I’ve got a sci-fi short film here for you to watch today titled Jettison, which comes from writer and director JJ Pollack.
The movie follows 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.
This short film is shared in collaboration with the FilmQuest Film Festival, where we are looking to expose some of the awesome indie genre films and shorts that filmmakers are creating.
We also included an interview with the directors below.
What was the inspiration for your film? How did you come up with the idea?
There was a great (and unfortunately now defunct) scifi film festival in Austin called Other Worlds, who were at one point awarding pretty sizable grants for filmmakers to make scifi 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.
Tell us about yourself. What is your background? How long have you been a filmmaker?
Outside of some early attempts at screenwriting, and the occasional random gig working on local sets as a teenager (stacking 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.
What inspires you to work within genre cinema and tell these kind of stories?
Scifi has always been my favorite genre of media, one of my earliest memories was getting to stay up late on a school night to watch Blade Runner with my dad on VHS, and to this day I have a bookshelf full of scifi books to read that only ever gets bigger.
For Jettison specifically, it was heavily inspired by Joe Haldemann’s The Forever War, which is probably obvious to anyone who’s read it. I also drew on more grounded media that dealt with military isolation and the effects of war and PTSD on combat soldiers, such as Jarhead directed by Sam Mendes and Born on the Fourth of July directed by Oliver Stone.
What was your favorite part of the filmmaking process for this project?
As is usually the case for me, writing the script was my favorite part. If only because as I’m typing away, nothing has gone wrong yet, so in my mind the movie’s still perfect. Once you start production, reality can hit pretty hard.
What are you most proud of with this film?
Despite how low the budget and short the shoot was, I think we did a pretty good job of worldbuilding without relying on cheap-looking CGI and VFX, and making it feel like the characters inhabited a lived-in but still futuristic universe. Scifi can be a pretty expensive genre to work in, but if you’re intentional about it, I think there are a lot of creative ways to work around budget limitations and still produce something interesting and visually appealing.
What is a favorite story or moment from the making of the film you’d like to share?
I bought, used, and then returned so many props, costumes and set decoration items off of Amazon for this film, that they sent me a message saying they were worried about the environment impact I was causing from all the boxes that had to be shipped back and forth.
I don’t actually think they worried about the environment, but in case you were wondering, yes Amazon will ban you if you abuse the return system enough in a short amount of time. So if you’re a filmmaker reading this, make sure you spread your purchases over a few stores and swindle Walmart and Target too, so that no one place gets suspicious.
What was your most challenging moment or experience you had while making your film?
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.
If it did, how did your film change or differ from its original concept during pre-production, production, and/or post-production? How has this changed how you’ll approach future projects as a result?
With the exception of some minor tweaks here and there in editing, the final film actually stuck pretty close to the story and vision of the original script. The biggest change was probably deciding to make the film black & white, even though we had shot it in color.
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 initially 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. And I ended up loving the monochromatic look of the film, even if that wasn’t always the plan.
Who were some of your collaborators and actors on the film? How did you start working with each other?
The film was shot by Garson Ormiston, with whom I worked alongside at a local equipment rental house. The cast – lead by Madison Wilson, Lauren Bonetti, Zachary T. Scott and John Valley – were a mix of new faces found through casting calls and actors I had previously worked with on other projects.
What is the best advice you’ve ever received as a filmmaker and what would you like to say to new filmmakers?
If you’re going to write your own material to direct (as most filmmakers do), develop your skills as a writer. Find people willing to give you honest feedback on your scripts. Be willing to listen to them. And don’t start pre-production on a project until you truly feel the script can’t get any better.
The screenplay is ultimately going to be the blueprint for the entire thing, and a valuable tool to get cast and crew interested in working with you, so don’t rush the process just because you’re anxious to start filming.
What are your plans for your career and what do you hope this film does for it? What kind of stories would you like to tell moving forward?
My interests are pretty broad and I love making genre films (of the scifi and thriller varieties) as well as more straightforward dramas and comedies. So I tend to choose projects based on how interesting a specific idea is to me, versus what kind of label I’m giving myself or my career by doing it. If I can make a living writing, directing, or even editing narrative films for a living, I’ll be overjoyed.
What is your next project and when can we expect to see it?
I’m currently in post-production for my first feature film, a 2-hander chamber dramedy called Nightcap. If all goes well on the festival circuit later this year, it should be released sometime in 2025.
Where can we find more of your work and where can interested parties contact you? Do you have a website or YouTube/Vimeo channel? Social media handles?
My website is jjpollack.com , and I can also be found on Instagram at @gutfeelingfilms
Bonus Question #1: What is your all-time favorite film?
All That Jazz
Bonus Question #2: What is the film that most inspired you to become a filmmaker and/or had the most influence on your work?
I watched Back to the Future so many times as a kid that my parents broke our VHS copy of it just to get me to stop. I’d say that’s a decent candidate.
