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.
