Editor’s note: This is the tenth chapter of “A Producer’s Path,” an ongoing column for IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking from independent producer Daren Smith. Read previous chapters here.

On my previous film, “Faith of Angels,” on the very last day of filming, the crew stood in the middle of the Provo River capturing the opening sequence of the film. The sunset glistened across the water, we watched fly-fishermen catch a few trout, and a handful of college students floated by on inflated rafts and tubes between takes.

Chatting with the owners of the Provo River Resort, I was surprised to hear that, while they owned the land, they didn’t own the water. No one owns the water here; the state holds it for everyone. They had purchased thousands of acres in Provo Canyon, and people float through their property all day, freely. The only place their land is worth paying money to stand on is where the water flows through it.

This is normal out here. Water and land are two different assets — owned, priced, traded, and borrowed against separately. Imagine two identical parcels of land — same acreage, same view, but one carries senior water rights. These two parcels are not even close in price. Everyone here knows that the dirt is not the asset. The water rights are everything.

Nobody finances the land. They finance the water.

Hollywood has spent a century financing the land.

A few weeks ago I read a piece called The Film Bond by Josh Stein, and then smiled when I saw his guest post on IndieWire and had to meet him. We did chat last week, leading to what we’re covering in today’s column. Josh writes from the desk, with a career in leveraged finance and media businesses informing his analysis. I write from inside the deal, with a movie in post-production that hits theaters this fall.

Josh’s argument: the audience is the collateral. He’s right. This is a companion piece, not a rebuttal.

We sit down in a room across from an investor. The pitch deck and pitch are both polished. What we normally do is pitch the land — the creative, the cast and crew with a long list of credentials, the tax credit, the film festival strategy. We talk about the attachments and the comps. Every item on that list is acreage — square footage, the view, the barn in the corner of the property.

The person sitting across from us wants to know about the water: who is hungry for this, who is actively waiting to buy a ticket? How do you reach them without a gatekeeper or an eight-figure marketing budget? And we answer with more land — bigger and better comps, a bigger attachment (if they’re willing to put up more money).

When they inevitably pass, we act insulted.

Every ask carries an appraisal of what we think the land is worth. The yeses we do get feel predatory. The equity gets called “too risky.” Lending against what we do hold — distribution contracts, tax credits — comes at expensive terms, and the only people calling back are offering 30 percent. They aren’t wrong; they are pricing a dry parcel of land correctly.

Take two films of mine, “What Comes Around“ and “Faith of Angels.” Same producer, same craft, same budget level. “What Comes Around” didn’t have an audience or a plan to reach them. “Faith of Angels” did, and the difference between their value in the marketplace was 100x.

Josh writes, “For 40 years, the equity layer priced as toxic waste because audience conversion was unknowable until release. Studios used famous talent, recognizable IP, and marketing spend as proxies for behavioral demand.” Your track record as a producer — or the track record of your package — underwrites whether you can build a ranch. Only water proves that anything can live on it.

He shared a story of a pair of filmmakers whose first feature was underwritten on their documented audience — they came in off a huge YouTube following, and the film returned roughly 20x. Their follow-up got greenlit on their track record (same filmmakers, now with a hit) and it returned 2.6x. The first deal was priced on water, the second on the rancher’s reputation without retesting the water table.

Producers walk in with credits and think they’ve answered both questions; they’ve answered one. Josh gives us four questions to help identify whether there is existing audience demand: Does your audience come back, has your audience converted, do you own or rent them, and what haven’t you given away?

On our call, Josh talked to me about his experience with creators who can set up a ring light and stream all day but wouldn’t know where to start when it comes to budgeting, producing, and distributing a feature film. And they know it. Kids sitting on aquifers who don’t know how to build anything.

We have a generation of ranchers with no water, and an entire industry structured so that the two worlds never meet, and decades of habit repeating “it’s just the way it’s done.”

