FROM A STAR WARS-INSPIRED childhood in a challenging Bay Area neighborhood, Andrew Gutierrez, professor of film and creative arts, rose to a directing career in film and television. Today, in addition to those endeavors, he is helming Concordia’s new Theatre and Film major, bringing years of experience and vision to train Concordia’s aspiring story-tellers.
“If God has called you to film like he did me, then with God’s help, you can do it,” Gutierrez says. “You may not know how to get into film, but with diligence and hard work you can tell stories that will connect with an audience.”
Gutierrez’s short film, Paz, has received numerous awards and accolades including nominations by the Fine Cut Festival of Films (KCET-PBS SoCal) and the American Society of Cinematographers for their Heritage Award, plus nods from the Los Angeles Film awards and the Prague International Indie Film awards.
In 2022, he won the best director honor at the first annual Mexican-American Film and TV Festival.
“Film spoke to me early on because I think God made me that way,” he says. “I believe I was designed to be in film, to work in the industry and to create with other filmmakers.”
But first, he was just a kid with a Super-8 camera and a dream that seemed to reside in a galaxy far, far away.
The son of an immigrant father from Mexico City and a mother of Mexican descent born in Stockton, Gutierrez grew up in a large extended family steeped in music and faith. His father was a radio disc jockey and host of a Spanish-language TV news show. His mother sang and wrote original songs in a Spanish-language gospel quartet with three of her sisters, touring and making an album.
At age 7, Gutierrez saw George Lucas’ Star Wars and “when I left the theater, I was a changed man,” he recalls. “I’d found what I wanted to do, but I didn’t know how to get there.”
He scraped up enough money to buy a Chinon Super-8 film camera and a razor tool. With these he shot scenes using Star Wars figures and “edited by eye and feel,” he says, teaching himself the craft by doing.
Though his father made TV shows week after week, and his mom sang before audiences, it still felt impossible to go “from my little neighborhood with guys in low-riders and on low-rider bikes, to working on a film,” he says. “You might as well have said, ‘I want to be an executive for IBM.’ That didn’t happen for kids in my neighborhood.”
He found a surprising outlet for original productions at the family’s Pentecostal church, led by his uncle, Paul Corrales, who was the pastor. His uncle embraced the arts and presented passion plays for which Gutierrez ran the lights: bare bulbs placed in coffee cans and aimed at performers. When a young Gutierrez made a silent film about David and Goliath with the church youth group on a local ranch, the church held a showing.
“It was crazy. I was 15 and leading a team of a dozen or so people,” Gutierrez remembers of that shoot. “I had a mindset of ‘whatever it takes.’”
He taught Sunday school and led high school and junior high ministry groups, but the persistent dream to get into film always “felt a million miles away,” he remembers.
Enrolling at the University of California at Santa Barbara film school, he had no mentor and didn’t realize that film studies differed from film production and would not teach him filmmaking. Stuck in that major, he earned his film studies degree anyway and secured his first major on-set opportunity as a production assistant for Oprah Winfrey’s interview of Michael Jackson at the Neverland Valley Ranch. There, he saw the best and worst in film production on one shoot. On day one, he and others were subjected to unrelenting and irrational verbal abuse by their crew leader, a man they had never met before.
“He read us the riot act in front of everybody,” Gutierrez says. “I was like, ‘Bro, what’s your problem?’”
But the next day Gutierrez was placed on another team shooting in Jackson’s movie theater, and the director, one of the ABC network’s most decorated and accomplished, “had a massive impact on me” in a positive way, he says.
“The director asked me one time what I thought of a particular shot,” Gutierrez says. “Everyone looked at me. I didn’t know anything about anything so I said, ‘Looks good to me.’ The director laughed. He was so kind. That whole time he made me feel part of the team. That showed me two sides of this industry. One side will tear you apart because they can. The other side knows who they are and chooses to have a great impact. That was it for me. I said, ‘That’s the guy I’m going to be.’”
