Brad Rushing on artistic motivation

Brad Rushing is a cinematographer who was recently interviewed on the youtube channel Film Courage. It was so insipring to me, I thought I'd post a few outakes of his interview. For more details, see the full interview.

Q: How do you keep faith in yourself and in your craft during turbulent times?

A: ... there was a time early in my career (early on in the 90’s) where I was so frustrated and so down and didn’t believe in myself and I just had this revelation You know what, I’ve set a goal. I don’t have to believe in myself. I just have to do the steps that I committed to doing to get me through the valley of the shadow of death, and that worked for me. It was a device that worked for me and I feel like occasionally I still have it. ... I just find that my brain is a little more complex in terms of the things it does to me. I don’t know that I am always in the driver’s seat and, quite honestly, I deal with self-esteem issues. I really do. I think a lot of people do in this business. Your identity is tied up in your work, even if you don’t want it to be because you put so much of yourself into it ... I do try and keep faith in myself and you know honestly when I do have crisis with the system or success is a nebulous thing I really get basic and I go back and remind myself: Brad you're an artist. That was the contract you made. You never said you wanted to be rich. I don’t care about being rich. I would like to be self-sufficient. I’d like to be secure. If I was rich it would be okay but I’d be donating, helping, and so on. I mean, I just don’t need a super yacht and an island. But I remind myself of the contract that I made was that I wanted to be an artist, simple as that.

For more questions and his wise advise, see the interview on Film Courage.