-year lease with no option to renew.

So we looked and looked, then Haley, through a real estate friend, found out that this place was going on the market.

 

You have very ambitious ideas and projects. What fuels that ambition?

Not to be too hokey, but I really believe in the cinema culture of this town.

Broadly, I think we’re really living in a dark age of cinema, and I just think the film industry across the world is going through this existential crisis of wondering if the future of cinema is really going to be on a laptop screen. And after running Indywood, there’s so much energy in our community, and so much support. I think people really want a cinema.

To me it’s totally unquestionable. If it’s possible to bring back cinema, the natural home of watching movies is on big screens with a lot of other people.

I also really think that there are gonna be a lot of feature independent films to come out of New Orleans, and I would love for Indywood to be kind of a home base for all of that. I’m friends with a lot of local filmmakers, and it’s very much this thing where everybody is off in their own corner, doing their own thing, but there’s not a consolidated sort of movement for it.

So we did a series of local film nights, and it just feels great to be in a room full of people who are all kind of on the same team and supporting each other.

I am passionate about Indywood because I believe in cinema, and also because I believe in independent film here.

 

What is the film industry like in New Orleans right now?

A couple of months ago, the tax-credits went back up on the chopping block. And at first a lot of people in the film community were freaking out because the tax-credits were capped. That was nerve-wracking because it might drive Hollywood away.

If you read the statute that brought the tax-credits into existence back in 2003, sentence one says that the purpose of those is to create a self-sustaining film industry in the state. And yet, there are all those people, the people lobbying for the tax-credits, who are dealing with Hollywood. Their argument is that if we lose Hollywood, we’re totally fucked.

But for people who want a local film industry, the logic of ‘if Hollywood leaves, we’re doomed’ is inherently non-self-supporting.

The rhetoric that has been surrounding all of this has been very pro-Hollywood. We’ve had a couple of meet-ups about this, and some filmmakers have brought up a couple of great points about how none of the people who are representing the tax-credits make films. They’re all vendors who rent things to Hollywood, or they’re tax-credit brokers. But none of them actually make films.

I think that the tax-credits had to be the way that they were for a while because we first had to attract Hollywood to have the infrastructure to support film and have people like me and plenty others who moved down here seeing that industry change, but we have to restructure them to encourage the creation of local films.

Another thing that they did was to lower the budget threshold for films. Before, your film had to have a budget of $300,000 or more to take advantage of the tax credits. Now they lowered that to $50,000 or more. And on top of that, you have to have a 90% local crew.

So what they’re trying to do is encourage the local filmmakers, which is awesome.

 

Tell me about the location and what moving to St. Claude from Elysian Fields means for Indywood.

I think that moving that St. Claude is awesome. I definitely cringe when a lot of the developer-type of people that I have talked with very cheerily say ‘Oh, St. Claude is going to be the new Magazine St.!’ I definitely hope it doesn’t become that. I would hope that this can be just kind of a real cultural avenue, and I would hope Indywood can be part of that.

I also think that New Orleans has such a strong cultural voice and I would love for Indywood to become a new type of mouthpiece for that voice.

You know, the ability to make movies has become so democratized in the past ten years with all this new digital technology. The goal in my head is keen to high school brass bands.

We screened The Whole Gritty City, which is a documentary about high school brass bands, and we had the band leaders come in and talk. The sight of them was really inspiring for me because they use music as a weapon against weapons in a way.

I really would hope that at Indywood we could do the same sort of thing and teaching kids in the neighborhood, and not just kids, provide classes for them to learn how to make movies. My dream is that the next generation of filmmakers could be from the 9th Ward.

 

There is a lot going on in this area these days.

I view St. Claude as really the frontline of gentrification. And in most conversation about gentrification there’s very few positive alternatives. The dialogue about it is very two-sided: on one side, people from the neighborhood, is saying ‘fuck this, our prices are going up in this weird backwards white-flight thing,’ and on the other side, the wealthy people say ‘well, there’s less crime and it’s safer so it has to be better.’

If we could provide a business where both sides of the neighborhood would feel comfortable, and where we could all meet and talk and engage with culture, hopefully we could hire people from the neighborhood, inspire them to make movies, help them make money on these movies. I would hope that this place could become a platform for local entrepreneurship in general. Then if locals start opening businesses on St. Claude, then the people who are moving in are going to spend their money at those businesses and those businesses can hire people from the neighborhood, and it might be a way to kind of neutralize gentrification.

 

What are the long-term plans for this place?

Upstairs, we’re thinking about having filmmaker offices. My goal for up here is to make our own movie studio, in the classic sense. There are plenty of places in town that rent places for Hollywood to shoot in. I mean a studio in the classic sense, with a room full of people writing, a room full of people shooting, a room full of people cutting, and we’re cranking out 10 films a year.

Once we get open, the next big project might be to try and fund films for $50,000, according to the tax-credits legislation. The ultimate dream is for Indywood to be making movies upstairs and showing movies downstairs. The idea is to really have an engine of local culture.

There’s this brand of ‘Hollywood South’, you know, New Orleans has such a voice of its own, and there’s so many characters here, so many stories to tell and so many landscapes. Hollywood comes down here and they dress New Orleans up to look like San Francisco, or to look like Los Angeles. There’s been three or four in the past few years where the story is set in New Orleans and they don’t take advantage of the landscape at all.

So, I just can’t wait to make New Orleans movies.

Another big thing for me is that Indy films have this association that you don’t make money on them. With the combination of the studio and the movie theater, what I would love to do is make low-budget films that make their money back, and to actually create an economic eco-system for economic films to thrive.

 

Sampson expects to open the doors to the New Indywood by January 2016, and hopes for the movie studio plans to pan out in the year after that. Until then, screenings are planned, starting with Local Film Night on October 23rd. More information can be found on www.indywood.org