Justin Gullett makes films about people at war with themselves.

He is a writer, director, producer, and entrepreneur from Memphis, Tennessee, and the founder of Red Thread Pictures, an independent studio that develops, finances, produces and releases its own films. He has also built other businesses outside film. Across both, he has spent his career building the thing most independent filmmakers only talk about: a way to make the films he wants to make, where he lives, with people he trusts.

Like Spielberg, he started early. At eight his father, Larry Gullett — owner of the Columbia School of Broadcasting — gave him a VHS camera. Larry had made silent films as a boy; when Justin found them he was amazed. By high school he was shooting almost every week with the kids in the neighborhood, packing the gym at Houston High and filling the church. Thousands of people came to watch. He was twenty-six when On the Lot, Steven Spielberg and Mark Burnett’s worldwide filmmaking competition for Fox and DreamWorks, drew roughly 12,000 entries. Three of his short films, Chance Encounter, Suspension and Distortion, won first place. Distortion was written, cast, shot and released in a single week; it won its round of the competition’s online challenge by viewer vote and put him on the front page of The Commercial Appeal. “People voted for it,” he told the paper, “not just critics.”

In the years that followed he executive produced The Grand with Woody Harrelson, directed a training series with Olympic medalist Ryan Lochte that was photographed by The New York Times, and worked as producer, executive producer and second-unit director on many released features while keeping a crew together with national spots.

He lives in both Memphis and Los Angeles with his wife, Lauren, who is his partner in all of it, and their children.