EXCLUSIVE
"For Lovers Only," an intimate romance made in luminous black-and-white by twin auteur filmmakers Michael and Mark Polish, is a wildly successful experiment in New Hollywood Math.
Production budget: $0
Marketing and advertising budget: $0
Profits that begin at dollar one: priceless.
As of Monday afternoon, the film, which stars Mark Polish with "Castle's" Stana Katic, sat at the No. 2 spot on the iTunes romance chart, the four-spot on its independent films chart and the Top 100 in all movie rental and downloads. (Find it here.)
That's for a movie that they self-released on VOD with no advertising, propelling awareness through Katic's rabid Twitter followers and word of mouth.
The film has made $200,000 so far.
"We wanted to go against everything you typically do when you make a movie, and just put it out and let people find it," said Michael, who directed and shot the film. It was written by and stars his brother Mark, along with Katic. "It's a movie created from nothing -- so the big question is, how far can it go?"
Although the Polish brothers have talked to the press in the past about movies ranging from the 1999 Sundance standout "Twin Falls, Idaho" to their major-studio release "The Astronaut Farmer," their strategy on "For Lovers Only" was not to do any interviews.
But they decided to speak exclusively to TheWrap about a movie that, they said, was "the most independent film" they'd ever made -- and one made possible by new technology both on the production and distribution end.
"The idea was to get back to the real energy of filmmaking," said Mark. "And we made it completely under the radar: nobody in the industry knew about it."
The film came from a script that Mark wrote more than a decade ago, about an American photographer who runs into an old flame while on assignment in Paris. Inspired by the French New Wave and the likes of Richard Lester's "A Hard Day's Night," it follows the rekindled lovers around France in a series of quiet vignettes that gradually reveal more about the complications in their lives.
"It was me, Mike and Stana, and that was it," said Mark. "We shot for 12 days, and the whole point was to capture this really intense intimacy between the two characters."
Along the way, the brothers said, they were helped by the fact that their Canon EOS 5D Mark II is a still camera with video capability, which means that to outsiders it looks like a standard SLR still camera. (Below, that's Michael, left, with the camera.)
"It looked like I was just shooting a married couple, or a couple getting married," Michael said. "So we were able to go into a church, and people would stay out of our way, because they'd think I was shooting stills."
