INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING AFTER SUNDANCE
The highs in a creative career can be so high. It’s the ultimate dopamine hit. And there’s a moment that comes after almost every one of those highs that nobody prepares you for. It’s not the moment of failure. It’s not even the moment of success. It’s the day after.
I was talking with filmmaker Erin Brown Thomas recently, whose short film Chasers premiered at Sundance last year, and she described it as a roller coaster. The higher the peak, the more inevitable the drop. Not because anything goes wrong. Just because deceleration is its own kind of disorienting. You go from press prep and meetings and your phone buzzing constantly to a quiet room and a blank page, and your nervous system doesn’t know what to do with the silence.
She called it the comedown. Not a crash. Not a failure. Just the physics of what happens after a high that intense.
This is something I’m very familiar with, so it wasn’t surprising to hear her describe it. What struck me more was that she knew it was coming. She’d been through versions of it before, with other projects, other milestones. And it still caught her off guard. Knowing something intellectually and feeling it in your body are two different experiences, and creative careers seem to demand that we relearn this lesson over and over.
What actually changes, and what doesn’t
Here’s the part worth being honest about. Sundance did open doors for Erin. She was clear about that. Cold outreach that used to disappear into silence started getting responses. Not always the responses she wanted, but responses. More yeses, more nos, and even the nos were an improvement over hearing nothing at all. People looked at her differently after the festival. There was a sense that she’d proven she could handle something difficult, and that made people more willing to trust her with more.
So the access was real. What she didn’t expect was how little that access settled the internal experience of coming down off the high. Even with doors opening, even with better responses landing in her inbox, she still described feeling a kind of imposter syndrome she hadn’t fully anticipated. The pressure to make the next thing just as big. The gap between how people now perceived her and how she still felt inside.
She told me about calling friends who got into Sundance the year after she did, specifically to tell them that on the other side of the premiere, once the deliverables were done and the press cycle quieted down, they might feel strange or flat, and that this was worth naming out loud instead of pushing through silently. Not because the opportunity wasn’t real. Because the emotional comedown and the professional upswing can be happening at the exact same time, and one doesn’t cancel out the other.
I think about how often we assume that if the external outcome is good, the internal experience should follow. Erin’s account says otherwise. You can be getting more yeses than ever and still feel the floor drop out from under you the week after the high.
When the industry decides what your work should have been
Chasers got into Sundance, and Erin got reviews. Not bad reviews, mostly. But reviews that told her what her film should have been instead of engaging with what it was. One reviewer wanted more focus on a different character, and Erin’s read was that this had less to do with her specific film and more to do with frustration about the overall lineup that year.
What she said next stayed with me. She didn’t feel like the reviewer was wrong about her, exactly. She felt like they hadn’t seen her. That distinction matters. There’s a difference between someone disagreeing with your choices and someone missing the thing you were actually trying to make.
She and her producing partner have a saying they return to when this happens: you’re doing something right when people start reacting to your work instead of ignoring it. I don’t know if that fully softens the sting. But it reframes visibility as its own kind of cost, one that comes with being seen at all.
Success as access to tools, not access to applause
Here’s the part of the conversation that shifted something for me. When Erin talks about what success actually looks like day to day, she doesn’t start with box office numbers or festival prestige. She starts with tools. Whether she can afford the needle drop she wants. Whether she has a music supervisor who understands the sound she’s chasing. Whether her next project lets her attempt something visually ambitious because the last one proved she could handle complexity.
Chasers is a 32 minute film shot as a single continuous take. When I asked her why she’d attempt something that difficult, her answer wasn’t really about ambition. It was closer to compulsion. Some ideas demand to be told a certain way, and you find out whether you’re capable of it by trying.
That’s a different definition of growth than the one the industry usually hands us. It’s not measured in headlines. It’s measured in whether your resources expand enough to keep tackling harder problems. Whether you get to keep playing in bigger playgrounds with better collaborators and more complex challenges.
The applause fades fast. She said this almost in passing, but it’s the whole thing, isn’t it. What lasts is the widening of what you’re capable of attempting next.
Listening to your gut when other people are in the room
We also talked about something quieter. The difference between mistakes you make because you trusted yourself and got it wrong, and mistakes you make because you overrode your gut to be agreeable.
Erin said the first kind doesn’t sting nearly as much. If you stuck to your instinct and it didn’t work, you can live with that. But the moments she replays in the editing room are the ones where someone suggested a change, everyone nodded along, and some quiet part of her disagreed but went along with the room anyway because collaboration felt important in the moment.
This isn’t a case against collaboration. It’s a much harder question. How do you tell the difference, in real time, between an idea that’s improving your work and an idea that’s just changing it into someone else’s? She said sometimes it’s obvious. Sometimes it takes until post production to know for sure. Decision fatigue makes it worse. Ten days into a twenty day shoot, running on no sleep, it’s easy to mistake exhaustion for open mindedness.
What redefining success looked like for me
This conversation landed differently because of my own history. I spent close to a decade acting professionally before I stepped away from the industry side of it. Not from performing itself. I still love that. From the machinery around it, which started to feel corrosive in a way I couldn’t keep absorbing.
For a while, I let myself believe those years were wasted because they didn’t lead to some visible version of arrival. Talking with Erin, I kept returning to the same question she brings to her own work. What if success was never about the milestone at all? What if it was about whether you were fully present for the characters you got to play, the risks you got to take, the version of the craft you got to practice, regardless of where it led?
That reframing didn’t erase the years. It changed what I was allowed to call them.
The map reveals itself in hindsight
Near the end of our conversation, Erin said something about advice that I keep coming back to. When she looks for guidance from people ahead of her, she doesn’t want strategy about how they broke in. That story is always anecdotal, never repeatable. What she wants is craft. What did they work on yesterday. What are they paying attention to today.
Because the map, if there is one, only becomes visible in the rearview mirror. You don’t get to see it while you’re walking through it. You just keep working, and at some point, looking back, something that resembles a path appears.
That’s the whole premise of this podcast, and I don’t think I’ve heard anyone put it better than she did in that moment. There is no map included. There’s just the next page, and the willingness to sit down and write it, comedown and all.
From the conversation: Erin Brown Thomas was an associate producer on the Academy Award winning film The Singers and premiered her pilot Chasers at Sundance last year. We talked about the roller coaster of creative success, what actually changes after a big milestone, and why craft matters more than strategy.
