October 27, 2026. Boise, Idaho. A Tuesday, and an overdue introduction.
This journal has so far been occupied almost entirely with other people, whether bands working under saturated stage light, couples photographed in the brief warmth of golden hour, faces lit by practical sources after dark, or the films I study in the hope of making better ones. This entry turns the camera around, an uncomfortable maneuver for someone who has spent most of his working life on the other side of the lens, but anyone arriving here deserves to know who made the pictures and where the work is going.
Painting first, and a long way round
I grew up in Boise, and before I made films I made objects. In high school I worked as a painter, a sculptor and an illustrator, and I assumed, with the untroubled confidence available chiefly to teenagers, that my life would be spent exhibiting in galleries as an artist with a capital A. That early training has never really left me: color, composition, the habit of thinking in symbols and the stubborn problem of telling a story within the boundaries of a single rectangle were the lessons of painting long before they became the lessons of cinema, and even now I find myself considering composition well before I give any thought to equipment.
The route from there to a film set was circuitous. I studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 2010 to 2011, and at the Art Institute of Portland I enrolled in animation, on the reasoning, which still seems to me essentially sound, that animation is after all nothing more than pictures persuaded to move. The program required an acting class, and that requirement, together with working as a grip on two independent features in Portland, did more to turn me toward filmmaking than any plan I had made. I also hold a BA in Visual Arts from Boise State University.
Forty short films and a camera
I eventually moved home to Boise, bought a camera and began making short films, and it was there, rather than in any classroom, that I actually learned to tell a story with one. Over roughly a decade I made more than forty of them, Danger Land among them, and most of that work, along with reels and other experiments, now lives on Vimeo and on the SpitBall Productions YouTube channel, which describes its own output, with admirable accuracy, as comedy skits, action films and whatever else we deem entertaining. The impetus behind all of them was Robert Rodriguez's Rebel Without a Crew, a book that persuades its readers that a film can be made with whatever is at hand. Rodriguez and Kevin Smith have occupied my thinking longest, because both took enormous risks to make their first films, and Federico Fellini remains a personal hero for how far he pushed what a film could be.
Alongside the fiction I learned the trade. I interned at, and later helped run, a production company, where I learned the technical side of operating a camera; I shot and edited dozens of commercials, a couple of them national; and I worked as story editor and camera operator on a reality-television pilot that was pitched to networks and never picked up. Assembling that show, and then sitting across from network executives while we pitched it, was instructive in a way no amount of reading could have been, because it demonstrated that Hollywood, which had appeared from Idaho to be a closed and distant institution, was considerably less out of reach than I had assumed.
Bangkok
In the fall of 2017 I traveled to Thailand with a group of friends, and the country made an impression durable enough that in 2018 I moved there, taking up work as an English teacher while training in Muay Thai, MMA and judo with an intensity that, at its height, consumed three hours of every day. I also learned to speak Thai. It is often said that acquiring a second language alters the person who acquires it, and in my case the alteration was concrete: speaking Thai revealed dispositions in my own personality that I had not known were there, and it complicated my understanding both of Thailand and of the country I had left, which I came, somewhat to my surprise, to appreciate more fully from a distance. Two photographs from those years appear above.
Opportunity
My first feature emerged from a stretch of my life I would not choose to repeat. I was living in an RV outside my parents' house, unemployed after the marketing company where I had worked as a video editor went bankrupt, and attempting to buy a house with money I had saved, only to discover, exactly as the protagonist I would go on to write discovers, that I could not qualify for a loan. I made a movie instead, in large part because I needed a project capable of giving me a sense of purpose at a moment when very little else did.
Opportunity is a dark crime comedy about Patrick, who lives out of his van and is desperate to buy a house, and who, together with his best friend Donnie, accepts a job from a loan shark that ends with both of them on the run from a crew of Mormon gangsters. We shot it in Boise on a micro-budget over sixteen weekend days between July and October 2023, almost entirely with people I had met across a decade of short films. Patrick is, by my own admission, a version of me, and Donnie is drawn from two of my best friends, one of whom, Quinn Aikele, plays him. The film premiered in Boise on September 21, 2024, and in December 2024 it won Best Feature at TMFF (The Monthly Film Festival).
I would rather let critics describe it than do so myself. Unseen Films called it "one of the great discoveries of the year." Cinedump wrote, "Reminiscent of early Kevin Smith films, Opportunity has a DIY spirit and a raw authenticity that is hard to resist." And TMFF wrote, "I can’t wait to see what Rehl manages to conjure up next." The reviews were not uniformly kind, however, and the criticisms were fair: Film Blitz found the villains short on menace, and ScreenCritix found the tone wavering between dark comedy and suspense, observations I had largely made to myself over the two years I spent working on the film, during which there was very little anyone could say about its flaws that I had not already said privately. The film streams on Prime Video, Google Play and Filmzie, and free on Tubi and Fawesome.
What comes next
The feature I am now developing is Fortress of Bad Vibes, a grief horror film in which negative emotions manifest as demons, which is to say that it takes the oldest device of the genre, the monster as the externalized form of something the characters cannot otherwise confront, and turns it toward mourning. Its origin is not complicated. I am making it because I was in a lot of pain, and it is how I am dealing with the grief and loss of my father; I think other people will relate to that pain, and I hope the film also spreads some joy. I do not yet have a production date for it, and I would rather acknowledge that plainly than announce a schedule I cannot keep.
The photography continues alongside it: portraits, couples and live music in and around Boise. Morris Hill Productions, the company I founded in 2024, is where Fortress of Bad Vibes now lives, and news of it will appear here as it develops.
Asked recently for a shorter answer to the question in the title, I offered this: a creative designer, a creative wizard, a magical elf from another realm sent to this world to make joy and chaos, who makes things look good while looking good. The first part I stand behind. The second remains under review.
Questions people ask
Who is Rusty Rehl?
I'm a filmmaker and photographer from Boise, Idaho. I wrote, directed and edited the feature film Opportunity (2024), which won Best Feature at TMFF (The Monthly Film Festival) in December 2024, and I photograph portraits, couples and live performance.
What is Fortress of Bad Vibes?
A grief horror feature I am writing and will direct, in which negative emotions manifest as demons. It is in development with Morris Hill Productions.
Where can I watch Opportunity?
On Prime Video, Google Play and Filmzie, and free on Tubi and Fawesome.
Do you take photography and film work?
Yes: portraits, couples, live music and film work in Boise and around Idaho. Get in touch with what you have in mind.