The part that stings is we want to be paid for the land because the land is us — our experience, our craft, our artistic taste. It’s the thing we made. The water is just… people. Admitting that the water is the asset means admitting that the film is not the point — the audience is. That’s the part we cannot say out loud, and it’s why so many of us would rather be broke and pure. Audience-building feels like it’s beneath the art because it forces us to find out whether anyone was ever waiting. I had to find out. The first four hires on “Brotherhood” were marketing hires, told to “go dig for water” before we ever rolled a single camera.

One thing that stopped me in my tracks on my call with Josh: “digging the well is not the producer’s job.” In his view, audience building is not something we should spend our time on. “Build it yourself, and you’ve imported luck, and luck doesn’t underwrite.” His prescription is: don’t dig — buy land where the water already is. He called me out: the audience at Craftsman Films is my job, on purpose. He’s right about most of the market. I’d already dug because there was no “values-based, family-friendly” aquifer to buy.

“Brotherhood” is the test for both of our models. We’re in post production now, and have a month-long tour — the well test — leading to our October 2 theatrical release. The goal is one million people watching the film in theaters.

Do we have a well or a dry hole? I’ll publish the results either way.

The water was always the asset. The industry spent the last forty years pricing dirt, and we can’t unsee it now.

Daren Smith is the founder of Craftsman Films and managing member of Producer Fund I. His latest film, “Brotherhood: A Cinematic Musical,” opens in theaters October 2. All artwork for the Producer’s Path series is created by Steven de Groot.

At the exact minute that baby Nino first came into this world, a rocket erupted through the walls of the Beirut hospital where his mother had just given birth — it was 5:05 p.m. Down the hall, just a few seconds later, a different woman gave birth to a little girl named Yasmina, whose cries could hardly be heard over the sound of the explosions around her. That happened at 5:06 p.m. 

“A Sad and Beautiful World” is acutely specific about the time, but withholds any concrete information about the date; amid the half-century of intermittent violence that has plagued Lebanon since the start of its civil war in 1975, such incidents have become as cyclical and unspectacular as the seasons. What year is it when this decades-spanning love story begins? It doesn’t matter, and writer/director Cyril Aris (“Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano”) deliberately confuses the point. 

Voiceover narration tells us that a massacre took place that day, and the last stretch of the country’s railroad was destroyed. But it also tells us that “on that day we sent a rocket to space,” a reference accompanied by local news footage of the Lebanese Rocket Society launching its first suborbital test flight in the early 1960s. In a place whose people are forced to endure the same struggles as their parents (to paraphrase one of this film’s most aching laments), time will always be a flat circle. Joy will always be braided together with pain. Fireworks will always be mistaken for bombs. Home will always be a history to escape. 

Per the contradiction of its title, “A Sad and Beautiful World” is constantly navigating between a love for Lebanon and the longing to leave it behind, a dialectic that Aris expresses by offsetting the gravity of his film’s setting with the lightness of a pop romance. Imagine if “(500) Days of Summer” was projected onto the pain of life during wartime — or vice versa — and you’ll have a rough idea of how this movie frames the star-crossed relationship between its fated lovers. They remain bound to each other even as their imagined paths to happiness seem to lead in opposite directions. 

Nino (Hasan Akil), who survived unspeakable loss as a child, has grown into a charismatic restaurateur whose Italian-flavored cuisine brings the world to Lebanon on a plate. He would never entertain the idea of leaving. Despite a less tragic upbringing that saw her family spend time abroad, the vibrant but cynical Yasmina (Mounia Akl) has grown bitter toward her birthplace and toward life itself. She intends to move to Germany as soon as she finishes her consultant work for the country’s 2025 energy campaign. “Boyfriend and girlfriend” when they were seven years old (a relationship status they agreed upon over juice boxes), Nino and Yasmina literally crash back into each other’s lives when he accidentally drives his car through the wall of her parents’ living room. 

