Rising Stars: Meet David Gutel of Los Angeles

Today we’d like to introduce you to David Gutel.

Hi David, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
During my freshman year of high school, I was very sick, and my father rented Monty Python and the Holy Grail for me. While I was watching it, I felt better for the first time. Whatever power that movie had to change how I felt, I wanted to do that for other people. That’s what made me want to make films.

I studied film and television at Cal State Long Beach, with an emphasis in directing, and built a career working on sets as both a director and a first assistant director. When I spoke with VoyageLA in 2020, I was trying to shift the balance toward directing.

Today, directing is at the center of my career, from vertical series at ReelShort to features, music videos, and live shows.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Learning to trust myself was the hard part. First assistant directing gave me a path that felt safe and reliable, but I wanted to direct. I had to learn to let that ambition shape my choices.

The people around me have helped with that. When I met Angel and Sean from Gelli Haha in December 2024, they trusted my ideas and encouraged me to push them further. Their confidence helped me trust my own taste. I had gotten used to setting some of my stranger ideas aside while trying to make a living. Working with them reminded me that those could be the very ideas worth pursuing.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m a Los Angeles filmmaker and the Senior Director for ReelShort, where I direct vertical microdramas: short, serialized stories made for a phone screen. One of my recent projects is My Secret Lover Is His Brother, which has a reported play count of over 210 million on ReelShort.

What interests me about vertical microdramas is the feeling that you’re telling a story to one person at a time. In a movie theater, you’re part of an audience. A television often sits across the living room. But your phone is in your hands, inside your personal space. I’m interested in how that closeness affects us emotionally and psychologically. I think it can make a character’s emotions feel more immediate, almost as if they’re sharing something directly with you.

The vertical frame also feels like a new cinematic language to me. The way you block a scene, pan, tilt, or move the camera on a dolly all feels different. Curiosity is one of my biggest creative energizers, and I love the sense of discovery that comes with figuring out how to tell a story in that frame.

For the past eight years, I’ve also collaborated with Cameron Lew on Ginger Root’s music videos, films, and live performances. We co-wrote and co-directed SHINBANGUMI: A Music Movie, which brings the album’s music videos together into a continuous story and aired on Adult Swim.

I’ve also directed music videos for Gelli Haha, including Bounce House, Funny Music, and Klouds Will Carry Me to Sleep.

On the feature side, I co-wrote and co-directed Forty-Seven Days with Jesus, which opened in 980 theaters nationwide.

My dream is to keep making movies. I’m currently developing three feature films, and as I grow as a director, I want to expand my work in features and move into episodic television.

How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
People can find my work and reach me about directing and creative collaborations on Instagram at @davidmgutel or email davidgutel@gmail.com.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidmgutel/