When Brian Netto and Adam Schindler met as fourth-graders at Woodbury Elementary School in the late 1980s, they began what would prove to be one of the most important and enduring relationships of their lives. They bonded over a shared passion for movie-making, which would take them from their backyards in Woodbury to Los Angeles, where they have successfully co-written, produced and directed two feature films that have screened at film festivals around the world.
“It started when we were around 11 or 12, bored in the summer,” Netto says. “I don’t know where the inspiration to make a movie came from, but our parents said it was fine; ‘just don’t leave the yard.’”
That first movie, a horror film about a killer Cabbage Patch doll, would eventually get a sequel involving an expanded cast of the pair’s neighbors and friends. By high school, while their friends were saving up for cars, “Brian and I saved money and bought video cameras and digital video cassettes, which were cutting edge at the time,” Schindler says.
Though apart during their college days, they remained committed to their craft, with Schindler starting a student film society at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, while Netto became one of the first students to complete the newly-created film studies minor at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. After graduation, they spent a year shooting on nights and weekends to make a movie from a script that Netto had written the preceding summer. “It was crazily ambitious, but we learned a lot about how to do things and how not to do things. It showed us we can fund, cast and tell a story,” Netto says.
However, it took nearly seven years after moving to L.A. for Schindler and Netto to make their first feature, the horror movie Delivery. “It was a big learning curve,” recalls Schindler. “The first month we were out here trying to get jobs; we’d put on suits, walk in to Disney and hand the security guard our resumes.”
Both took unpaid internships—Netto at Warner Bros. and Schindler at Lawrence Bender Productions, the company that produced Good Will Hunting, Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction—and worked hard to turn them into paid jobs, saving up favors that they called in for Delivery, which premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2013.
An article about the film prompted Jill Whisler, the pair’s former elementary school teacher, to reach out to Netto on Facebook. “It was my first year teaching in Woodbury and Brian was in my fifth-grade homeroom,” she says. “I followed that class and got to know them pretty well.”
She uses their story as an example to her students of the importance of friendship and following your passion. “When students get discouraged, I like to show off some of these alumni, show them these two kids from their same town with similar experiences,” she says.
When Netto and Schindler’s second feature film, the thriller Intruders, screened at the Twin Cities Film Festival last October, Whisler and her daughter were in attendance. “I’m so happy to see how far they’ve come in their career,” Whisler says.
The duo is currently writing their latest project, the sci-fi film Canaan, while developing ideas for a new TV series. They both credit the friendship they formed as kids with keeping them going when things got tough. “We always had each other to get each other jazzed up,” Netto says, even when success was “so far away it felt like a dream.”
To learn more about their past and upcoming film projects, check out Netto and Schindler’s production company, Type AB Films, at their website here.
