Searchlight Pictures boss Matthew Greenfield says YouTube has emerged as a valuable pipeline for discovering new filmmakers and stories, pointing to projects like Obsession and Backrooms as examples of studios and producers mining the platform for the next breakout property.
Speaking at TIFF: The Market — the Toronto Film Festival's newly launched film and TV market, which also runs a conference strand tracking industry trends — Greenfield explained why the Google-owned video site has become such fertile ground.
"YouTube is an incredible resource, and we're always looking for new storytellers," he said. "One of the things that's super exciting about [YouTube] is that it used to be that we would find, collectively in the industry, new talent from short films, from first features, from short stories. But all of those had to go through gatekeepers in one form or another."
He added that the platform allows creators to bypass those traditional gatekeepers entirely: "With YouTube, obviously, people can go direct and find and build their own audience. And we can find things that wouldn't have come through the standard [avenues]. So, for sure, it's an exciting place to find new talent."
Greenfield also addressed the broader struggle of drawing audiences back into cinemas in an era dominated by streaming. "Familiarity is the challenge that we have to battle against," he said. "How do we tell stories that feel new, that feel fresh, that feel interesting, that feel worthy of a theatrical experience?"
He framed the decision moviegoers face each time they consider a trip to the theater: "Everybody has to decide every time they go to a movie: should I pay X dollars, make a real effort, get out of the house, travel, pay to see a movie in the theater, which is a great experience if you're seeing something you love. Or, should I stay at home and watch everything that has ever been made in the history of human culture?"
Photo: Danielle G. Campbell, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