It’s unclear if they remember each other, though Aris prefers to emphasize the extent to which they would even want to. For someone as nostalgic as Nino, this is the ultimate meet-cute (he seizes on the crash by inviting the girl’s family to his restaurant for an intimate dinner). For Yasmina, who already has one foot in Europe, such a blast from the past feels like a strange cosmic snag. 

But Anthony Sayhoun’s plucky and shimmering score, which tempers “Amélie”-esque synth whimsy with more traditional Arabic sounds, makes it obvious enough that magic is afoot. Meanwhile, extended flashbacks to Nino and Yasmina’s childhood romance tug at the present with a palpably Western sense of emotionality (Aris cut the film with “Moonlight” co-editor Nat Sanders, who still knows how to hopscotch through time to maximum effect). Flirtatious bickering soon gives way to step-printed desire, and even a “Friends”-coded race home from the airport, as the dust and exposed rebar of wartorn Beirut fades into a flushed smear of neon lights, fragrant kitchens, and crystal blue seas. 

The threat is still there, suffused into the air like a memory, but for a time the choice between love and survival no longer feels mutually exclusive to Nino and Yasmina. Another child is born, and the cycle begins again. As the years speed forward, a new round of violence will force these characters into a final confrontation with the challenge of building a hopeless future together. 

Unabashedly sentimental and committed to its heightened cuteness even as the earth threatens to rip apart below Nino and Yasmina’s feet, “A Sad and Beautiful World” is at its best when Aris commits to the romanticism of its tone. Broad and dogmatic as its nonlinear approach can be — lyrical montages, styled to resemble home video footage, root Nino’s twee nostalgia in such purely engineered feeling that Yasmina’s natural cynicism can seem weirdly manufactured by comparison — the film maintains a sharp eye for the rhymes between past and present. The slackness of its final third, in which Nino and Yasmina are divided over where to raise their daughter, is redeemed by Aris’ enduring attention to how “politics” continue to intrude upon the everyday. 

Whether the film’s characters are wandering through the bones of a house they haven’t built yet or sitting on the floor of an ultra-modern new apartment that might as well be in Dubai, Lebanon remains a third party in their love story. It’s a love story that could never have been conceived anywhere else, and may not survive without a change of scenery. 

Haunted by her feelings of unworthiness, Yasmina is suspicious of Nino’s rose-colored glasses, and insists that, like Lebanon itself, he lives for a version of her that no longer exists. Nino, meanwhile, clings to his grandfather’s fairy-tale vision of the country as a mythical island, where there are no bullets, no wars, and everyone has electricity at night. On its own, that recurring motif — visually literalized as a digital blue idyll in the middle of the ocean — seems mawkish, naive, and unworthy of a film that is otherwise so attuned to the heartache of leaving one’s homeland, and to the quotidian extremes of living in this one. Despite the prescriptive nature of its framing, however, “A Sad and Beautiful World” ultimately wrestles with a question that neither of its characters will ever have the luxury of answering for themselves: Is it easier to love without hope, or to hope without love? Nino and Yasmina have always been bound together by that uncertainty, and the open-ended final moments of this movie leave us desperate to believe that they always will be.

Grade: B-

Watermelon Pictures will release “A Sad and Beautiful World” in theaters on Friday, July 24.

The following article is an excerpt from the new edition of “IndieWire’s The Lead Up,” a weekly newsletter in which our Awards Editor Marcus Jones takes readers on the awards trail, interviewing key figures responsible for some of the most compelling stories of the season, and offering predictions on who will win. Subscribe here to receive the newsletter in your inbox each week.

As someone who could not get a ticket to “The Odyssey” in IMAX 70mm until 11 p.m. on the Sunday night of opening weekend, it’s no surprise that the latest adaptation of Homer’s epic became Christopher Nolan‘s biggest global debut so far, grossing $264 million. 

Stemming from that box office success, and this being the Academy Award-winning director’s follow-up to Best Picture winner “Oppenheimer,” we can easily plant the flag that “The Odyssey” is already a formidable Oscar contender.

