Self Reliance, Jake Johnson’s film directorial debut, is 90 minutes long for a simple reason: Anything longer is tough for him to watch. “I know it’s not a great trait, to have a short attention span,” he tells Consequence. “It’s a bad one, but I’m like, but I have it. I just know, as a fact, that I’m not seeing these three-hour movies. I know a lot of people are, and I know that a lot of people are celebrating them. But I’m not watching them. They’re too long for me.”
Thus, he says, “The goal for me was a fun 90-minute movie. Hopefully, you don’t stop and look at your phone a few times.”
Premiering today on Hulu, Self Reliance (also written by Johnson) features the New Girl and Minx star as Tommy, an ordinary man whose life changes when Andy Samberg (playing himself) rolls up in a limo with an offer: Participate in an underground reality show where he’ll be hunted for sport; if he survives for 30 days, he’ll win $1 million. Tommy agrees to play because of one key rule — the Hunters can’t attack him if he’s within arm’s reach of another human being. How hard can it be to stay in constant contact with other people? Harder than Tommy expects, is the answer.
The film also stars Anna Kendrick, Natalie Morales, Mary Holland, Emily Hampshire, Christopher Lloyd, GaTa, and Biff Wiff. While Johnson says he doesn’t want to create “lessons” with his work, it’s a premise with baked-in themes about loneliness and how we might all be feeling differently about isolation, following the onset of COVID-19. Below, Johnson explores how that came together, why he originally conceived of Self Reliance as a limited series, and why he wants to return to television.
To start off, talk about the development of this idea — at what point did this start feeling less like a collection of ideas and more like a story to you?
Originally it was written as a limited series, and so it was broken up in my head in terms of episodic ideas and dialogue ideas. I kind of knew what I wanted to do, and then during the pandemic, I decided to try to put it all into a feature. The beginning of it was just putting everything together and having like that 150-page mess of a script and then slowly figuring out what I no longer needed. So trimming it down and trimming it down and trying to get like a centralized story and then, you know, seeing if I could just make a movie out of that.
What initially made you interested in doing it as a limited series?
I love limited series. I love television. I love episodes ending. I love knowing there’s 18 episodes of something, I love the structure. I just love TV more than movies. It’s like, I know movies are cooler, but I just like TV better. In TV, there’s just more freedom. You could go, like, what we need is backstory, so you could do one episode that’s set 10 years before. I’m sure some people could figure out how to do that kind of stuff in a movie structure. I can’t. So for a movie, I’m telling a centralized story. It’s building, it’s peaking, it’s a three act structure.
And also with TV, you could have staff writers, you could have guest directors, all that stuff. Like, I would’ve loved to direct the pilot [of a Self Reliance series], and then have a lot of other people come in and direct some episodes.
In your original plan, did you have a flashback episode idea?
No, I didn’t. But I had multiple seasons planned out, and different kind of arcs. The way the movie ends was the end of Season 1. Season 2, I wanted Tommy to go on a press tour for it — I wanted to create a whole fake press world for it, where he’s now selling this thing and the Hunters are there, but everybody’s celebrating, and he starts feeling like something’s off. Everyone tells him he’s being paranoid, enjoy his roses, but he’s like, “I feel like something’s fishy.” And then he breaks free from the press tour because he’s thinks he’s still playing. I wanted to see if I could keep heightening stuff like that.
That’s such an interesting element of the film, that part of it would just be about Tommy trying to convince people that this is really happening to him. What do you feel like that gave you as a storyteller?
Well, I think it’s always funny when one person sees an absolute truth and no one around him does. I like that type of comedy. This really became serious for me during the pandemic, when I would go down a rabbit hole of information and start to believe something, and call a dear friend and go, “I have an interesting thing I was reading.” They would go, “You sound like a nut.” And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I know, but you sound like a nut too.’ And then you realize, everybody sounded like a nut to everybody.
Yeah, I feel like right now we’re in this place where a lot of people want to tell stories about the pandemic, but there’s a hesitation about address it directly. So everyone’s finding new ways to talk about the kinds of things that happened.
Yes. I think that’s exactly right. Because just doing a pandemic thing seems like a bore. I also am so tired of everybody teaching lessons with entertainment. I don’t want lessons. I’m like, just entertain, have a fun story. And if you happen to see a lesson in it, great. But for me, I really wanted this movie to be about entertainment. I wanted a lot happening, a lot of twists, a lot of turns.
What I mean by lessons is I don’t want to make something that says, like, “This is my view on this. And you guys should follow my view, and if you don’t follow my view, I’m not making this for you, because this view is correct, and this is for this type of person.” I feel like that’s getting to a place that’s starting to bug me.
But there are always going to be themes in movies, though, and the themes matter to me. This is definitely a movie about loneliness — it’s a movie about how much better things are when you’re with people. And those people can be unexpected.
Self Reliance (Hulu)
So I feel like there’s a line you can draw between Tommy and New Girl’s Nick Miller and even, you know, Peter B. Parker — I mean, you can call it a Jake Johnson-ish-ness. Do you feel like you were leaning into that for this film?
Not consciously, but I do know that there’s a tone in which I like to perform. And I’ve been doing it since I was probably 19, when I first started getting on stage and doing shows. When I used to do sketch, I used to do a wide variety of characters, and when I first started acting, like, I played a tough guy in a David Mamet movie and I played like a killer in Lie to Me, some procedural TV show — I really thought that was the goal, to disappear into each role.
And then as I started getting more and more parts, I started finding, well, this is what I like to do and this is what audiences like to see. And I thought, great. If audiences get bored of seeing it and I get bored of doing it, then we’ll make a change. But I’m not, and there’s a certain thing that’s been enjoyable and seems very clean.
So for a movie like this, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking of ways to make Tommy unique. I did spend a lot of time trying to think about the whole world and other characters and how these characters all work together and the overall tone. And then within it, I’m like, “I need it to be funny and this is a way I know how to get some laughs,” rather than being like, “Tommy is gonna be an English butcher.” I don’t know how to guarantee laughs with that.
Plus, you’d have to learn an accent.
And I’m bad at accents. It just would’ve been dogshit. [Laughs.]
Before we finish, I want to ask — looking forward, what are you excited about right now? Like, what are you looking to do next?
I’m really phase-y, so whatever I’m in is the thing I’m most excited about. So right now I’m doing a podcast called We Are Here to Help — it’s a call-in advice show where people call in and we give the best advice we can, but we do not promise it’s good advice. And we only take calls that are trivial problems, that are ridiculous, and it’s just been so much fun.
And then what I really hope happens is somebody comes along with a great script for a pilot and a great character. I’d like to do TV again. If it’s a movie, it’s just tricky because it’s gotta be in L.A. — I’m not looking to go to like Sweden for nine months to play a chef. I want to be home. I got kids. So it has to all line up. Whatever that is, I have no idea, but it’s got to be the right people, the right project, and it’s gotta be local.
I am really sad that that doesn’t sound like it’s going to be the third season of Minx.
I know, it sucks. I loved that. That was such a fun show. I thought [creator Ellen Rapoport] had such a great handle on the world. The cast was so talented and nice. The crew was on fire — D.P. Blake McClure’s work this season, it was so pretty. I really, really wanted to see what was gonna happen with Doug. But, hey man, that’s 2023.
Self Reliance is streaming now on Hulu.