Written & Directed by JJ Pollack
produced by Cassie Wineland & Carrie Cates
A restless young woman ships off to fight an interstellar war, only to struggle with the effects of being cut off from her home by both time and space.
ABOUT THE FILM
JETTISON screened at the Academy Award qualifying Hollyshorts and Austin Film Festival before being released online via Dust. It was also nominated for Best Sci-Fi short at FilmQuest and played at the Sci-Fi London Film Festival.
READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH JJ
Welcome to our Short of the Week series. Tell us a bit about yourself and your filmmaking background.
Outside of some early attempts at screenwriting, and the occasional random gig working on local sets as a teenager (restacking cases of Mark Wahlberg’s special bottled water in the production office of The Fighter is truly an experience I’ll never forget), most of my background with film is as a viewer, rather than as a maker. It wasn’t until going to college that I really started participating in filmmaking, working on student sets every semester and directing my first short my senior year. After graduating I moved to the indie-film utopia of Austin, TX and continued making shorts, and now work as a freelance editor there.
Tell us about the genesis of Jettison What inspired this film?
There was a great (and unfortunately now defunct) sci-fi film festival in Austin called Other Worlds, who were at one point awarding pretty sizable grants for filmmakers to make sci-fi shorts. I figured it was a super competitive process and wasn’t ever planning on applying, until I mentioned it to a friend who knew some of the people who worked at the fest. She told me they had a whopping two people apply the year prior. So knowing that my odds were a lot better than expected, I wrote something that combined two subjects I’m always interested in exploring (science fiction and veterans’ experiences) and surprise surprise, got the grant to make it.
In terms of tonal influences on the film, the two biggest were actually books, not other movies — Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and Tim O’Bren’s The Things They Carried. Me and my cinematographer, Garson Ormiston, did look at lot of other films for visual and aesthetic references though — Arrival, Interstellar, Elysium, Annihilation, Aliens, as well as others outside the sci-fi genre like The Thin Red Line.
What were some of the main obstacles you experienced when making of Jettison and how did you overcome them?
Far and away the biggest snafu we encountered on set involved the costumes. Originally the soldier characters were only supposed to wear jumpsuits during the mess hall and non-combat scenes, and were going to have enclosed space suits when out on patrol, since the implication is that these are alien planets and one wouldn’t necessarily expect them to have breathable atmospheres. Without getting into it too deeply, those costumes weren’t ready in time, and we had to think of alternate solutions the same morning we shot the scene of soldiers patrolling the beach. Ultimately we pivoted to an Annihilation-type look, repurposing the jumpsuits and adding backpacks & sleeping bags bought from Walmart on the way to set (they’ve got a very filmmaker-friendly return policy!). While it’s certainly far from perfect, I think we did an okay job of cobbling something usable together in the span of, quite literally, hours.
Jettison is extremely understated for a sci-fi. I notice you always cut away when an action sequence is about to occur, and instead you focus on the moments in between the action. Can you tell us about why you decided to make that creative choice?
Part of that decision, frankly, is due to the practicalities of trying to make sci-fi on a low budget. I really hate when obvious, cheap-looking VFX ruins your immersion in a film, and wanted to avoid using it as much as possible. Going into pre-production, I also knew that we were never going to have the budget to do a whole battle scene with practical effects. So I was very intentional about the story not needing to revolve around the action itself.
But another, more artistically-driven part of it is that I didn’t want the audience fixating on any violence we depicted, when the film is really more about the psychological effect it has on soldiers. When people talk about the horrors of war, I think they’re usually picturing the bloodshed and carnage that can happen on the battlefield. But since 9/11, four times as many US service members have killed themselves than have died in combat. To me, that’s just as horrifying an idea. So if we’re going to use film to talk about why war is hell, the disconnect veterans feel when returning home and the terrible job we do of successfully reintegrating them into society has to be part of that conversation.
The use of black and white is also a bold artististic choice, why did you choose to make the film in this style?
I wish I could say it was purely an artistic choice. But between the aforementioned costuming problems, the lack of a huge budget to afford shooting at more exotic locations, and my desire to have the VFX be as seamless and unobtrusive as possible, black & white was ultimately just our way of smoothing some of the film's rougher edges. That’s the the thing about art though, constraints and mistakes within the process of making it can sometimes help the final product as much as they hurt.
There’s a great story I heard about Steven Spielberg asking Akira Kurosawa why he framed a certain shot in Ran the way he did. Kurosawa responded (and I’m paraphrasing here) “It was a period piece. And if we moved the camera an inch left you'd see a Sony factory, and an inch right you'd see an airport." That's more or less the same sentiment behind Jettison being black and white -- practical necessity.
Jettison has had some good festival success. Can you tell us about your experiences screening the film with Austin and Hollyshorts? Also any tips for filmmakers currently trying to navigate the festival circuit?