However, I wouldn’t call it the acting showcase that people may have expected, considering its all-star cast. Obviously, Matt Damon as Odysseus is undeniable. His endurance as an affable leading man, capable of keeping the audience on the side of a textually hubristic war general, is likely to at least earn him a third Best Actor nomination. But the rest of the cast is facing a more arduous journey toward being recognized by an awards body for their performances.

Though actors like Himesh Patel, Jon Bernthal, Lupita Nyong’o, Elliot Page, and Zendaya, who play figures that factor heavily into Odysseus’s journey, all have standout scenes, the cast members more likely to linger in the minds of Oscar voters are the ones stuck at home in Ithaca.

See, the film has a way of continually outdoing itself, so even while we’re blown away by the abject body horror of Samantha Morton’s Circe as she turns our hero’s troop into pigs, Nolan almost immediately outdoes himself with the mystifying underworld sequence. It’s an issue of serial position effect, where the parts best remembered are the beginning and the ending.

Therefore, I anticipate that what’s at home that counts. As Eumaeus, unwavering servant to Odysseus, John Leguizamo has the best shot for a Best Supporting Actor nomination. The energetic 65-year-old has been a pillar of the filmmaking community as one of the key voices advocating for more Latino representation in film and TV. There is enough awareness among voters to appreciate the veteran thespian playing against type as this sage figure who plays a crucial part in the third act. 

Anne Hathaway, who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2013, could also be well on her way to another nomination in the category, as I’d argue that her Penelope is the most subversive take among prior ancient Greek adaptations. Is the film beating the allegations that Nolan’s female characters are too thinly written? Not really, but Hathaway brings forth a louder, tenacious side to the character that isn’t quite picked up in literary translations of the poem.

What’s most interesting about the awards campaign for “The Odyssey” is everything happening below the line. Nolan brought back nearly everyone he worked with behind the scenes on “Oppenheimer” who either won or was nominated for an Oscar, and across the board, their work plays an even bigger role in this film.

The retelling of the siege of Troy toward the end of the film is Best Editing winner Jennifer Lame’s best work, in my opinion. Although the camerawork isn’t as noticeably showy this time around, Best Cinematography winner Hoyte van Hoytema‘s stature as the first person to shoot an entire film on IMAX 70mm will score a lot of points among his peers. 

Furthermore, Oscar nominees Ruth de Jong and Ellen Mirojnick exceed expectations with their production design and costume design, respectively, which some initially wrote off as too brutalist and minimal in the film’s previews. But shots of the Trojan horse or of Agamemnon’s helmet take up a large share of the iconography most discussed in complimentary conversations surrounding the film.

It reminds me of the awards campaign for “Sinners.” Along with the credit Ryan Coogler received as writer/director, the moment cemented his frequent collaborators like costume designer Ruth E. Carter, production designer Hannah Beachler, cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, and composer Ludwig Göransson as the new class of master artisans — the ones top of mind for Oscar voters with every project they work on.

Coincidentally, Göransson has also become Nolan’s go-to composer, having earned his second Best Original Score Oscar for “Oppenheimer.” Having just won the category again for “Sinners,” one of the most compelling Oscar narratives coming out of “The Odyssey” opening weekend is whether or not the Swedish maestro is now bound for back-to-back Oscar wins.

It would be his fourth win in that category, all within one decade (his first Oscar win was for “Black Panther” in 2019), making it even more fair to dub him the John Williams of his generation. He’d be only one Oscar behind said 94-year-old composer (also in contention for Best Original Score this season for “Disclosure Day”).

Ultimately, “The Odyssey” has set a high bar for all other Oscar contenders coming out this year, with Christopher Nolan and his crew likely to receive nods in all the same categories as “Oppenheimer,” including Best Adapted Screenplay. But time will tell whether any stars other than Matt Damon are Oscar-bound, as legendary an ensemble as they may be.

As a reminder, my email is majones@indiewire.com if you’d like to share any feedback.