After working in El Teatro Campesino in Northern California for two years under the direction of Luis Valdez, director of Zoot Suit and La Bamba, his biggest break arrived. Valdez made a phone call to get him a production assistant job on the biopic film Selena. Gutierrez drove to San Antonio, Texas, and worked for three-and-a-half months, six days a week, usually more than 12 hours a day as part of the assistant director’s team.
“Selena was my film school,” he says. “I learned you’ve got to take care of people. I watched the crew’s professionalism and got a sense of how this should work. I saw people who were goofing around and not taking it seriously on set and how quickly they were fired. You’ve got to show up and work. To this day I keep a very tight calendar and work very hard because I realize how quickly you can be pushed out.”
Actor Edward James Olmos was impressed with Gutierrez’s hustle and invited him to Los Angeles to become a working professional.
“That changed my life,” says Gutierrez. “It confirmed what I’d felt in my heart.”
Still, it was a fight to survive on data-entry jobs and 59-cent tacos from Taco Bell between gigs.
“I was so hungry sometimes when I went to bed, but I was committed to making this dream work,” he says. “I had to tell stories. That’s all I could do.”
He learned non-linear editing systems and began earning money as a video editor. Then came open doors to work as a production manager, segment producer, and ultimately a director.
But it was a debilitating health scare — finally diagnosed and treated — which prompted him to dedicate himself to going back to school. He earned a master’s degree in film from Chapman University and his student thesis film, Paz (Spanish for “peace”), about the abuse his mother experienced in childhood, was nominated for a bevy of awards and aired on PBS for two months.
“Great blessings came from that, and it started to open doors,” he says. “The film touched people’s lives because it’s about physical abuse. Wherever we showed the film, time and again people were moved. That taught me: From now on I don’t want to make entertainment. I want to make movies that touch people’s lives.”
Gutierrez is developing a feature film which started as a pilot for a TV show, among other projects. His goal at Concordia is to help the next generation of filmmakers create meaningful and moving works.
“I try to teach students to make films that have impact,” he says.
WE ARE STORY-DRIVEN BY NATURE AS HUMANS CREATED BY GOD. [HERE AT CONCORDIA] WE WANT STUDENTS TO MAKE FILMS THAT CHANGE LIVES.
Gutierrez, who serves on the elder board of his church, says the Christian community “needs to send Christians into the film industry like they are going on a mission trip.”
“We have the greatest resources of love, comfort and peace, and this industry needs all of that,” he says. “I’ve been on sets where I share my faith, and if you live it out first and people see something different in you, then you get into conversations on film sets, it’s powerful.”
One unique aspect of Concordia’s major is an emphasis on how to give effective and encouraging leadership to a production and a crew, a novel thought in Hollywood.
“I’ve been to two big film schools and never once was I taught leadership,” says Gutierrez. “The question is, how does a student take what may be a lot of money given to them for a film project and acquire a large film crew and lead them through this project and do it ethically and well? Film production and ethics frequently do not mix, yet I see a world where they do.”
That means, among many other things, behaving professionally and graciously with people on film sets, and valuing work-life balance by not insisting on 19-hour days. Gutierrez and the theatre department’s Lori Siekmann are also making the major inter-disciplinary, bringing filmmakers and actors together so they can understand how each other thinks.
“You have to learn to communicate with actors, so our film students take an acting class,” Gutierrez says. “Our filmmakers become well-rounded by understanding the actor’s world. Making movies is not just about cameras and lenses.”
His overarching goal is to get Concordia graduates making movies and television series right away because studios and streamers are in a state of “collapse” now that affordable technology has made content widely available virtually for free.
“Don’t wait for anyone,” Gutierrez advises his students. “I want them to start making films and getting into film festivals as soon as they are done here. My goal is to get them ready to be independent filmmakers and get their stories told independently of the system, because the system is broken.”
That approach, he says, is how God led him into the industry.
“I didn’t know what the system was. I had to make it on my own,” he says. “I want to be what I never had, which is someone to point me in the right direction when I was a young man. Now I’m in a position to help and I’m handing it over to them and saying, ‘This is how you do it. If you’ve been blessed with this crazy mind to tell stories in a visual way, we’re ready to help you fulfill that mission in your life.’”