So you think you're a natural-born filmmaker who was put on this earth to direct movies? Join the club, pal.

With the advent of cheap cameras, the Internet and online video-sharing sites like YouTube and BitTorrent, practically everybody is an aspiring Spielberg or Fellini these days.

But making a movie, be it a five-minute short or a two-hour feature, takes more than vision. In his witty and addictively readable book The Reel Truth: Everything You Didn't Know You Need to Know About Making an Independent Film (Faber & Faber, $25), author Reed Martin provides 500 pages of how-to advice for would-be De Palmas -- everything from financing to casting, scoring to marketing -- and backs it up with cautionary anecdotes and tips from famous directors.

Martin, 39, will appear at the Coral Gables Books & Books at 4 p.m. Sunday to talk about the plentiful pitfalls awaiting first-time directors. The Herald spoke to Martin, a Gainesville native who grew up on Key Biscayne and graduated from Coral Gables High School in 1987, about the book and his motivations for writing it.

Q: When the modern-day independent film movement started in the 1990s, everyone went from wanting to write the Great American Novel to wanting to write the Great American Screenplay. Does that still hold true today?

A: It does, although there's been a generational shift. Back then, everybody wanted to be Quentin Tarantino or Miranda July. After that, everybody was starting websites, wanting to be the next Sergey Brin and Larry Page of [founders of Google]. Now it seems everyone is creating iPhone apps.

And for people who yearn to tell stories, everybody wants to direct the Great American Movie now. It's gone beyond the writing, because a lot of people don't have the patience to sit down and write a novel or a 120-page screenplay. But they do want to direct a film.

Q: They also feel that they know how to do it because of the accessibility of filmmaking tools nowadays.

A: We're living in an indie film nation right now. Every laptop computer ships from the factory with built-in video editing software. Just the fact you have this free software available has really opened it up for people. Not only can they shoot video with their handheld pocket digital cameras or cellphones, but now they have the tools to put it together and make something sophisticated.

Q: What is the biggest mistake aspiring filmmakers make when they decide to direct their first film?

A: The biggest one is that people don't copyright their screenplays. The most important part of any independent film is really the story and the screenplay. A lot of people mistakenly think that by mailing a copy to themselves and not opening the envelope, that somehow triggers a copyright registration called Poor Man's Copyright. But . . . there's no such thing as Poor Man's Copyright. It's a myth. People really have to take the time and spend the $45 to register their screenplays with the Library of Congress.

Q: The accessibility of filmmaking equipment has been a particular boon to the documentary field.

A: What's exciting in the documentary realm right now is that there's a new opportunity for documentary makers to become filmmakers. The first evidence of this is Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, which is a film I totally love. One of the things he did was to acquire the life rights of the people he was interviewing for the film. As a result, he was able to sell the remake rights to the documentary when it was picked up to be turned as a feature film, which I've heard might star Greg Kinnear and Tom Cruise.

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