Interview with Brad Rushing
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Brad Rushing
Cinematographer from Houston, Texas. He shot features for Roger Corman's Concorde, music videos for Moby and Eminem, and commercials, and won an MTV VMA for Moby's "We Are All Made of Stars".
Source: Film Courage on YouTube
These answers are taken from You Will Get Hired To Do What You Show You Can Do - Brad Rushing on Film Courage's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with filmmaking?
My first feature film that I worked on, I got on set and I was hustling. I was volunteering, and I was working with professionals. I was a musician, I did a lot of recording, so I knew sound, so they had me be the boom operator. Then the sound guy had days he couldn't show up, because again, we're all volunteering, and because of the attrition, you step up pretty quickly. So he trained me how to record sound. I learned grip work, and, oh, the first AC can't show up, Brad, you want to pull focus? Can you run a camera? I went from being the little guy to, a couple of times, it was me and the director and a wind-up Bolex, and we were the crew.
What drew you to a career as a filmmaker?
I spent many years studying fine art. Fine art was my passion, and it still is my passion, because to me this is fine art in a different medium. As a visual artist who is the principal author, I thought I would want to be the auteur, hence the director. But on that first set I was watching that director, who's a friend to this day, and everybody on set wanted a piece of him: the actors, the wardrobe people, the producer, the location people. And then over here is the DP. This person has the magic box, and they get to look through the magic box and make the pretty pictures. They get the lights, the toys. And I'm thinking, that looks like fun.
Years later, looking at it retroactively, I'm a huge science geek. I love history, and I love music, and of course visual art. And I realized that all of those disciplines converge in cinematography. You've got the art, obviously. You've got the science in terms of the technology, the physics, optics. You've got history, because you understand the way that a film was shot in the '20s versus the '40s, the history of cameras and film grain and digital, because it all informs your creative choices. Looking back, I was just overwhelmed by all the affirmation of why that had been the right decision.
How did your filmmaking career unfold?
I get out here, and I spent some years kind of aimlessly. To make a living I was doing temp work in offices. I was doing the freebies from Drama-Logue. A lot of it was student films, but I was building a reel.
At one point I had this epiphany. All the people I know are at the same level I am. We kind of got into this and said, all for one and one for all, we're all going to be filmmakers. The problem with that is I realized that if I want to make a living at this, I have to work with people who do it for a living. That was a very transformational realization for me, and when I did that, that's when I started moving forward. I started applying to companies like Concorde-New Horizons. From there it took a couple of years, and then I shot some movies for those guys and did some more indies. A young fellow who I mentored in Houston ended up blowing up as a huge music video director, and we ended up working together, and that jumped me up some levels. Then when the big music video budgets went away, I transitioned over to commercials, and then those kind of evaporated, and now I'm doing narrative again.
What advice do you have for new filmmakers?
This is a business where it's very important to remember: you will get hired to do what you show you can do. If all you do is freebie low budget stuff, that's what you're going to get brought on for. If all you do is volunteer stuff, that may be what you get stuck in. If all you do is commercials, it's going to be hard to get a feature film. And even if you do commercials and you've got a broad variety of stuff, if somebody wants a car commercial, they want the car person, the one with 10 car spots.
I was working with wannabes. I was a wannabe. It's like entropy. You're in a vacuum, and nobody in there has the capacity to advance you unless you get lucky. It's like the lottery. I liked those people, they were talented, but nobody was in a position to jump me up to a salaried position, and I had to break outside of that paradigm, go to a completely different model, and that model was to find the people who were getting paid to do the work and work with them. We basically are all wannabes when we start out at something. I'm still a wannabe. There's still things I want to do.
Has your filmmaking career progressed the way you expected?
I started my career in Houston, and there were some really good cinematographers in town, and still are. I thought, in order for me to get a shot, these guys are going to have to retire, or there's going to have to be more work. It became evident to me that it was a little bit of a closed ecosystem. It was a small market. And instead of making all these sacrifices for this limited market, if I'm going to pay this price, I'm going to go where the sky is the limit.
I got here and I had a lot of delusions. I really did. I made so many bad assumptions about how I was going to be welcomed with open arms and get business and get work, and probably 30,000 other people had that same idea.
Describe your filmmaking style.
I've done a lot of camera operating, and I've come to find that there are rhythms. Nobody's tapping out a drum, but in a scene, in my head I've got a metronome, and I'm like, this person speaks, they grab the glass, and I find there's a rhythm.
