How can you ensure that the production team's interests are protected in the contract?

While this part is standard project management, it is quite important to plan. The “10% contingency” shouldn’t be touched. You should understand, especially when you move into larger projects, what might cause budget creep. One of our previous “friends and family” actors now requires $500,000 to show up to others’ projects. Talent (and similarly residuals when you want to recoup the budget) can eat up large portions of the project and should be known early. Similarly, and this happened on my last project, PTA cut a location for being remote from the rest of the film’s Sun Valley shooting. It was a good business decision to reduce the travel of the cast and crew. Good scope management is the hallmark of great production crews.

There are significant jurisdictional issues as well. CA law doesn’t allow emergency positions to be overtime-exempt and if you’re based in GA that can cause issues. The larger companies have people to manage this for them, but a good legal consultation with an expert can be worth its weight in gold. What are the requirements to pay local Romanian workers catering your shoot in Bucharest? Similarly, one previous project nearly failed when a third party contractor failed to show up and unlock a building. Had to pay everyone an extra day. Not the end of the world, but the contract where the security agency was financially responsible for failure to ensure all doors were locked or unlocked as required helped the post-mortem dialogue.

This may sound funny, but my team has a 1) prior insurance adjuster, 2) a military security expert, 3) a safety expert, and a 4) former career criminal check out our locations for physical risks. By doing this prior to risk transfer via insurance, we can often mitigate the more serious issues (such as an open empty swimming pool on one project, a pedestrian thoroughfare that couldn’t be secured on another) and save money on premiums. If you’re going into business with people you can’t trust in absence of the contract, no words on paper will save you. My average breach of contract claim takes 2.5 years to resolve in court, so spend a few weeks to get your set.

My advice in the previous section still holds, it takes years to work an action through arbitration or court. Spend more effort on the front end vetting who you work with. When you are comfortable handing the keys to your home to your COVID Safety guy to handle a situation, your set is running properly. Seldom happens, but just because everyone else’s work is messed up doesn’t mean yours should be.

Funny story on this one, I still have a $10M commitment made in front of multiple witnesses where the guy basically grabbed the signed contract and ran away. Made some inappropriate to repeat comments about my partner’s skin color. Never going to work with the guy, and there’s no reason to invoke the court to compel contract performance. Look to Warren Buffett’s investment advice. Like he only invests in companies where the management can run them without him, only sign contracts with people who keep their verbal commitments. And be one of those people yourself, the industry long remembers cheats.