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Hal Trussell was born in the small ranching community of Burnet, Texas. His father was an officer in the military and the family moved every two years. By the time he graduated high school, he had lived in four countries and attended eight different schools. He credits this lack of roots for developing a passion to create stories out of the world around him.
A series of fortuitous encounters led him into the world of film. At The Rolling Stones show at Altamont, he bumped into cinema-vérité filmmaker, Al Maysles, who was shooting what would become Gimme Shelter. Maysles would offer him the first encouragement toward a film career.
With a 35mm SLR, he experimented with stills to capture the power of the moment and taught himself force-developing so he could shoot in extremely low-light.
Falling in love with the expression of photography, he explored working with motion - shooting snippets on 8mm and 16mm. At the local art theater he watched Walkabout, Get Carter, and The Wild Child (L'Enfant Sauvage) over-and-over, taking notes in the dark, to later study how scenes were put together to create emotion.
As a child, he had sensed the magical power of stories told on film, and realized he wanted to participate in that creativity. He sought admission to the London Film School and AFI to learn narrative filmmaking, but his applications were rejected.
So he took it upon himself to learn by starting at the bottom - he moved to Hollywood and took any film job he could, first sweeping stages and eventually working in nearly every department. With a natural facility for lighting, he was soon in demand as a gaffer: first in guerrilla-style movie making, then on low-budget independents, and eventually studio productions.
A serendipitous meeting with natural light genius Nestor Almendros on a Roger Corman film (Cockfighter) led to a mentor relationship and artistic collaboration that would change his life.
For the next 20 years, he worked with Academy Award winners Almendros, Allen Daviau, and talented actors, directors, and technicians, where he participated in the creative heartbeat of film production.
Following the shooting of The Blue Lagoon, he took a sabbatical to teach himself the relationship of light to storytelling in art. Beginning in Greece, he followed the development of art in Western Civilization across Europe. This gave him the opportunity to experience in-person the light, the color, and composition of the world's great paintings. He credits that seminal experience with a continuing influence on his subsequent work.
In addition to his credits as gaffer and cinematographer, his body of work includes directing PBS documentaries, award winning shorts, bond completion of an indie feature, numerous uncredited second unit assignments, and assorted budgets and schedules.
A self-imposed break took him away from the film business to pursue other endeavors. He found he missed the energy and creativity of the entertainment business and returned to Los Angeles where he focuses on writing and producing his own projects and nurturing new talent.
