Boise, July 15, 2023. First day of principal photography on Opportunity.
Everybody on the cast and crew had a 9-to-5 job, so we only shot on weekends. Twelve days of principal photography, then four more days of pickups and reshoots. Sixteen days in all, spread from mid-July to early October.
I had made 40 short films over about nine years before this. I'd always wanted to make a feature, ever since I read Robert Rodriguez's Rebel Without a Crew. For one reason or another I never felt ready. Then circumstances lined up so that I no longer had any excuses.
Here's what that summer taught me.
Plan everything, then let the plan go
I storyboarded the whole film. It was my directorial debut and I didn't want to waste anyone's time, or my money, by showing up without a plan for every scene.
Then we started shooting, and the old line held up: no plan survives contact with the enemy. On a film set, no plan survives the first day.
If an actor couldn't make it, I shot around them. If a location fell through, or wasn't what I'd pictured, I adapted on the spot. I took a couple of improv classes years ago, and the main lesson carried over: you never know what's going to happen, so you take everything as a gift and use it, even when it looks like the opposite. Adapt and overcome.
Shoot where you already have keys
Every piece of low-budget advice I'd read said to shoot in one location. I didn't do that. What I did do was shoot mostly in places I knew I could get into.
That mostly meant the alley behind Combat Sport Supply, Justin Brown's store. It didn't matter whether the store was open, so I could drive down, park my van and shoot a scene. Justin also knew the owners of the Reuseum, where we shot the office scenes and the final fight. That's why he's credited as a producer. The rest happened at friends' houses and apartments.
It is so useful to know local business owners who will let you film on their property.
Cast your people
Everyone in the cast was a friend or someone I'd made films with before. That's one of the benefits of a decade of short films: the people you meet turn into collaborators. I knew how to talk to them in ways they understand, and that meant very little friction on set.
I wrote Donnie around Quinn Aikele, who had been in almost every short I'd made since the beginning. I cast Jon Waters as Patrick because he's classically trained, with a theatre degree from Boise State, and Patrick has a lot of lines. The two of them bonded over comic books, and it shows. Film Threat put it better than I could:
"Waters and Aikele are hilarious together and play off each other excellently."
I didn't set out to make a comedy. A lot of the funniest bits came from letting the actors improvise after I already had the takes I wanted.
What I'd do differently
I didn't hold rehearsals. I asked the cast to learn their lines on their own, because I'd been part of so many projects that fell apart before they started, and I knew I had to start moving. Things in motion stay in motion. Next time I'll probably give it two weeks of rehearsal and blocking.
I also made a lot of mistakes that my sound designer, Jacob Kinch, fixed in the edit. He built out the whole world in sound. And Taylor Ross wrote the score, his first. Working with him meant learning to speak the language of music. Now I can't imagine making a film without a score.
Where it ended up
At the first local showings, the audiences gasped at the nail step, which was the point. They also laughed at things I never planned, like the tumbleweed falling off the van in the desert scene.
Cinedump wrote: "Rehl’s direction, despite the limited budget, is polished in many areas." In December 2024, Opportunity won Best Feature at The Monthly Film Festival.
You can watch it free on Tubi, or on Prime Video and Google Play. I called it Opportunity partly because that's what it was: an opportunity I was making for myself.