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"Mud" and "Loving" director Jeff Nichols says shooting indie movies in America is "nearly impossible." He shot his next movie, "King Snake," in Arkansas "out of necessity." "It’s devastating. Studios negotiate contracts with these guilds and unions, and I suppose when they make agreements that they don’t ultimately want to pay for the results if they take production elsewhere. I’ve been in Georgia, and from what I’ve heard it’s been a pretty devastating blow with Disney taking everything to London; the work there has been challenging since this last round of strikes and everything else. The thing is, American independent filmmakers do have to abide by those contracts — and they weren’t built for us. We really need to look, as an industry, at independent film production — what it provides, what it costs — and we need more flexibility in those contracts, and more flexibility from our unions and our guilds in order to make things at different price points so that as independent film producers we have a fighting chance to keep things in the U.S. The truth is, as state-based subsidies continue to change and move, that’s not enough. We have to find ways to have independent film producers stay in the United States, and it’s a massive challenge, so that in between the big studio films there’s a thriving ecosystem of film." wp.me/pc8uak-1lHDxk