Hi and welcome to the Team Deakin's podcast. This podcast is a dialogue between Roger and

James Deakin's often joined in the conversation by a guest. It's very informal and we never

know where it will go. We're connecting through Zoom, so bear that in mind when you hear

the audio.

If you'd like to submit a question or topic, please do so by emailing podpod at rogerdeakin's.com.

Today we're speaking with a cinematographer, a frequent collaborator with David Cronenberg, his credits

include Eastern Promises, Crash, Mars Attack, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and the cult classic,

The Rocky Horror Picture Show. We're happy to welcome Peter Shushitsky with us today.

Pretty good. Peter, thank you for doing this. Thank you.

It's my pleasure. We'd like to start with a question. How did you get to where you are today?

What was your path? Did you have another path in the beginning and then find this? Let us know.

I will try and tell you how I got here. Well, I was born into a family. My father was with photography.

I had photography in my veins in a sense. I grew up with my father pointing a camera at me

from the very beginning and the smells of his equipment. As he opened it up, he had heavy leather

cases for his camera and his lenses. It had a really particular smell. That stayed with me

all of my life. He used, on occasions, he would use a photo-flood lamp. That always had a

particular smell as the dust burnt on it. As I began to understand speech, my mother would tell me,

if I asked where's Dad, he's in the dark room and that very word began to take on a rather

magical and mysterious connotation. It was somewhere that he disappeared to. It was a dark room

rather than going into a forest in the folktales that I began to hear.

I would walk up stairs when I was old enough to walk. The first thing I wanted to do was to see

where he was and what was he doing in this dark room. I knew that he would come out with wet

...