We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Matt Fore. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Matt below.
Matt, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?
Looking back, it did honestly me take a good decade or more to get where I am today in the field of cinematography and camera operating. Some people may take longer or, interestingly enough, even much LESS time to get to that same spot for themselves, but for me personally, persistence was and always will be key.
I stayed the course in striving for what I wanted ever since I was nine years old — to make movies. Different aspects of “making movies” have of course blossomed and curved off on to related tangents, but they are all encompassed under the same umbrella — working behind the camera. From launching out of film school and into Los Angeles in 2005, I initially dipped my toes into the industry in as many departments as I could, from Production Assistant to Grip, Electric, and Camera, and eventually found my stable ground as a professional making a living in Lighting and Camera.
The first few years in The Big Pond of course tested my resolve and ability to support myself at making a living in a freelance lifestyle in the entertainment industry. I remember at once particularly slow point, I considered getting an actual “job,” which I hadn’t worked in years since I had a small part-time office assistant job during film school to help pay the bills. I distinctly remember going to fill out an application for a normal 9-5 job just so I could support myself while still hacking away at the freelance cinematography dream, and the next day I got called to helm two feature films back-to-back as the Director of Photography, less than a year out of school. I tossed out the job application and went to work creating my life’s dream, and here I am 18 years later, growing year-by-year freelance for almost two decades.
It doesn’t matter to me now if I’m shooting a feature film, television show, music video, commercial or corporate promo, because I’m telling a story visually behind that camera, and that is all I’ve ever wanted. Give me an idea or a concept and the tools to execute, and I’m ready to go. For me, I knew persistence would never let me down and would eventually get me there, even if I wasn’t sure when.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Ever since I was a wee lad, I had always dreamt of “making movies,” whatever that meant. Growing up in Ventura, CA only an hour away from Hollywood, allowed me to subconsciously validate these hopes and believe I could actually do such a thing. In the early 90s when I was a second-grade public school kid, I pooled my friends together to make not only a fourth installment to the beloved “Alien” franchise but also “Terminator” and “Jurassic Park” follow-up pieces.
I collected props, began customizing wardrobe (crafted from my own clothes at the time, much to my mom’s chagrin), and even built set walls out of cardboard (never mind if they could stand upright on their own). While none of these elementary school projects ever came to the fruition of principal photography, my family eventually bought a Sony 8mm video camera (yes, you read that right — not even Hi8 or Digital8, but 8mm video) in the mid-nineties.
That allowed me to make my short film debut in the summer of 1996 before starting 6th grade with “Psycho Kid,” a 6-minute “horror” piece about a new kid who moves to town who harbored secret motives to kill his peers, all crafted “on screen” with wonderful plastic Halloween weapon props and masks. I, of course, cast my best friend Owen Thayer and my pal from up the street Chris Adam, along with, of course, my baby sister Laurin, five years my junior. Having no editing system at the time, everything was shot in sequence, and camera roll cuts were surprisingly well-crafted and timed to afford close-up coverage and inserts (never mind the accidental line flub or prop-drop, which thus made their way into the non-edited final cut).
Over the years as I moved into middle school and high school, I began to make more and more short films with my group of friends that grew and evolved. In high school, I managed to scoop up quite a few awards from local film festivals, and eventually found myself accepted to the prestigious Brooks Institute of Photography film program, which lo and behold, had just opened up their film campus in the summer of 2002 right after I had finished high school, in my hometown of Ventura — how perfect was this?
I attended Brooks Institute of Photography and received my Bachelor’s Degree in three years before zipping right down to Los Angeles in late summer of 2005 with a few film school pals to take on Hollywood in earnest. I dove into the industry at the cusp of the film vs. digital collision, having the luck to experiment with some of the first 24p HD cinema camera systems available in the early-to-mid 2000s. This dual-format background still provides me with a rich technical knowledge from which to draw upon to create robust storytelling images for every unique project, no matter the budget. Ever since I was that 90s kid with my Sony 8mm video camera, I’ve always believed story and mood are the top priorities when making visual decisions, not just aesthetics, and as such, always try to make it a habit of finding that visual balance.
