Cinema Canada (Jun 1978)

SPOTLIGHT... Jock Brandis has managed to immerse the conventional wisdom of the film business into a totally enigmatic lifestyle and still remain well ahead of the game. He lives on a tugboat in Toronto Harbour, restores and rides antique motorcycles, has his wardrobe fitted by the finest in Army Surplus and is able to tap dance into a frenzy without the slightest effort. As Jock Brandis, he is fully equipped lighting man with an armload of features to his credit. As Brandstead Industries, he is an innovative design and manufacturing company, constructing lighting, grip and special effects equipment. His name is an anglicized version of the Dutch name “Joost” — and his adventures tell it all. Cinema Canada: Jn the years I’ve known you, you have established yourself as a living, breathing legend in the film business. Where did it all begin? Jock Brandis: I was born in Holland and raised around, in various places, took on a military career which I didn’t like, then a high school teaching career which turned me into a Marxist-Lenninist. I decided early on that the trick behind Marxist-Leninism was making great revolutionary films. So, I rushed out and bought myself an Eclair and stepped eagerly into the wonderful game of making films so that I could in fact fan the flames of discontent. Unfortunately, by the time I had gotten the knack of the film business, my politics had waned to a near guttering light in the bottom of the barrel... While on this threshold of discontent, let’s just backtrack. To be a bit more specific, you mention a military career... Well, although the Royal Canadian Navy Reserve put me through university they were disappointed because I changed my major half way through. 4/Cinema Canada on jook brandis Jock Brandis Although they thought they’d end up with a bio-chemist, they ended up with an anthropologist. They felt cheated, but none the less they threw me into the system and I became a navigation officer. We parted company on friendly terms and I went into being an eager social worker for Oxfam. I did a variety of activities... Biafra air-lift operation, various other bits of public relations, hospital organization, signing receipts and sending out Christmas cards... and other nice things that Oxfam people do. Then I got into teaching. Was this regular Ontario high school? No, this was the CUSO. They sent me down, four happy years in Jamaica, teaching high school. I’d gone with the intention of teaching auto-mechanics. Unfortunately, the head-master and I were the only teachers who were university graduates. All the other 30 teachers were high school grads and they thought it would be an affront to the other people to have me teaching technical subjects. So, in order to save face I taught biology, chemistry and West Indian geography. Was it in Jamaica that you got your first taste of filmmaking? Basically, yes. I matched socially with Perry Hensel, who later went on to do The Harder They Come. He did a fair amount of commercial work, stuff with the local TV broadcasting system. So on weekends I would wander out on film locations with him. That got me mildly interested in filmmaking. My political discontent was another story. So now you were back to the point where you ideals — after a certain amount of film experience — were more or less re-arranged. Where did you go from there? I was at this point back in Toronto, NABET was sending me out to do Ford Motor commercials with Advertel which was fine with me because Advertel was right behind that little Marxist bookshop and everybody else would go out for a wet lunch and I would go browsing and come back with some bargain basement copies of Lenin’s work that had been thrown into the bathtub by the Western Guard the night before. On the surface I was never in the film business, the same as most people; I just did whatever I could. So that was basically as a lighting man? I don’t know exactly how I ended up being a lighting man in the union. I just did. When I went to university and high school I had done all the amateur lighting for operettas and all that sort of amateur drama stuff and I just somehow managed to talk myself into being the lighting man. So later, did you talk yourself into being a cameraman? I bought a camera and talked everyone else into the fact that I was a cameraman. The assumption is that if you have an expensive camera you know how to use it. Fortunately the first few films that I started off doing were sort of simple industrial educational films and I sort of learned on the job fairly quickly. I had never been an assistant cameraman so I didn’t know any of the rituals. But it’s all tech