Film Courage: What factors into you saying yes to a project and what factors into you saying no?
Brad Rushing, Cinematographer: Let me limit my answer to a narrative (to scripted narrative) because there’s so many other manifestations but the one thing I would say is that it’s just got to be a great script. I’ve learned the hard way that that no amount of talent behind or in front of the camera, no amount of money can compensate for a bad script. Meanwhile you can take a really, really good script and and have shabby technical values and still have a really entertaining movie. I look at what I do as window dressing and I think it’s important of course but if I don’t have the skeleton to hang my pretty pictures on then it’s just gonna be vacuous. The first thing is that, I want to see a good script. The other thing is that I want to know that these people have enough money to do justice to that script. I’m not going to be biased if you come at me with 10 million dollars or if you come at me with $200,000 as long as you can do a good job on your script with that money. If you’re being unrealistic to me that’s like buying a ticket on the Titanic and I do not want to go down with it because I’ll be blamed if there aren’t the resources for the crew, if there aren’t enough days, if there are unrealistic expectations, if there are tons of visual effects and not enough money to pay for them it’s going to look like crap and my name’s going to be on it. I don’t care how much they pay me, I’m not going to do it. A good script and the ability to do a good job with it and then I look at the collaborators. Who is the director? Who is the producer? Who are the other keys, the production designer? Who’s the talent, the cast and if there are people I’m excited to…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
Film Courage - Empowering Creatives 