USC native breaking through with music video, film work


Gregory Kasunich
Directing a film or a music video is glamorous, ego-enriching work, right?
You get to stand behind the camera, scrutinize performances, cook up a production design and yell “Cut!”
But it also includes some nuts-and-bolts, quotidian chores. Just ask Gregory Kasunich. The filmmaker and Upper St. Clair native’s duties when he was recently putting together a music video in California included making multiple runs to the nearest Lowe’s store so he could pick up galvanized rods.
“It takes a lot of sweat,” Kasunich explained in a recent phone conversation. “A lot of late nights, and convincing a lot of talented friends to work for free.”
The work the 2004 graduate of Upper St. Clair High School has been doing in Los Angeles could be starting to pay some dividends. Kasunich directed the video for the song “Dog Fight” by the Los Angeles singer-songwriter Sophie Strauss. It’s from Strauss’s album “Hard Study,” which is set to be released Friday. Strauss told Billboard magazine that the song is about “casual hook-up culture,” and Kasunich illustrated the theme by surrounding Strauss with anonymous body parts.
“We were playing with a lot of ideas of good and bad, light and dark,” Strauss said. It can be seen on YouTube and other outlets.
Kasunich now lives in North Hollywood, and works during the day for a digital advertising company whose clients include Disney and Taylor Swift. His wife, Anjali Kasunich, is a naturopathic doctor who has a practice called Mantra Natural Medicine.
During his lunch hours, he can often be found on the phone, getting details together for his own work.
“I’ve learned so much by taking on different projects,” he said.
And how does Kasunich decide who he wants to work with?
“I make a personal connection to the artist,” Kasunich said. “I like the song, I love the record or I love the concert.” From there, he has approached the artists with his ideas, and the process takes off from there.
In a profile for the Voyage LA website, Kasunich said that when he was growing up in Upper St. Clair, “I was a curious, nerdy, overweight kid who played in the marching band, started the robotics club at my school, and got my butt kicked in every sport. …” Coming of age when video cameras and blank VHS tapes were commonplace, he started making short films. Eventually, he signed on for an apprenticeship at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, and majored in film and psychology at Temple University near Philadelphia.
Kasunich’s first feature, “The Rest Falls Away,” was a coming-of-age romantic comedy about a young man trying to avoid responsibility and, when he does make a decision, it “causes his universe to literally split into different possibilities.” Kasunich compares it to the 1882 short story “The Lady, or the Tiger” by Frank R. Stockton, and it ends with a twist.
“He is sent back to a pivotal moment in his life and has to make a decision,” Kasunich said. “The film ends right before we see what direction he chooses.”
Kasunich is now working on a movie about the economics of the blood industry, and is cooking up a screenplay about genetic engineering that touches on aging, advertising, religion and the pharmaceutical industry. He is in the right place to make a mark in the film industry, but, Kasunich concedes, the Los Angeles area is also a hothouse of competition.
“Because there are so many people trying to do the thing (that you want to do), the bar for creativity and execution is really high,” he said. “The hardest part is defining your voice and continually making great work that competes. The other side of it is getting your work out there and seen by both audiences that might respond to your work, and also those who can hire you in the future.”