Jettison

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.

CREW
Written/Directed/Edited – JJ Pollack
Producers – Cassie Wineland, Carrie Cates
Cinematographer – Garson Ormiston
1st AC – Keaton Loudamy
2nd AC – Sean Stephens
Gaffer – Isaiah Rendon
Key Grip – Jordan Spayd
Grips – Austin Wells, Austin Vaught, Tomas D’Amico, Sean Craig, Randy Ray Adams
Script Supervisor – Spencer Mirabal
PAs – Mia Garza, Bailey Savage, Duncan Meece
Production Sound Mixer – David Gutierrez
Boom Operators – Ben Marchi-Hilton, Siegen Bretzke
Utility Sound Technician – Frank Gutierrez
Set Decorator/Prop Master – Steven Martinez
Prop Fabricator – Martin Drake
Art Crew – Jeff Baugh, Jennifer Costa
Costumer – Della Price
Makeup – Anna Makar
Sound Design – Hansdale Hsu
VFX – JJ Pollack, Colton Maddox
Colorist – Alex Winker
Music – Alex Cap

CAST
Rebka – Madison Wilson
Ellie – Jamie G. Vaught
Mom – Beth Puorro
Dad – Christopher Winbush
Technician – Austin Wells
Mandella – Zachary T. Scott
Ives – Lauren Bonetti
Stilwell – John Valley
Seargent – Joseph Stellitano
Officer – Richard Blake
Nurse – Mia Garza
Messenger – Victor Vandell
Tom – Clem Beard
Mary – Wanda Sanchez
Recruit #1 – Chiara McCarty
Recruit #2 – Liam Booth
Transport Announcer – Zach Bachand
Officer (Voice) – Brian Villalobos

EXTRAS
Arlene Cavazos, Sydney Cooper, Caleb Craig, Maria Luisa Cullen, David De Leon, Sandy Dutchak, Miguel Gonzalez-Floyd, Zara Majidpour, Jorge Mata, Ryan Milton, Amy Nichols, Alisa Salikhov, Anton Savenko, Atif Shahnawaz, Annie Shortt, Jonathan Smith, Malcolm Thomas, Breona Watson

To me, a director’s job boils down to hiring and guiding the right set of cast and crew for a project, and unifying all their work into the most effective aesthetic vision possible. Put simpler: find people who’re really good at their jobs, cut ‘em loose, and bring it all back together in the end.

So with that in mind, I set out to write the script in 2017, just in time to secure partial funding from the Other Worlds Film Festival’s O’Bannon Grant. Cassie Wineland and Carrie Cates were attached as producers, and after the usual pre-production preparations and some not-so-minor bumps along the road with costuming, shooting happened over four days on two weekends in April 2018, mostly in Austin with one day along the Texas Gulf Coast. David Gutierrez oversaw sound recording at our slew of noisy locations (certainly no easy task!), and Garson Ormiston captured some stunning visuals as cinematographer, as well as the brilliant performances of our lead, Madison Wilson, and supporting actors Lauren Bonetti and Zachary T. Scott.

Due to a backlog of projects I needed to finish editing, plus the usual Covid-related delays, post production took much longer than we would’ve liked. But eventually we got it across the finish line in May 2021, with post-sound mixing & design by Hansdale Hsu, beautiful monochrome coloring by Alex Winker, and wonderfully haunting music by Alex Cap, all of whom I’ve worked with previously and completely trust to produce quality work.

I like to think of Jettison as a war movie without the war, in that instead of showing the usual gory horrors of combat itself, we wanted to depict the experience as a slower and more existential kind of death, and more subtly capture the feeling of alienation that many veterans experience when sent overseas. By using the scientific phenomenon of time dilation, my goal was that viewers would ask themselves how the fictional soldiers of the film could possibly cope with a conflict of this magnitude and time scale, and reflect on the conditions of their real-world counterparts as a result. Hopefully the film was able to accomplish that!

– JJ Pollack