ANDREW GURA

Known and respected for his skills behind a movie camera, Los Angeles based director Andrew Gura’s visual legacy has blessed him with some truly unique and inspirational experiences. Signed to award winning production company Partizan, Andrew’s work has seen him create some of the finest, visually compelling and memorable music videos for the likes of Nas, Saul Williams, Junk Science, MF Doom, The Gossip, Cut Chemist, Snoop Dogg, and many others. His groundbreaking work for Stones Throw helped define the labels’ visual identity and his Scion-funded 2004 film ‘On the DL’ staring ?uestlove and King Britt, credited him with a silver plaque at the Chicago Film Festival. Brainer caught up with the visionary director to talk about his many experiences and life from the directors’ chair.
 
Tell us about your creative background and what initially inspired you to get into film-making.
Watching indie and foreign films in my late teens definitely set the stage. I was an avid reader and writer and was always drawn to the visual arts like collage and painting and photography but the pragmatist in me went for a more realistic degree in literature and set my sights on law school. The summer before my last year at university, I decided to try something completely different and somehow got a friend to hire me into the art department of an independent feature film. And that was all it took really. The filmmaking process brought together everything that I loved to do and being a part of it for the first time inspired me to become a Director myself.
 
You have directed films, music videos, TV commercials, viral ads and more recently branched off into fashion. How do you find different inspiration for each project?
A fair amount of it is preparation. I do a lot of research so that I have visual material ready for reference and inspiration when I am asked to write up a treatment. This used to mean buying tons of books and magazines and scanning them and maintaining a visual database. I know directors who have an intern maintaining their databases daily. More recently, with the advent of so many image bookmarking sites like ffffound.com and video sites like youtube and vimeo, research and cataloging imagery has gotten a lot easier.
 
The right image can inspire an aesthetic, a concept, a location, casting ideas, anything really. And there is something to be said about real experience as inspiration. I carry a camera most of the time and take a lot of photos when I travel, so if I see something interesting, I’ll snap it and save it for later use.
 
But a lot of finding inspiration is also having the right coterie to banter with and throw ideas around. My friends are talented, some of them much farther along their career paths than I am (meaning their budgets are larger) and we keep each other in check. The best way to develop an idea is to say it out loud to someone you trust who will give you an honest opinion.