Most people find a piece of music and cut to the beats of the music. I never do that. To me it feels artificial. It feels forced. I will cut to the rhythms of the visuals, and then I will find music that fits those. And the thing that is just profound to me, time and again, is you find the right song and it just drops into place, and all those beats hit. Sometimes there's a little nip or tuck, and sometimes I might cut the music and fiddle with it a little bit. But literally all the feature montages on my website were done that way. None of them were cut to music.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your filmography.
I've always known what I wanted to be. Even when I was a little kid, I knew I wanted to be a garbage man. Now, I didn't stay wanting to be a garbage man. Then I wanted to be an astronaut. But I've never been one of those people who didn't know.
I was living with my parents at 25. One day I drove home, and I had this lark that I was just going to provoke my parents. I was going to tell them that I was moving to LA, just to get a rise out of them, and I figured they would talk me out of it. There had been no prelude to this. I walked in and I said, "I've decided to move to Los Angeles." And they said, "That's wonderful. We completely support you." And in that moment I thought, I've committed myself. I have to follow through now. My friend and I made plans that we would leave in a month, and then I was like, let's just go. So two weeks in, we left.
I was just invited to become a board member for Southwest Alternate Media Project in Houston, a film advocacy and education group that's been around since the '70s.
Brad Rushing's Full Biography
Born and raised in Houston, Texas, Brad expressed an aptitude for art and science from a very early age. He majored in fine art at Houston's prestigious High School For The Performing And Visual Arts and also college where he added filmmaking for a double major. Upon completing his education, he shifted focus to filmmaking full time.
Roger Corman's Concorde/New Horizons film studio afforded Brad some of his first feature film opportunities as Director of Photography where he learned valuable skills for innovation and economy and made fast friendships with many people who have become influential filmmakers.
After a number of years concentrating on indie feature films Brad began to shoot high end music videos photographing award-winning, iconic clips for artists like Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Lionel Richie, Nelly and Eminem. Brad's ground-breaking work on Moby's "We Are All Made Of Stars" won an MTV Video Music Award "Moonman" for Best Cinematography in a Video, and many of the other music videos he shot have won awards such as VMAs, MVPAs and Grammys for Best Video. Brad also won a Canadian Society of Cinematographers Award for Best Cinematography in a Video for the Alsou video "Always On My Mind."
Brad has also achieved a reputation as a gifted commercial cinematographer. His work includes a NASCAR Superbowl spot, notable high-profile national and international campaigns, branded-content and promo work.
Brad was the cinematographer for the Jay Roach-directed "Dustin Hoffman: Master Class" acting workshop, his second collaboration with director Roach.
Brad continues to photograph indie feature films including "Cook County" which won Best Feature at the Hollywood Film Festival and the Audience Award at SXSW. Brad was cinematographer on the Warner Brothers/Wonderland/Bandito Brothers web series "Aim High 2" starring "Twilight"'s Jackson Rathbone, Aimee Teegarden and Beverly DeAngelo, which was directed by Academy Award-winning short director Ari Sandel.
Brad recently photographed the feature films "Doolittle's Heroes," about the WWII Doolittle Raid retaliatory attack on Japan following Pearl Harbor, which was shot in the U.S. and China, and the upcoming science fiction television series starring Casper Van Dien "Salvage Marines."
Brad's most recent work is the feature film "A California Christmas" which filmed in Petaluma, CA in July 2020, one of the first film productions to start under stringent COVID-19 safety protocols. The film will debut on a major streaming platform for the 2020 holiday season.
Brad's body of work features a tremendous amount of experience with visual effects and he is a full member of the Visual Effects Society.
Brad Rushing is known for being well prepared, organized, fast, efficient and always friendly and cheerful.
His commercial brands include: ABC, Aguila, Belkin, Blue Diamond Almonds, British Telecom, Comcast, Coors, Cricket, Disney, Fandango, Fox Sports, Fruco, Fuel TV, Geico, Glad, GSN, Hallmark, Heineken, Hotwire.com, Macys, McDonalds, Miller, Monster.com, National Geographic, NFL, NASA, Nascar, Pepsi, PlayStation, Pop Tarts, Sketchers, ROKA Sports, SC Johnson, Schweppes, Sebastian, TBS, TLC, TV Guide, Velocity, Veria Network, Vodafone, WeTV