A graduate of Denmark’s National Film School, Alexander Gruszynski began his professional life in various European capitals before moving to the U. S. in 1985. He has since worked on several dozen feature films and television productions, and is an esteemed member of the American Society of Cinematographers.
Gruszynski’s credits include six hugely successful Tyler Perry features, most recently The Single Moms Club (2014). Noted for his versatility, he is lauded for genre fare such as as Tremors (1990), The Page Master (1994) and The Craft (1996), as well as for friendlier pictures, among them The In-Laws (2003) starring Albert Brooks and Michael Douglas; Nancy Drew (2007) with Emma Roberts as the teenage sleuth; Wallander: The Revenge (2012), based upon a noted Swedish television series.
Gruszynski’s work has been honored. He received an ASC nomination for the made-for-television movie, Kingfish: A Story of Huey Long, which won the Cable ACE award. I Like It Like That received an Independent Spirit nomination in 1995 and, much earlier in his career, he received the Bodie Award for Jenny.
The year 2017 found him shooting a feature, Ideal Home, as well as two television series, Conspiracy of Silence and Insatiable. During down time, he directed two short films just for fun, Teapot and Tripolar.
Music, War and Love is the first film Gruszynski has made in Poland, the land of his birth. He was born in 1950 in Warsaw, in a historic district decimated by the war. His father was a playwright and his mother a neurologist who survived concentration camps and the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1968, when civil war instigated a purge of the Jewish population, the Gruszynski family fled to neighboring Czechoslovakia and In due course emigrated to Copenhagen. “It was the saddest day of my life,” he remembers, “standing on a train platform packed with people dear to us, who’d come to say goodbye.” At the Czech-Austrian border, the family’s passports were taken, leaving them officially stateless. “My identity as a Jew consciously began after leaving Poland,” he says. He didn’t return until 1993. Alexander Gruszynski makes his home in Los Angeles.
