We recently connected with Jeremy Bradford and have shared our conversation below.
Jeremy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?
Growing up, I was one of those kids who’d tell people that I wanted to be a filmmaker. But the first time I really knew it came at the end of my senior year of high school. I’d submitted a one-act play to my school’s Playwrights’ Festival, and it was one of twelve selected that year to stage. “What You’re Dealt” told the story of teenage boys Casey and Benjamin who strike up a bond smoking joints in an alley after school together. I allowed myself to be vulnerable writing it, pouring out all my self-loathing, longing for acceptance, and fear of judgment into it while focusing the rest of my efforts on imagining myself as these characters and crafting believable conversations between them through trial and error. As the conversations progressed, I would make sure that tensions would mount until one character finally makes a confession, then another character makes a decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life. I was worried people wouldn’t like it. It was a very personal story. I braced for people to laugh at the wrong moments. But as I sat in the theater and watched it be performed, I was pleased to discover that people reacted how I wanted them to react. And by the end, when I was called up to the stage to take a bow with the performers, I was treated to a round of applause, and even noticed a few people in the crowd moved to tears. Classmates I’d never really interacted with came up to me and told me they thought I’d done a great job. One even gave me a hug. My parents and sister told me they loved it and that they’d cried. I was so happy. I wrote a story for myself that was produced, performed, and moved people to tears. If there was any moment I first knew I wanted to do that for the rest of my life, it happened that night.
Jeremy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m a writer, director, and editor. I studied screenwriting at the University of Southern California, graduating in 2018. Since then, I’ve written six screenplays, mostly psychological thrillers and dramas, one of which — “The Itch,” about a husband and wife who explore their secret desires over the course of a summer’s day in 1973 San Francisco — was a quarterfinalist in the Academy Nicholl Fellowship. I currently have two short films (“Nice & Easy” and “Daydream”) and a documentary (“Coca”) in post-production that I plan on submitting to a few film festivals before the end of the year. I’m proud of how much the quality of my writing has improved over the last decade, how much I’ve bridged the gap between the movies I most admire and the movies I make, and how much more comfortable I’ve gotten working with larger crews on each new project. I’m eager to start making my feature film scripts come to life, so anyone with experience on a film production or post-production team, especially those based in Southern California, please feel free to reach out and let’s grab coffee sometime. I’m always trying to meet new creative people and build up my rolodex so that I have plenty of people of different specialties that I can readily reach out to when I start getting ready to make my next project. I’m also getting ready to launch a Seed&Spark crowdfund for my next project: a short film titled “Rest in peace, Mr. Burr.” It’s a drama centered around a medical student. It’s also a proof of concept for my psychological drama feature “It’s Okay,” so everyone please be on the lookout for that, and if you watch the pitch video for “Rest in peace, Mr. Burr” and it makes you believe in its potential, please consider contributing to the crowdfund. Thank you!
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
Yes there is. What drives me is the desire to make movies that can have as much of an impact as my favorite movies have had on me. I want to make movies that are totally gripping from beginning to end, movies that are windows into fully-realized worlds inhabited by multifaceted characters who make fascinating decisions and whose experiences are deeply felt, movies that someone can walk away from feeling as if they’ve been opened up to a deeper understanding of the world they live in.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
The most rewarding part of being an artist happens in those moments when the stars align and I arrive at an idea — for a story, for a scene, for a moment — that I love and I just start writing, and I lose all sense of time, and I’m just imagining it all in my mind so vividly, and it’s exactly the sort of thing I would want to see in a movie I’d love. Just as rewarding are those moments on a film set when the stars align and all aspects of the take — the actor’s performance, the precision of the camera moves, the total lack of unexpected sound ruining the take — are working in perfect synchronicity or even exceed my highest of expectations.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jeremybradford.com
- Instagram: @jeremybbradford
- Twitter: @jeremybbradford
- Other: https://vimeo.com/jeremybradford
