Storyboard artist’s Hollywood career was launched in Westlake
Artist who once feared he wouldn’t graduate now has big film credits to his name.
Little did Mark Bristol know that his serendipitous 35-year career as a storyboard artist would be launched in Westlake as an illustrator for the Picayune when he was a boy at Hill Country Middle School, taking art classes from Dale Baker.
A classmate’s parents owned the Picayune, saw his work, and asked whether he could illustrate cartoons for editorials, sports and politics. Now his hometown has commemorated his artwork by commissioning a storyboard replica on the side of the Alamo Drafthouse Theater Slaughter Lane.
It all started after his parents took him to see “every movie under the sun,” Bristol said.
When he was 12, he was drawing every day and was inspired after seeing an illustrated screenplay, otherwise known as a storyboard, for “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
“It connected art and film,” Bristol said. “Somehow the illustrator helped Spielberg previsualize his movie before it was shot. That was amazing to me. At the time, I couldn’t afford a video camera, so I started studying artwork from a book about the movie. That was my film school.”
Then another seminal moment happened.
“My Little League coach was Bill Wittliff, who wrote (television’s) ‘Lonesome Dove,’ so I started showing him my artwork, and he became a mentor,” Bristol said. “Then, in 1992, when I was a junior at the University of Texas, he gave me my first job . ... That was pretty amazing. Since then it has been nonstop. That job led to my doing ‘Dazed and Confused,’ and now, 55 movies later, I’m still going.”
Bristol started out in the film department but said he was not inspired. His favorite movies are epics such as “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Dr. Zhivago” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
“At the time, no one wanted to make those movies in Texas, so I thought, well, I’ll go get an English degree because if you’re going to be a filmmaker, you have to tell stories,” Bristol said.
He thought that reading the greatest stories of all time would find its way into his own work. He almost didn’t graduate. “I walked in to the counselor’s office thinking I had all my requirements, and she said I needed two upper division film credits to get out,” Bristol recalled.
Ironically, he avoided taking courses in the film department because he said it required a grammar, spelling and punctuation test to enter upper division film courses.
“I can do a lot of things, but I can’t spell,” Bristol said. “I failed it three times. So I thought, ‘I’m not going to graduate.’” Then, he got lucky again. “I was lying in bed thinking, ‘How am I going to do this?’” Bristol said. “The phone rang, and it was UT film professor Ira Abrams. He had seen my storyboards and made me an offer to help with his short film, telling me he couldn’t pay, but maybe he could do something else for me. I told him my tale of woe, and he said, ‘OK, I’ll work out two self-paced upper division film courses. You’ll work with me, and we’ll get you graduated.’”
In 1993, he moved to Los Angeles, where he directed music videos and commercials before returning to Austin. Directing was his end goal, but storyboarding opened the door in big ways and provided a long list of successes: “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation,” “The Tree of Life,” “The Chronicles of Narnia,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Memento” and many more.
After a movie project fell through, Bristol said he lucked his way into the video game industry, where he worked for six years. Next, his friend director Chris McQuarrie asked him to work on the “Mission Impossible” movie in 2014.
“I’ve never once gotten a job from sending out a resumé in all the years I’ve been in the business,” Bristol said.
Now, he’s heading to London to work with Tom Cruise on the new “Mummy” movie.
He has been visualizing and storyboarding a “huge action sequence. They’re going back to all the old monster movies ... reconnecting their storylines with what is going on in the world now. It is very cool.”