Brad Rushing, Cinematographer: I remember meeting the producer at the studio
on my first job and he said took me into his office and he said Brad
every day you can pick one scene to make look really good beyond that just make your day.
Film Courage: Do you think if you were still moving to Los Angeles today that it would take you
five to ten years to find steady work as a cinematographer?
Brad: It's hard to say but I'm going to go out on a limb and say probably not. The reasons being are
that there are tools today that didn't exist in 1990 you have the internet you have film industry
groups and associations you have access like when I started shooting the only way to shoot
quality work was film cameras which were very expensive and very hard to come by and the film
was expensive and the processing and tren and the telecine and if you shot on video it looked cheap
and crappy but even those cameras were expensive there were no inexpensive home camcorders
and so it's I could shoot something on my iPhone and you could cut it into an
avengers movie and you would never know that that is just an incredible paradigm shift
you can cut films on your phone you can cut them on your computer
those things did not exist now you've got youtube and influencers and web shows and
so many more things now how long it would take me to crack in to the more professional stuff like
feature films it's hard to say but it would be a lot easier to make quality content it would be a
lot easier to access other filmmakers I mean back in the 90s how how do you find anybody
I mean now you just pop on facebook and you jump in a group and boom there you go you're
surrounded by them and if that if that group is full of a bunch of sh*tty people with bad
attitudes you just go to the next group you go to multiple groups yeah it's a very different
world so I think I think maybe not I think I would have I think it would have happened
faster whether the big stuff would have happened faster or not I don't know but I would have been
up and running making films faster almost for sure and just as a side note you said you were crashing
on a friend's couch or floor I was on a floor on a little foam egg crate the little mattress toppers
and not only that but I slept I continued to sleep on that for about a year even when I
got my own place I had a I had a one bedroom in at Vermont and the 101 [A highway] in Koreatown
and and and it was literally a one bedroom and there was three of us and at times more because
we were the underground railroad for Houston when people would come out i'd be like come on out
and I and I paid forward my friend's offer where she said you can come out and stay for free for
a month and that was my policy is you can come out you stay for free for a month give you time
to find a job and a place and and get get in a place where where you're comfortable and
secure and I think we helped some people get their starts that way I'm very proud of that what's the
strangest part-time job you had on unrelated to film during that time during that time
I probably there was some job that I only vaguely remember but this guy would pay me
to go and audiotape like school plays or musicals on a little cassette recorder
in retrospect I'm just like what was that all about I don't even really remember it but but
it happened so yeah that was the strangest thing really interesting where'd you find that job
I don't even remember much about the job I have no idea
what did Roger Corman teach you about the business of filmmaking well Roger Corman personally and
directly taught me nothing because I didn't work I never worked with Roger I met Roger
and he's a really nice guy and he's like a big kid he was so excited about this cheesy monster
that somebody had repurposed very affordably I think he was more excited that they had
repurposed it for next to nothing than what they had actually produced with it but he had a very
I'm sure he still does have a very sparkly and wonderful personality and this deep
mellifluous voice that you could just keep talking Roger that sounds great
but in terms of the precedent that he set at the studio he ran New Concord New Horizons
it definitely taught me a lot of things because it was it was it was called colloquially
concord school of film or Roger Corman's school of film and and it really was a lot of people
got their starts there you go they weren't always concord because you had new world and some other
other things but he gave his he gave starts to people like Ron Howard got his first directing
opportunity Dennis Hopper worked for him Gale Anne Hurd, Jim Cameron I mean these
are they're all way before me of course but they're in in that in that in that realm of of
of Roger Corman and there wasn't a lot of of money he he has this book that's titled how I made
200 movies I forget the number 200 movies never lost a time he would do things like get
Martin Sheen and he'd be on the cover of of the the video box and then you realize what actually
happened is that Roger paid him for one day and they shot little scenes that they cut in through
the movie that's smart people buy a movie because martin sheen's on the cover well there you go
so I learned things like that I remember that and this wasn't me this was my friend who worked
in marketing he they would send him out with a clipboard into malls and they would just have
these titles of non-existent films and he would ask people which which movie would you go see
which is interesting because that's how Sharknado originated they had the title they didn't even
have the the script and I know the fellow who wrote that and he said they when they decided to
make it they conceived it as a straightforward serious movie and he said you said no that's
this is this is something we've got to have fun with and and somehow he got them to trust
him and it became what it became but again things like that things like what really
sells a movie is it the fact that I take great pictures or this person does great acting I mean
I think that's what brings a movie home but what gets the butt in the seat is the title
or the fact that martin sheen's in it from a practical point of view I remember meeting the
producer at the studio on my first job and he said took me into his office and he said Brett
every day you can pick one scene to make look really good
beyond that just make your day and being a very proud artist I'm like okay I've got to game the
system how do I make them all look really good and and so I was coloring outside the
lines I mean what's the what can I do that that's outside of the normal parameters and
