In 2008, a group of industry professionals and eager amateurs – inspired to reverse the inertia of the 363 days a year that weren’t the 48 Hour Film Festival – formed a filmmaking collective in Auckland. The team met every Sunday to experiment with and develop their craft, not unlike a kind of filmmaking band practice. They called themselves Hybrid Motion Pictures.
“It was really frustrating because once a year, we would get together and do this 48 Hours film, and then the rest of the year, we tried to get something off the ground and it was just… pulling teeth,” says co-founder Doug Dillaman.
For the past five years, he’s been engaged in another form of rough DIY dentistry with Hybrid Motion: self-funding, self-producing and self-distributing Jake, a science-fiction comedy he wrote and directed.
He’s clearly exhausted when we speak, and his advice to first-time filmmakers is bittersweet: “It’s about having a project that will sustain you for that long, because it’s such a long road.” But there’s no mistaking Dillaman’s infectious passion for the art of filmmaking – or the pride he takes in Jake.
The premise is undoubtedly intriguing: an ordinary guy wakes up to discover a mysterious agency have cast an actor in the role of his life, and what’s worse is that no one seems to really register that he’s been replaced.
There’s something really intrinsically sad about the idea that you could be replaced by somebody who doesn’t even look like you and nobody notices
Dillaman remarks that the influences for Jake range from Phillip K. Dick’s science fiction, which he devoured as a kid, to the sad-sack mind-melt of Charlie Kaufman. But all are rooted in some kind of clever sci-fi conceit, and defy classifcation. “They are all films that are hard to file in the video store,” Dillaman says. “I really wanted to make something that keeps surprising you.”
And Jake certainly does that. It’s a tonally assured, mordantly funny, cruelly pleasurable oddity that isn’t afraid to plumb some pretty dark depths for its truths. “When I would tell people this premise, they would often be like, ‘Oh, that’s really funny! So this is a comedy, right?’” Dillaman remembers. “You can imagine the Adam Sandler version… but there’s also something really intrinsically sad about the idea that you could be replaced by somebody who doesn’t even look like you, and nobody notices.”
Dillaman says he hadn’t anticipated the extent to which the cast would bring his writing to life. At odds with the passivity of the page, there’s a frustrated, furious sense of conflict to Jason Fitch, who plays the lead character Jacob, and Leighton Cardno has a believably human core as the nefarious actor-antagonist. “I [had] imagined the actors maybe being a bit more plastic, like someone in a sitcom, but Leighton brings this sort of deadpan reality… That’s the main thing; suddenly I have these actors who brought this sort of grounded reality that was really exciting.”
They are there because they believe in the script and they believe in you, and you have to repay that with every consideration that you can within your budget.
With an extensive cast of actors and crew offering their time and talents for free, Dillaman is quick to count the blessings in his support and realise his responsibilities in return. “There’s no end to the amount strangers will give to your project if you are engaged and considerate,” he says. “You have to take care of everybody, especially when you are not paying anybody. They are there because they believe in the script and they believe in you, and you have to repay that with every consideration that you can within your budget.”
It’s for that reason Dillaman is so passionate about treating filmmaking as a fundamentally collaborative medium. “I always get bummed when I see a first film that says ‘A FILM BY ________’. So many other people’s blood, sweat and tears went into that.”
With Jake, Dillaman credits the passions and expertise of his crew for making the calls he didn’t how to. “Our costume designer Jasmine Gibson is the perfect example,” he says. “That [costuming] is not something I ever think about when I watch films… but it has such an instant, intuitive effect on where you position characters… For next to no budget, she went out and crafted a whole wardrobe for these characters. And it fit in perfectly for the tone I was trying to create.”
Dillaman migrated to New Zealand from America in 2004, and remarks on the relative lack of an independent filmmaking tradition here. “America has a greater history of self-funding,” he says, citing the early films of Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, Darren Aronofsky and Richard Linklater as key fixtures in the narrative. Dillaman is thankful to have found like-minded collaborators in producer and Hybrid Motion co-founder Alastair Tye-Samson and producer Anoushka Klaus.
Tainui Tukiwaho as D and Jason Fitch as Jacob Photo: Jake The Movie
“You don’t sit around and wait for permission to make something. You make it,” he says. “I was single, had no house, had no life forms dependent on me, and I could spend all my money and go into credit card debt”. It’s hardly a sustainable model, he admits, but he says it was worth every step in order to realise his vision. “I’m glad I didn’t have to sit in front of anyone and hear I had to change anything to get funding. We might have made a film that was easier to shift units for, but I know I made the film I wanted to make.”
Samson and Klaus are currently developing features of their own and Dillaman is now working on his first novel at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters, but the release and promotion of Jake is still a sizable project with taxing demands of its own. “There’s just so much more work to filmmaking than being on a set and shooting something.”
But the payoff is imminent: Jake is currently screening at Auckland’s Academy Cinema, with a run at Wellington’s Paramount slated for July, and a VOD release planned for the remainder of the country later in the year. Dillaman says it couldn’t have happened without his crew and the Hybrid Motion family: “At the end of the day, a film called Jake would still have existed with different people filling the roles, but this film Jake wouldn’t have existed in this way, and I’m really proud of how it came out”.
This content is brought to you with funding support from New Zealand On Air.
