Making JAKE, Part 1: The Idea.

Posted by on 5 March 2010 | 55 Comments

This is the first in a series of short articles about the process of writing and directing JAKE, by Doug Dillaman.

Everything starts somewhere, and JAKE, the sixth feature film script I've written and the first one that I've directed, came from the combination of two ideas which I had near simultaneously. 

The first: Sometime in 2007 - I think it was June - I was not having a particularly good day, and was in a bad mood, and as I laid in bed that night, exhausted, I thought about the elements of my life, and as I considered them, I realized that all the raw material that was there - the people I knew, the family that believed in me, the job I had, and so on - was a good foundation. And that perhaps the problem, my unhappiness, was not with the elements of my life but what I was doing with them, and that perhaps somebody else, if given the opportunity, would do a much better job. 

The second: Maybe that night, or the night before, or the night after, again, lying in bed, I thought about Jake Gyllenhaal. Why? I have no idea. I had seen ZODIAC recently, and he was on the cover of terrible magazines, the kind whose covers are plastered in enlargements on the outside of every dairy in New Zealand, because he'd recently started dating Reese Witherspoon. And I wondered what his life would have been like if he went by Jacob instead. Would he get big movie roles? Would he date movie stars? Or would the very fact of choosing a less tough-sounding name change the very way we perceive him - not only that, actually, but the way he perceived himself? It seemed likely. 

This business of how we choose to name our selves - why I go by Doug instead of Douglas, why some of my friends go by Dave or David, Robert or Bob, and so on - has something to do with how we perceive ourselves. And that choice then bubbles out into the world. 

And so, those two seeds cross-pollinated, and I imagined Jacob and Jake, and how they would take the materials of a life, and what each of them would do with it. 

And thus began the 18-month gestation period for the first draft of JAKE.


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