Award-winning filmmaker Quinnolyn Benson-Yates made her first feature documentary before film school—and its seven-year journey from short film concept to PBS distribution holds lessons every indie filmmaker needs to hear.
Epic Bill follows an endurance athlete who lost everything when his video rental empire collapsed (thanks, Netflix). Bill’s mantra—“show up and suffer”—became Quinn’s filmmaking philosophy as she navigated polar vortexes, battery failures in -50° weather, and the brutal realities of distribution. In this episode, she shares how she cut a 93-minute film down to 56 minutes for PBS, why credibility matters more than connections, and the uncomfortable truth about what distribution actually solves.
DocuView Déjà Vu:
Free Solo, 2018, 100 mins, Watch on on Disney + Package / Hulu, IMDB Link: Free Solo (2018) ⭐ 8.1 | Documentary, Adventure, Sport
Meru, 2015, 90 mins, Watch on Prime Video, IMDB Link: Meru (2015) ⭐ 7.7 | Documentary, Sport
Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, 2020, 106 mins, Watch on Netflix, IMDB Link: Crip Camp (2020) ⭐ 7.7 | Documentary, History
What You’ll Learn:
- Why “fail early, fail often” should include “fail sustainably”
- How archival footage transformed a short film into a feature
- The PBS application process (NETA) and what it requires
- What intermediaries like Bitmax do for Apple TV/Amazon distribution
- Why distribution doesn’t make your career—you do
About Quinnolyn Benson-Yates
Quinnolyn Benson-Yates is an award-winning filmmaker with an MFA from USC School of Cinematic Arts. Her feature documentary Epic Bill gained nationwide PBS distribution with promotions on CNN and SiriusXM, and is now available on Amazon and Apple TV. She’s a two-time winner of Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s 10-10-10 competition, and her short film Miss River screened at Palm Springs LGBTQ Film Festival. Her most recent short, a Western comedy called Man, premiered at Austin Film Festival. She’s currently developing her first narrative feature about a middle school girl starting a punk band with her dad—inspired by her own childhood as an eight-year-old punk rock singer.
Website: QBY | Film: Epic Bill - The Film | Instagram: @quinnolyn
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00:00 Introduction
04:27 Quinn’s journey: punk rocker to USC film grad
06:44 Current projects: narrative feature development
08:02 Epic Bill origin: short film becomes seven-year feature
10:08 Why documentaries take so long
13:22 Bill’s philosophy: “Show up and suffer”
17:35 Applying endurance athlete lessons to filmmaking
21:59 Filming in extreme conditions as a new filmmaker
25:26 Fail early, fail often—fail sustainably
27:01 Hardest scenes: -50° battery failures and emotional breakthroughs
30:44 Bill’s financial story: millionaire to bankruptcy
33:57 What beliefs needed to die for Bill to succeed
38:52 Leslie Murphy: the stakes character (Free Solo comparison)
43:36 The PBS path: NETA application and cutting from 93 to 56 minutes
46:33 Bitmax and Apple TV/Amazon distribution
51:02 Deliverables that surprised her
54:13 CNN and SiriusXM promotion: cold emails and pitch packets
56:45 Industry Stress Test: Plan A, B, C when nobody’s buying
1:00:04 Uncomfortable truth: distribution doesn’t make your career
1:01:01 Practical tool: scene-by-scene film study method
1:03:49 DocuView Déjà Vu: Free Solo, Meru, Crip Camp
