Over at Turnstyle, micro-budget filmmaker Lucas McNelly has a chat with actor-turned-director Matthew Lillard about Fat Kid Rules the World, which had its world premiere at Sundance this past January. Lillard is currently running a Kickstarter push to self-distribute the film, and is aiming to raise $150,000 for this purpose.

To my mind, the truly successful Kickstarter campaigns are those that approach the task of raising their target funds by using their creativity and finding innovative ways of reaching potential funders — and then engaging them. With Lillard’s campaign, he was greatly helped by a three-hour “AMA” session on Reddit, which he talks about below.

McNelly: Talk about the Reddit session you did. I’ve heard about it from people who have no idea I worked on the film, which tells me you probably did something right.

Lillard: WHEN we achieve our KS goal, it will be because of those 3 hours and the millions of people that played along that day. I think our campaign was on the 25th day and we had raised 52K? After that session on Reddit.com, we were at 87K! It was epic, that’s the only word I keep using to describe it. It was a session called an “AMA” (Ask Me Anything) and I went there and had a blast. I’m not sure why it was so great for the Reddit readers, but for me I found an opportunity to talk about me and my career, and Fat Kid in an organic way with people who really wanted to know. I laughed out loud a lot. I can’t wait to go back and do it again. It was also the first time in my life I witnessed, first hand, the power of the internet. They are the ones that are responsible for getting Fat Kid to the people.