That’s how Rust Creek was born in 2010, when Julie started writing the screenplay about an ambitious college senior who skips Thanksgiving with her family to embark on a road trip for a promising job interview.

Because I always thought of Sawyer as somebody who is very invested in the material world. The main chase in the film takes place in the Appalachian forest. It was really exciting to set the whole script outside in the woods, in an environment that I could actually play with and make those environmental cues part of the movie and part of her arc. Even though the original story was based on a drive that happened in Maryland, Rust Creek is wholly set in Kentucky. Stu told Julie about his experience, and she was immediately drawn to the idea of a survival story centered on an invincible young person confronting their own mortality for the first time. Stu PollardĢ0 years later, that memory resurfaced as Stu and writer Julie Lipson were brainstorming ideas for a script to collaborate on.

That moment, that rite of passage in every young person’s life, where you go from feeling invulnerable, to realizing that you might be taking your last few breaths…The moment you realize you might not necessarily be the star of your own movie, you might be an expendable day player and somebody else’s. ( Hear him tell the full story here).īut that experience stuck with him, and he realized that it is a pretty universal experience: For the first time in his life, he thought his goose might be cooked. It was only after hitting the storm he realized he had failed to tell anyone he had headed out on an impromptu road trip.

In December of 1988, Lunacy’s Stu Pollard got lost in a midnight snowstorm in the hills of western Maryland.

Rust creek movie