Ryan Sullivan was born in Grand Island, Nebraska in 1984 and began studying film during high school after watching Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo for the first time. In school his friends used to call him Charlie Starkweather, because he shot everything with his camera. In 2007, he received a grant from the Experimental Video Art Project in Omaha to fund his first film, which was lost when the lab accidentally destroyed his only print. After this setback, he left his small-town life for San Francisco and began documenting the lives of pornographers he met, the footage of which eventually became the basis for his documentary Island.