I’m now known for shooting independent features like the sci-fi horror festival favorite “The Human Race,” the action thriller “Bus Driver” and many more including period pieces, comedies and dramas, as well as shooting a bevy of commercials and music videos, I’ve also worked as a Camera Operator in the action/stunt units for some of today’s larger Hollywood films, including “Limitless,” “Real Steel,” “Little Fockers,” and “Godzilla.” In addition to my narrative work, I’ve also shot two feature documentaries, “Harvard Park,” and “The Spirit of the Pony Express” as well as numerous docu-series, TV spots, and promos for corporate clients such as DirecTV, AT&T, Nvidia, Honest Tea, ESPN and more.
I have been called “The Fastest DP in the West” due to my knowledge and experience of being able to maximize production value and imaging with limited resources. Having gone through the ins-and-outs of countless productions over the years, I always find the best and most efficient way forward in any situation on-set.
Additionally, I’ve also started up a film production company with my wife Kathryne Isabelle Easton named Abhorrent Behavior, and together we’ve produced and completed two feature films, with a third planned to be shot next year. Just a few weeks out from 40 and having done this for nearly two decades, I feel like I’m finally digging into my element as a filmmaker, while primarily acting as a Cinematographer, but also producing and creating original feature film work from scratch and bringing it to life from start-to-finish.
What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?
From being an elementary school kid with a dream of making movies to jumping into the industry in my early 20’s gunning to be a cinematographer and to now producing, creating, and selling feature films to distributors and navigating that larger process as a whole, I feel like I took my childhood spark and blasted it off into fireworks. Inch-by-inch of not really knowing what I was doing, with no details of a path visible, I suppose I simply trudged ahead step-by-step, eyes always on the prize, never knowing how long it make take to get where I thought I wanted to be. I now run my own production company with my writer/director wife Kathryne Isabelle Easton, and we develop and create our own work to sell to distributors to then fund the next subsequent project. If I were able to show and tell my childhood self where I made it today, I don’t even know how he’d react.
One of the key milestones of transmuting a simple freelance cinematographer business into a full production company can be simply put in one word: COVID. During the early 2020 lockdown, there was no work, and no real safety net, especially for freelancers who work in the field and on set and can’t work remotely or from home. With nothing on the horizon and nothing to do, Kathryne and found ourselves with the time to finally do what we had always wanted to do: make our first feature film. With generous help from friends who also weren’t working and had camera and lighting gear laying around, we borrowed Arri cameras and LED lighting/grip and made our own pandemic movie “Borrelia Borealis” all from our own 1-bedroom apartment in The Valley. We Zoomed in East Coast actors and experimented in psychedelic and ethereal lighting techniques to take the audience on a personal, emotional, and cosmic ride through the mind and beyond. We ended up securing a distribution deal for our little pandemic movie and now it’s available on most major platforms. That really was just the spark that lit our path that we are now on today, growing each year.
Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?
While COVID was the spark that transmuted my freelance cinematography business career into also producing and creating my own works, it was also a double-edged sword. There were minimal jobs to work throughout 2020, and when I did my taxes for the year I was able to see I had lost about 70% or more of my income from the previous year when times were good. While we tried to hang on as best as we good, month-by-month the expenses keep digging away at our meager income sources and little bits of savings. We weren’t sure what we were going to do, but luckily we were able to pivot from production-only to post-production as I dusted off my film editing skills that I had begun to develop in the late 90’s that I used to cut all of my middle school and high school films. We were able to stay fluid and embrace a secondary skill set to land clients for editing jobs and post-production delivery to help keep us above water. These services and this skillset also lended itself to our own new feature works and blended nicely into our new creative workflow to expand our future, just in the nick of time.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.mattfore-dp.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfore
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattforedp
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattfore/
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1864437
- Production Company: www.abhorrentbehavior.com