A good artist doesn't need a few thousand dollars to get started, they just get started, and that initial work is either good enough for the artist to move forward or it isn't.

This is a myth. It's a lot cheaper than it used to be, but at the minimum you need the price of a camera or a generous friend. The best way to get started for cheap is to volunteer on other peoples' film shoots. What gets lost in statements like this is that filmmaking is not that creative of a process: it's an industrial one. Writing is creative. Photography is creative. Editing is creative. Acting is creative. Putting all those things together is grunt work to a great extent. Unless you do something unusual like a single location, it takes two weeks to shoot a feature, and the cost of food and travel expenses for 2 weeks for the minimum # of people will easily hit $1000. As I said yesterday, saying that you made something for nothing is partly a marketing tool. Invariably, when you dig into these stories, you find that the person either had money of their own, had very generous friends, or used some creative accounting (getting a donation of film stock means 'the film cost $0' and we won't talk about the manifold other expenses).

The big step forward in the digital domain we have today is taht you don't need to buy film any more. Film was staggeringly expensive: it used to cost about $70 to purchase and develop 3 minutes of 16mm film, of which 2/3 would go unused. Digital video made that a lot cheaper (an hour of tape for ~$10 OMFG), but decent cameras were pricey and you couldn't get depth-of-field without expensive accessories, because the video sensor was too small. Controlling focus is a major, major creative tool, so people would spent as much as the cost of the camera itself on accessories that let you mount still camera lenses on a box with a spinning ground glass screen. DSLRs with 35mm sensors are the biggest breakthrough in decades.

Every other successful artist I know just had the hustle built in: the act of producing.

Producing is an art. But lots of directors, writers, and visual artists aren't producers, and there's a limit to how much free help you can get, because people with experience/technical skills need to be paid or they don't eat. Sure, they'll give you a break if you're sincere and your project is good, but you need money at some point.

I have an issue with this myth for 3 reasons. First, if you buy into it you'll waste a lot of time wondering why the product of your hard work is so weak. The fact is that you can have it good and fast, or good and cheap, or fast and cheap, but not all three. If you can't or won't spend money, then don't do film, join a theater group. Second, it creates the justification (for oneself and others) that it's OK to work for free because a) the project is great so it'll help one's career through exposure online and at film festivals and b) it's for art. (a) is almost never true; success stories like primer happen for only one project in 1000, if that, and the pitch screams 'rookie!' to anyone with more than a year's experience. It's much better to say you don't have much money and can only pay food and travel expenses. As for (b), saying that 'it's for art' is producers-peak for 'you're being screwed.' Ask people to give up their time for fun: the only person whose time should be sacrificed for art is your own. This filmmaker-as-artist schtick goes back to the auteur theory of the french new wave, and it's BS. The new wave was only possible because of 16mm cameras, which made filmmaking cheap and mobile by comparison to the costs of 35mm. This made filmmaking more of a cottage industry than a factory floor one. But as most HN readers know or quickly learn, a small business is still a business and is subject to economic forces like burn rates and so on. Which brings me to the thrid reason: projects that are founded upon the idea of doing it for nothing and possibly having a hit are projects with no sales strategy. And that means that it's almost guaranteed not to recoup its costs. As long as you work on this basis you're not in the film business, you're in the film hobby. You should absolutely have a plan for breaking even: it's more decent for the people that work for or assist you, helps to simplify your decision-making, and spurs creativity. It needn't be too elaborate; once my friends and I paid off the costs of a short by staging a little film festival at a neighborhood theater and putting our short on last. We charged people to enter, to attend, and sold t-shirts, posters, and photo prints in the foyer.

So please, please, however you do it, learn to think of your film as a product that can be sold in some fashion.Every time someone says they don't want to spend money, what they're actually communicating is that they don't expect or want to make any money, and that deep down, what they're making is No Good. Accepting the idea that your work has some monetary value will actually improve the quality of your art significantly because it will help you to become critical of your own process and output.