Treat your art like a startup is fantastic advice from filmmaker Charlotte Siller. She has a lot of great wisdom from her ten year journey into making a documentary. A CURIOUS IDOL is a film about the "life, and truth, of Louise Brooks", a film star but also an intellectual powerhouse.

Charlotte and I discuss so many topics we don't normally talk about on the podcast -- an unvarnished take on not showing up for class in college and the blockchain. It is thrilling to share an episode with such a unique filmmaker, Charlotte Siller.

In this episode, Charlotte and I talk about:

her ten year quest to bring her film, A CURIOUS IDOL: DOCUMENTARY OF A LOST GIRL;
her unvarnished and amazing take on school, acting, and how she wound up as a filmmaker;
why she didn't connect with acting and how cinema studies set her up to make a documentary;
what the film looks like now and when it can expected to be released;
why she's putting the film out now, despite the enormous challenges;
the opportunities of the blockchain for indie filmmakers and her award from Decentralized Pictures;
how marketing helped her filmmaking;
what's next for her.

Charlotte's Indie Filmmaker Highlight: Wong Kar-Wai; George Cukor; THE MOMENT (2026) dir. by Aidan Zamiri based on a original idea by Charli XCX

Memorable Quotes:

"The film itself is about Louise Brooks, who was a silent film star, but even more was a writer and like this brilliant self-taught woman."

"The hardest thing about being truthful about the world is having to be truthful about yourself."

"I think the professors there taught me how to look at film storytelling analytically and how to have a holistic viewpoint on it."

"The most important thing to me in this whole process was that I did not put my own bias on it."

"This has been a pretty sporadic decade of doing this. Hopefully, this is helpful to young filmmakers who are starting to embark in these journeys. I had to live a life in between all of this."

"Filmmaking requires, oh, so much marketing, like a ton of marketing. And I didn't realize that. I had that experience until I started doing marketing and then I was like, oh, wait a minute."

Links:

Follow A CURIOUS IDOL On Instagram

A CURIOUS IDOL Website