Last September, The Hollywood Reporter made waves when it reported that Christopher Nolan was getting $20 million upfront and 20 percent of the gross for Dunkirk, the beautiful war drama already deemed an Oscar contender by film critics. At the time, that staggering figure was enough to send film bloggers into overdrive, re-reporting the figure and declaring it the largest filmmaker payday since Peter Jackson’s Scrooge McDuck moment in the early-aughts, when he was reportedly paid the same for the same trio of duties (writer, producer, director) on 2005’s King Kong.

Though an eight-digit payday is the stuff struggling filmmakers’ dreams are made of, a source close to Dunkirk’s production told Vanity Fair this week that the filmmaker actually accepted next-to-nothing upfront in exchange for a sizable backend percentage. (As of now, Dunkirk is projected to make $40 million its opening weekend.) For further explanation, Vanity Fair reached out to a few salary wheelers and dealers in Hollywood, who broke down the complex economics of modern-day director paychecks. Ahead, the most surprising takeaways, including why the world’s best filmmakers are probably not getting paid the hefty chunk of change you thought—and why Michael Bay isn’t as hot of a hire as his $2 billion box-office career gross would have you believe.

The Legends

Even master filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola are dealing with the grim realities of today’s commercial, superhero-crazed Hollywood climate. Last year, Scorsese’s $40 million Paramount period drama Silence grossed a measly $7 million worldwide. Though 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street was a hit, his third and most-recent film, the inventive 3-D adventure Hugo, was such a production headache—its budget spiraling from $100 million to $156 million—that producer Graham King publicly took the blame and confessed that his attitude toward filmmaking had changed because of it. “Now when I read a script, I think—what does the audience want to see? In the past, I was only thinking about what I wanted to make. . . . I don’t want to live on the edge anymore.” Thankfully, the experience did not seem to sway Scorsese. Though he has recently ventured into more lucrative television waters—to executive produce Boardwalk Empire and co-create Vinyl—he did make the aforementioned Silence, a film about 17th-century Jesuit priests.

Coppola, meanwhile, essentially excused himself from studio filmmaking altogether, focusing his energy on his lifestyle brand (under which he sells wine, runs resorts, and operates cafés) and self-financing his movies when he does make them.

The way Coppola sees it, by minimizing risk, studios are handicapping themselves from evolving the art form of film.

“An essential element of any art is risk,” Coppola recently told 99u. “If you don’t take a risk, then how are you going to make something really beautiful that hasn’t been seen before? I always like to say that cinema without risk is like having no sex and expecting to have a baby. You have to take a risk.”

Tell that to the shareholders, though. Hollywood’s studios are owned by massive corporations, which don’t care what Oscar-winning auteur directed the film that put their budget in the red.

“At the shareholders meeting, they don’t care that David Fincher or Martin Scorsese directed the movie,” said a source. “All they see is a huge financial loss, which they cannot have.”

There is one master filmmaker still able to have his proverbial cake and eat it too—the massive paycheck and artistic breathing room—though.

“There’s nobody else who has the track record like Steven Spielberg,” one source said of the filmmaker, who is still the highest-grossing director in Hollywood. His movies have earned over $9 billion at the box office, a sizable lead over Peter Jackson and James Cameron—both of whom have accumulated $6 billion, according to Box Office Mojo. “But he is the only one. And, in fact, a lot of the younger directors are being paid significantly higher than the established directors who have been around forever.”

A second insider points out, “I can guarantee that Bob Zemeckis is not getting paid $10 million anymore.” The Oscar-winning Forrest Gump director, whose Back to the Future franchise made nearly $1 billion in the late 80s and early 90s, suffered a box-office setback last year with the Brad Pitt-Marion Cotillard thriller Allied. Meanwhile, the sizable paychecks Zemeckis might have had a decade ago are now being claimed by filmmakers like Justin Lin, the helmer of Star Trek Beyond and four Fast and the Furious films, whom an insider says is getting $11 or $12 million for Hot Wheels, an upcoming project based on the classic toy car line. Todd Phillips, whose own $1.5 billion franchise, The Hangover, isn’t so far in the past, is still able to command between $12 million and $14 million.

It Doesn’t Matter What You Did 10 Years Ago

Hollywood has a short memory when it comes to heaping piles of money on filmmakers. “It doesn’t matter if somebody’s gotten the same number for 10 movies in a row . . . if their last three films didn’t perform,” an insider tells us. “They’re not going to get what they got before.”

Though it sometimes seems as if studios are cranking out brainless action features on an assembly line, a source said that studios are still looking for directors to have some kind of inspiration between the car chases, crashes, and blow-em-up sensory assaults—which is why Lin has an easier time getting an eight-digit-paycheck than, say, Michael Bay, “who’s done four movies in a row that were uninspired.” (Indeed, while Lin’s Star Trek Beyond ranks at 85 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, Bay’s Transformers: The Last Knight yielded a putrid 15 percent.)

The Hot Up-and-Comers

Promising new filmmakers have put themselves on the industry radar by making movies outside the studio system. Take Rian Johnson, who hopscotched from his $450,000 Sundance indie Brick to the $30 million Looper to the holy grail of a Star Wars film, The Last Jedi, in a single decade. Jordan Peele, who hit a grand slam with his $4.5 million horror film Get Out—earning over $250 million at the box office and counting—will be rewarded grandly should he make his next film within the studio system. (One insider predicts a $10 million payday in his near future.) Patty Jenkins, who set a new record for female directors at the box office with Wonder Woman and its $770 million gross, is due for an equally record-breaking payday. And Jon Watts, who managed to spin box-office gold out of the re-recycled Spider-Man franchise with this month’s Homecoming will likely get a sizable bump on his next feature.

While there has always been a chasm between male and female directors’ feature salaries, simply because men have been given the big-budget franchises, both Jenkins and Ava DuVernay are making important strides in Hollywood with Wonder Woman and DuVernay’s upcoming Disney adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, the sci-fi ensemble film starring Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon, with a reported budget of $100 million.

The Star Wars Make-or-Break

In Hollywood’s current director-scape, where up-and-comers duke it out with veterans for the juicy paychecks, the new Star Wars anthology has proved an unexpected battleground between young and old. When Gareth Edwards needed help at the helm of Star Wars: Rogue One, Tony Gilroy was brought in to oversee the reshoots for a staggering estimated fee of more than $5 million. Though Edwards is seen by some as “unhirable” since the shakeup, insiders estimate that Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who were replaced by Ron Howard on the stand-alone Han Solo Star Wars spin-off, will not have the same problem.

“It was more of a tone issue,” explains an insider of the mismatch. “They wanted to be a little fast and loose, and Star Wars is such a machine—they essentially have an instruction guide that works for them. Whoever is hired needs to follow it. . . . I don’t think a studio would hesitate to hire them.” After seeing three young directors flame out on Star Wars spin-offs, only to have seasoned vets save them, studios might operate with a little more caution when deciding who should have the key to their jackpot franchises.

The Unicorn

The rare “unicorn” director

also writes and produces his own bankable films. Think directors like Christopher Nolan, Peter Jackson, and M. Night Shyamalan, the latter two of whom reportedly did make $20 million and 20 percent of first-dollar at the peaks of their careers. But it is hard to maintain that sort of success and inspiration, while also continuing to attract top talent to projects. When Shymalan’s winning streak cooled off, after the big-budget Will Smith flop After Earth, he waited two years before moving to television, executive producing the Fox series Wayward Pines.

Speaking of: Television

Like actors, filmmakers are also fleeing to the golden fields of television. Look no further than this year’s Emmy nominations, where three of the six nominees in the Directing for a Limited Series category are Oscar-winning filmmakers—Ron Howard for Genius, James Marsh (Man on Wire) for The Night Of, and Steven Zaillian (who won a screenplay Oscar for Schindler’s List) for The Night Of. A fourth, Jean-Marc Vallée, is an Oscar nominee. David O. Russell is joining the TV exodus, with a limited series starring Robert De Niro and Julianne Moore. David Fincher, whose demand for complete control has deemed him a risk to some studios, was wooed to television by Netflix, and its gobsmacking $100 million commitment for House of Cards. Baz Luhrmann was similarly wooed to the streaming company with a budget of $120 million for the ill-fated The Get Down to screens. Hell, Woody Allen even gave TV a try.

“There really is no stigma with television anymore,” an insider says, “In fact, it enhances your future career to do a prestigious TV show.”

The Bottom Line

Studios are asking everyone, even established directors, to share in the risk of a project. This means that generally, directors are making less on the front end of films (like Nolan on Dunkirk) but are taken care of on the back end—even more incentive to make a film that gets moviegoers in seats. When American Sniper made nearly $500 million in pure profit, for example, director Clint Eastwood is said to have cashed in mightily. (In similar fashion, when Gravity earned over $600 million in profit the year before, star and producer Sandra Bullock, is said to have earned nearly $70 million because of her back-end percentage deal.)

“There’s still a lot of money to be made,” an insider clarified, “but only when the movie works.”