Johnstad grew up working on a cattle farm in Wisconsin. Among his family were two sisters and his father, an Air Force fighter pilot, and mother, an English teacher. Johnstad graduated high school at 16 and spent a year traveling. He enrolled in the California Institute of the Arts in 1986 to study film and completed the program in three years.
Johnstad began working on music videos and television movies for the next four years. Among the people he had worked with was director Zack Snyder, who offered him a job as his first assistant director which lead the two to work with each other for the next ten years.
Johnstad would later work on scripts and in the mid 1990s, a low-budget action film True Vengeance was released in the mid-1990s. Snyder asked Johnstad to assist him with his film 300, a fictionalized graphic novel adaptation of Frank Miller's comic involving the Battle of Thermopylae. The film got him nominated for a Saturn Award along with Snyder and Michael Gordon.

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