I'm reminded of Klaus Kinski, who wanted to make Paganini desperately, but couldn't convince Werner Herzog it was a good idea. Kinski ultimately made it himself, and it's supposedly quite bad (I haven't seen it). At least that's the impression My Best Fiend gives.
Then again, Clerks was famously paid for by a bunch of credit cards. I guess there's an exception to every rule.
This might be pedantic for this thread, I have to point out that Clerks wasn't really a "self financed" movie. At least in the sense that the final product you saw on theaters and on DVD was not paid for by Kevin Smith.
Smith did spend around $30k of his own money on production costs. The bulk of that was for film stock. (Similarly, Rodriguez spent $8k of his own money on Mariachi.)
Now, here's the kicker: Neither one of them spent a dime on film prints. They signed deals and let the studios take care of that. This is significant because if people talked about Clerks' or El Mariachi's budget in those terms, the numbers would be in the rane of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To put it in perspective: Would you say you "self financed" your startup if a big multinational paid for all the servers and bandwidth from the get go? It's sorta like that.
Saying it in interviews makes for a better story ("College dropout makes major movie for $8,000!") but it's not really accurate.
Then again, Clerks was famously paid for by a bunch of credit cards. I guess there's an exception to every rule.