Mark Stolaroff: No Budget Film School founder talks micro-budgets and finishing your film to leverage your career
Mark Stolaroff is an LA-based independent producer with an over 25 year career in the film business. A frequent collaborator with writer/director Henry Barrial, Stolaroff has produced all five of Barrial’s features, including Some Body, Barrial’s feature debut, which premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival in Dramatic Competition and was released theatrically by Lot 47 Films; True Love, a Sundance Screenwriters Lab project; Pig, a sci-fi thriller that appeared in over 35 film festivals worldwide winning 10 awards and released by Kino Lorber; The House That Jack Built, which premiered at the 2013 Los Angeles Film Festival, winning 8 awards, and released theatrically by Vega Baby; and DriverX, which opened theatrically through IFC Films/Sundance Selects in November 2018. Stolaroff was a consulting producer on Meera Menon’s (Equity) Farah Goes Bang, which premiered in the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival and won the Nora Ephron Award. And he produced Adam Ripp’s (Gang Tapes) film Devil’s Whisper, which was released by Sony in 2017.
Stolaroff is considered an expert in micro-budget filmmaking and is the Founder of No Budget Film School, a unique series of classes specifically designed for the no-budget filmmaker. Stolaroff has lectured on low budget and digital filmmaking throughout the world and at many of the major film festivals. He has taught film classes at UCLA Extension, the Maine Photography Workshops, and The Learning Annex and has written for Scientific American, Filmmaker, MovieMaker, Sight & Sound, Film Festival Reporter, and Film Arts Magazine. He has been on countless filmmaking panels over the last two and a half decades and has sat on the juries of numerous film festivals. He was on the Advisory Board of HBO’s US Comedy Arts Film Festival and currently serves on the advisory board of Filmmakers Alliance. Stolaroff founded No Budget Film School in 2005, and in addition to teaching his classes, has lectured at many major film schools, including USC, UCLA, Chapman, The University of Texas, CalPoly, and Columbia College Chicago.
Stolaroff was formerly a principal at IFC’s Next Wave Films, a finance and production company that provided finishing funds to exceptional low-budget features, including the first films of Christopher Nolan, Joe Carnahan and Amir Bar Lev. He was a producer on several Next Wave projects, including Jordan Melamed’s Manic, starring Don Cheadle, Joseph Gordon Levitt, and Zooey Deschanel.
- Twitter: @Stolaroff
- facebook.com/stolaroff
- facebook.com/nobudgetfilmschool
- facebook.com/groups/MakeNoBudgetFilms
Connect with your host Kaia Alexander:
- https://entertainmentbusinessleague.com/
- https://twitter.com/thisiskaia
Produced by Stuart W. Volkow P.G.A.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices