Meet Andy Rydzewski

Today we’d like to introduce you to Andy Rydzewski.

Andy, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I grew up the only film nerd I knew in a small fishing town north of Boston. I loved watching movies and was obsessed with learning how the magic happened. I soaked up all the filmmaking knowledge I could, but this was pre-internet, so I was limited to what I could find at libraries and in the pages of Starlog and Fangoria magazines.

When I went off to college – UMass Amherst – I took whatever classes were required as a Marketing major and then added a bonus film class for myself each semester. In these classes I was, for the first time introduced to the true art of film. I had been a voracious consumer of movies but limited to whatever my local video store had. In college, I was suddenly introduced to the Carl Dreyers & Igmar Bermans of the world. Then, when I was introduced to the French New Wave, something shifted in me. The immediacy of the images and the raw, unpolished filmmaking spoke to me.

I immediately dropped my marketing major and signed up for a domestic exchange program. On a whim I sent myself to a tiny college, deep in the redwoods on the Northern California coast – Humboldt State University. I saw that it had film classes, was on the ocean and was not near a city. It sounded like heaven.

My year at Humboldt changed my life in every way possible. I was writing, acting, directing, socializing and hiking around the clock. I immersed myself in film and theater and, once it came time to graduate, I was invited to the graduate program. I finished with two Masters – one in screenwriting and one in film production. I lingered in Humboldt for a couple of years before moving to Los Angeles.

My first four years in LA were spent gripping and gaffing on various indie projects and I lived in the mountains of Tujunga. A group of musicians and filmmakers shared a piece of land with six cabins and no cell service. We weren’t always focused, but we managed to squeak out some small, weird pieces of work. Sadly, our weird little creative commune came to an end when the property burned down in the 2009 Station Fire.

Since I lost all of my belongings in the fire, I spent the next several years between scattered jobs and odd, hobo-like life adventures. I shuffled around quite a bit. I spent time in the mountains, living in off-the-grid cabins, I lived and worked in Hawaii for some months and spending time back east. Always, though, I was working to get work on more film sets with more creative responsibility. Finally, in 2011, I caught a break and was invited to shoot (as cinematographer) a feature film in Barcelona.

After years of being broke (but happy!), I was finally starting to make some progress in my career. I shot a few small TV series (including an Albanian war comedy in Albania) before 2017, which was a transformative year. I shot 32 episodes of various TV shows on the now defunct Verizon streaming platform, Go90. I learned a ton shooting all that material and could feel myself getting better and better and my job. I kept shooting TV and this year finally had a show that broke through – Pen15 on Hulu. It was my 7th or 8th TV show and my first to actually be seen by human beings with human eyeballs.

I’m now entering a new phase of my career but realizing that my life rhythms have completely flipped 180 degrees. Where I used to have a life full of adventures, but no career to speak of, I now have the beginning of a solid career, but very few life adventures.

I love my job deeply, but I am a big believer that life experiences enhance our work. I am determined to figure out how to continue growing my career, but also escape to strange places and rekindle some of my old hobo-ways.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
While I’ve always done fine without money, financial anxiety was a constant little demon, whispering in my ear. For a long time, I was fond of telling people, “I have spent more nights sleeping in a car than anyone you know.” Once I dug into Los Angeles a bit more, I realized that probably was no longer true. That’s the magic of LA – We are a city full of dreamers and characters in pursuit of pipe dreams. It’s a magical, unpredictable, and mad energy.

I sacrificed stability and comfort for an industry I was passionate about. When I was deep into my thirties and the bulk of my friends were on their second kid or second marriage, I kept wondering if I would one day wake up and be sick of my not-so-fruitful career pursuit. That day never came.

We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
I am a freelance cinematographer. I specialize in narrative work – TV series, feature films – but also do some commercial work, which is a fantastic change of pace.

I’m extremely proud of my reputation in this town and do my damnedest to bring a good energy to the sets I work on. I have wonderful crew members that do the same. Narrative filmmaking can be exhausting and punishing to one’s physical and mental health, so I do my best to sing and dance while I’m working.

In addition to striving for a fun on-set atmosphere, I also love pushing the filmmaking envelope. “Bold choices,” a term I’m fond of saying, lead to interesting content. In an era where we are flooded by TV shows and movies, why not make strong filmmaking choices?

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
As much as I’d love to say that people hire me for my lighting and camera movement (both of which I take great pride in), producers and directors cite the on-set atmosphere I create as the reason they want to hire me over and over again.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.filmandy.com
• Phone: 7076160234
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: @filmandy
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/andy.rydzewski
• Twitter: @filmandy

Image Credit:
Chris Henry (the Santa painting), LJ Filion, Matthew Wordell, Alex Lombardi

Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.