Both those festivals were wonderful experiences. I volunteered for AFF the first year I moved to Austin, so getting to be a part of it was literally a dream come true. Playing at Grauman’s for Hollyshorts was equally exciting, and despite expecting any LA-based fest to be filled with unpleasant people (live there for a month and you’ll understand why!), everybody I met there was extremely nice and genuine. And that’s the most important thing I look for now in fests — Do the people who organize it really care? Do they actually engage and make the effort to get filmmakers to attend?
As easy as FilmFreeway has made the submission process for filmmakers, it’s also unfortunately attracted a lot of people starting (air-quotes) “fests” who don’t care whether they’re providing anything of value to audiences or filmmakers. And the site’s rating & reviews system is beyond useless, since anonymous feedback is kept hidden and people don’t want to risk backlash for publicly calling out a fest as being a waste of time. So my advice when deciding whether to submit to a fest or not is to privately reach out to filmmakers who’ve attended previously, and see how they really feel about it. If you’re not actively developing relationships with other filmmakers at those fests, and getting to discover quality new work that excites and informs you, why spend the money to submit?
Now that you've completed your festival journey the film has been picked up by Dust and Film Shortage. How have you found the online release of the film compared to the festival circuit? Any tips for filmmakers looking to release their film online?
More people saw Jettison in its first hour online than did at all its festival screenings combined. And that’s about a hundred times more views than anything else I’ve ever made, so I was definitely very lucky to be able to tap into the pre-existing userbases of DUST and Film Shortage. Validating as those kinds of numbers are though, it doesn’t really change anything for my career trajectory. No one can make a living just doing shorts. So whether it got 50 views or 50 million, the film was always just going to be a portfolio piece, and (hopefully) a stepping stone to bigger things.
So my advice for other shorts filmmakers is to not worry too much about online exhibition, and just make the movie you want to make, however weird or uncommercial you think that is. If you’re able to get it on a shorts curation site and get some exposure for your work, that’s great. But the format is perfect for experimentation and finding your voice as a creative, and in my opinion that’s the most important thing you can do with a short.
What do you think is the biggest challenge short filmmakers face trying to break into the industry?
I think it’s probably the same challenge that everyone faces trying to break in, whether you’re making shorts or features or are a writer or actor or producer— How do I get noticed by the people who matter? How do I cut through the noise and convince those with money that I’m the right person to back? If anything we may have it a little easier as shorts directors, since we have a pretty digestible, sub-20 minute piece that we can show to demonstrate our abilities. It’s way harder to get someone to read a full TV pilot or commit 90+ minutes to watching a feature, say. But with how many people want to be in the film industry, there’s naturally going to be a lot of competition for a limited number of spots. Figuring out how you make yourself valuable enough to snag one is the problem we all face.
Any film recommendations that we should add to our watchlist?
So many to choose from...I’ll go with two new movies and two underrated ones.
New:
Breaking - My favorite film of 2022, I really wish more people had seen this one. With how awful the new Star Wars films were, I kinda forgot that John Boyega could actually act. But man is he amazing in it. Feels like it could be our generation’s Dog Day Afternoon, in the way that it combines a tense bank robbery plot with pointed social commentary. And of course I’ve got a soft spot for anything that highlights the problems veterans face.
The Whale - Uncomfortable as it was to watch, this is an extremely well made, well acted, and genuinely empathetic movie that had me and everyone else in the theater bawling by the end (granted it was a Sunday night and there were only six of us there, but the point stands!). I was ready to put Aronofsky in movie jail after suffering through Mother!, but he totally redeemed himself!
Underrated:
Streets of Fire - Walter Hill is at his absolute best here with endlessly quotable dialogue, memorable action sequences (Willem Dafoe wielding a pickaxe in leather overalls, anyone?) and a truly fantastic soundtrack. Apparently this was the first film of a planned trilogy, and it’s a shame we’ll never get to see the rest. I feel bad for Michael Pare too, think he really should’ve been a bigger action star.
The Core - I had to put at least one sci-fi film on the list, right? I don’t care if the premise is complete nonsense, I don’t care if it’s schlocky B-grade action, I don’t even care that they used the word “unobtainium” (though they did hang a lampshade on it). This is the best disaster movie ever made, as far as I’m concerned. Wickedly fun dialogue and loads of chemistry between the cast. Plus it’s got Stanley Tucci with hair! How often do you see that?
What are you working on now?
I'm currently trying to find funding to shoot a grounded sci fi-thriller feature I wrote. The story’s about the slowly deteriorating mental state of a social media moderator, and how we as a society are handling (or rather, failing to handle) the sheer volume of negative information we’re constantly bombarded with on the internet. Think Taxi Driver, but instead of the Vietnam War and urban decay, it’s conspiracy theories and the 24/7 news cycle that’s wearing on our collective psyche.