one of the things I came up with was that I would show up to set every day an hour or two early
and I would do diagrams I would go and I would be in the set without blocking or anything but I have
a sense of what it was I probably had gone with the director and talked talked through it I don't
remember that but I probably did but anyway I went in there and I would place some lights I would
on my diagram I would be like this is the lighting scheme in here and that's the lighting scheme
in there and I would go through all the sets because they were those sets on a sound stage
and then when the crew would get there I would walk them through
the sets and the first set we would we would get it lit and then after that if I didn't have
time I would just hand them the diagram and say here go set this up so I was micromanaging them
and I would have them light two and three sets ahead now the limitation with that is you have
to have the equipment but this was a studio the equipment was laying around and this is something
that I've always incorporated any time that I that I am able to I sell that to people is I will
move faster if you give me the equipment to pre-light so I'm not going into a room and
starting at square one that you're walking in and it's roughed in we just have to tweak and shoot
so that was one of the advantages and part of that reason was because literally to my astonishment
I would I when we were shooting I would walk into the bathroom and I would no sooner have
stopped and gotten ready to do my business then the door would open or ba would be saying we
want you on set I mean I just had no time so I had how do you how do you hedge that bet
and that was one of the things I did another thing that I did because we often didn't have the thing
we needed you have to think out of the box how can I do this differently if I don't have dolly track
if I don't have that light if I don't have the cucoloris if I don't have the thing I need to do
the thing how do I make it work so it got me thinking really creatively and sometimes you
completely reconceive a shot and and sometimes that challenge makes that shot even better
and so so that's just that's a just a really a revelation but also it got me into the habit
of where if I needed something to break up light and I didn't have it or whatever I
needed I would just go walk around the studio which was an old lumber yard and I would look
in trash cans and in corners and I would find these little treasures I'm like I can use this
and it's funny because years later I was working on torque for warner brothers which is a 55
million dollar action movie I was shooting second unit and I had Martin Henderson was the lead actor
and I had a scene with him and the light was too clean on his face I wanted to break it up
and I had these really experienced veteran grips and I had this huge 10-ton grip truck outside
and they're like what about this what about this what about this and I'm like no no no no no those
things are right and and so I walked around and just walked around and I found this old
raggedy plastic c47 bag clothespin bag and I was looking I was like what this is and I and I walked
up and we had a leco on his face and I put it in there it was just perfect very subtle but it it
took the edge off the light and I'm like this is it and these guys are looking at me like I'm crazy
and they bring a c-stand and they clamp it and they thought it was so funny they found a spare
pelican case and they they called it the x-z-47 or whatever and that was now that was on the truck
but but it's it's it's it's easy to take the thing off the shelf and to use it
I mean anybody can do that but I really am very happy that I got pushed into that position
of learning to Macgyver learning to appropriate what was handy I was on a shoot just the other day
and we were shooting an interview with somebody and in the background there was this white pole
and everybody's freaking out we don't want to see it can you go with a different angle
and there was angles which showed sliding glass doors or the light was bad on the actor's face
and I just took some two-inch get black gaff tape and literally just put it on the face of the pole
towards the camera another one of my favorite stories is I did this video with Rob Thomas called
lonely no more and there was a scene with him in close up and he's got these shiny glasses on and I
wanted a reflection in the glasses and we did not have a because they're convex they show a pretty
wide degree of range I didn't have anything white wide enough that you didn't see the end of it
and in a moment I said what get me some a roll of paper towels and a c stand and
I took that roll of paper towels I put it on the c stand I just went
I raised the c stand up and if you see that video if you go to my website and
you'll see this the thumbnail for it has this white line it's toilet it's a paper towels so
I could give you so many more examples of that but those are the things when you don't have the
stuff when you don't have the thing when you're shooting low budget when you're challenged when
you don't have the time don't don't don't think of it as a handicap embrace it as a
challenge because really it will make you a better filmmaker and and sometimes maybe more often than
not what you come up with will be even better than if you had the thing to pull off the shelf
and when you do have free time do you go to swap meets or thrift stores and look for things where
you because it sounds like you just have this keen eye for like intuitively what's going to work
I don't I mean for me it's it's an in the moment thing I mean if I if I saw something like every
once in a while I've bought little lights and little tchotchkes but I don't I don't I don't
go looking for it I do try to balance my time and not be in work mode all the time although
I am a little bit of a workaholic when it comes to both networking and also mentoring I probably push
myself a little more than I ought to I've gotta find that balance again with personal time but
but yeah it's I've had a few dreams in my in my life where I would I would wait I would be
dreaming that I was on a set and I and a light was broken or missing and I would just get so
worried about how do we fix it and how do we and then I wake up and I'm like
I have to have this conversation with myself that it was a dream because I'm so upset and
so involved or those dreams where you dream that you're on set and then you wake up and
it's time to go to set it's so I try and I try and I try and not be on the clock 24/7.