"Don't tell me what I can't do."
For fourth-year Interdisciplinary Studies student Brandon Davis, it's more than the saying he has tattooed on him.
Davis has a movie called "Shifting Gears" that he's trying to raise funds to make. To him, he's more concerned about seeing what he can do rather than what people say he can't.
He's met with the president of AMC to discuss turning his script into a TV show; however, the network pulled away when they saw the budget.
"Even though I am passionate about it," Davis said, "it’s hard to get someone to spend $26 million on a 13-episode run for somebody who's never proven themselves before.”
After that, he was in touch with an investor in New Jersey to turn the script into a movie. When he found out about that, he worked all weekend rewriting it, only sleeping for six hours during that time.
And, much like AMC, the investor pulled out after seeing the budget.
"That was so frustrating," Davis said. "I had to take off of work — I had to rearrange my schedule to make this work, only to find out this guy was going to fade away after we hit him with the numbers.”
But, Davis doesn't let those things get him down. He said that he has a drive that is different and that keeps him going.
For "Shifting Gears," he was able to convince a police department to agree to do a car chase in Columbia with him. He said that he loves to film trailers to show to people.
“It was more rewarding to make the trailer and share it with people and hear them say, ‘Holy s---, you really got a police car and got it to chase you down the street,'" Davis said.
He's working with Antwon Tanner from One Tree Hill and hopes to get Chad Michael Murray to work on the film if he gets enough money.
Davis hopes to raise $20,000 to get both, but he will make a movie regardless of how much money is raised.
Usually, scripts are written and sold to big movie companies for them to produce. Davis said he has no intention to do that.
“I'm not doing it for the money. I'm doing it to do it, to show everyone my story that I wrote," he said.
After seeing his mom win a battle with breast cancer while he was in high school, he says that he pulls some of his drive from her.
Raised in a single-parent household, he wants to pay back his mother for all she did for him. He said that his mother would be his date to his first movie premier.
“I watched her struggle and she does everything that she can to help me out. I want to make her proud and show her that she raised her kid right and that he can be successful."
Davis launched a website for his movie earlier this week, is still fundraising for "Shifting Gears" and hopes to get the project off the ground soon.
Right now, he works at Longhorn Steakhouse in the Vista and as a movie critic for WACH Fox, a local TV station.
But soon, he hopes, he'll be able to dedicate his full time to making movies.
“I want to prove to myself and everyone else that says no or doubts it, I can.”