THE METER’S RUNNING // An interview with the writer/director/star of Take Me Home Sam Jaeger
Once and awhile, a film comes out of nowhere and knocks your socks off. It doesn’t have $20 million dollar stars or a huge budget and a giant summer release. What it does have is a great cast of actors, a surprising script, and a lot of heart. From Once, Me You and Everyone We Know, Junebug, and Center Stage movies like these have shook us with their originality and cleverness, forcing us to pay attention (I’m kidding about one of those movies. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which one).
This summer I saw one such film called Take Me Home. It was a simple story about a woman named Claire (Amber Jaeger) who, after a traumatic event, hops in a cab and insists that he just keep on driving. What unfolds is a touching, funny, and refreshingly original comedy/drama that both reminds us of classic films while bringing in something new at the same time. Writer/Director Sam Jaeger (currently seen playing Joel Graham on NBC’s hit drama Parenthood) has created a down to earth, extremely accessible film that is funny without every trying to be funny and heartwarming without ever becoming cheesy. He also stars in the film as Thom, the would-be cab driver who takes Claire across the country and delivers a top notch, hilarious performance. Take Me Home has played in film festival after film festival this year, starting in Nashville to its upcoming appearances in the Boston and Savannah fests and between his very busy schedule, I was able to sit down with Sam and ask him a few questions regarding the film and his unique process towards making it.
MATEO MORENO: Where exactly did the idea for the film come from? 
SAM JAEGER: The idea came out of two things. On the initial drive I took when I moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, I felt like the country laid out a pretty perfect story. You have the excitement of Manhattan and NYC, and then you head west and get into the heart of the story, which was kind of our second act, where we learn more about the characters in the Midwest. The characters and their relationship, plus their sort of antagonism of one another just come to a head in the desert. Never having seen the country I just felt like it was a beautiful story, the entire continent itself. The second part of that was I was writing a musical with the guy who actually wrote the music for Take Me Home (Jordan Beckett) and it was a very heady, difficult to explain project. I realized that I wanted something I could explain simply to people. The idea of a woman getting into a cab heading west was about as easy as it could get for me. I like having the freedom to have a simple project but you can go so many different ways within in, having this big huge canvas called The United States and being able to kind of paint anywhere in it.
MM: What was the shooting schedule like?
SJ: I was trying to make it for a couple of years and then Jane Kosek (one of the producers) came on board and said, “You know, we can do this movie for next to nothing. We just have to say this is what it’s going to cost and make it work.” When we did the initial shoot, we took a month in, I guess it was 2008, where we actually drove across country and then we did the next shoot with all the other actors beyond me and my wife in 2009 and we shot that predominantly in LA. So it took 2 major shoots of about 17 days each and then we had about 3 separate weekends where we went and picked up little chunks along the way. So it was a long, long process. Thankfully I made the choice to hire young guys who weren’t married or had kids and had the free time and the passion to make it happen and actually happened to be very talented to boot.
MM: Now the role of Claire was played by your wife, Amber Jaeger. Did you write this as a project for you guys to do together?
SJ: Yeah, I wrote this movie for Amber. I initially wrote it thinking that I’d write this in three months and we’ll shoot in one weekend and maybe take a week to shoot with a small crew. The first draft was pretty simple. Thankfully I spent another year and a half rewriting it to the point where it included a lot more characters and so forth. I think that very few actresses could pull off that role as effectively, so I set out to make it with her in mind and I’m glad I did.
MM: Is this the first time you’ve worked together, and how is that dynamic? 
SJ: You know it was different from other experiences because there was so much stress involved with traveling across the country. That was a really hard shoot, I think, for our relationship. There are very few women who would be able to put up with what I put her through. And the fact that we’re still married is a testament to either the fact that we love each other unconditionally or we got to shoot the next year under better terms. (Laughs) I remember there was a scene where she was crawling through the forest on her knees, picking up makeup and the stuff that she’s thrown out of her purse. Well, we knew that there was Poison Ivy there, or likely Poison Ivy and I had someone go get knew high socks for the entire crew. And I said, “Well honey, you don’t have socks in this scene so you’re just gonna have to grin and bare it and we’ll deal with it later.” Well, she got Poison Ivy so bad that by the time we got out to shooting Utah virtually her face was unshootable. She had gotten it on her face and her arms, her legs and was in so much pain. It’s just a small example of the toils that I put her through. It was pretty wild. I’ve known her since college. We both got a BFA in theatre from this liberal arts college called Otterbein College in Ohio and I had always a profound respect for her, this girl who could always “bring it,” who had a lot of depth. I think that’s a rare trait to have.
MM: There are several familiar faces, like Victor Garber and Cristine Rose that pop up throughout the film. Did you know them prior to making the film? How did they come aboard? 
SJ: You know, Cristine I didn’t know and Lin Shaye I didn’t really know. Our casting directors Meg Morman and Sunday Boling had put out offers to these ladies shortly before we started shooting. What’s amazing is I hadn’t seen either one of them read one line from the film when they came to do the work but sometimes you really luck out in filmmaking. Not only do they both look like Amber and I they just so fully embodied those characters and brought so much more. As a writer you always hope that you can have an actor come and bring that much more to it than what is on the page. Victor Garber is a longtime friend of mine. We did a show called Eli Stone and I basically begged him to do it and out of his kind heart he did. I think having that sophistication and kind of solemn menace that Victor often brings to roles fit really well to the father of Thom. You can kind of see why Thom may have hid so many of his failings from his parents because they do seem so successful and Christine and Victor just kind of gave you that sense of true sophistication and kind of country club confidence that we needed.
MM: So the movie itself, it feels very natural, never feeling forced. How much was scripted versus improvised?
SJ: Very little was improvised. A couple lines were thrown off here and there. Lin Shaye was never short on words; that’s one of her great gifts. If anyone took liberties it was probably me. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to think the best way to use these words and what a phrase conveys versus another phrase but I had so many jobs on the road that when I got out there it was just sometimes about making it feel lived in. Again I think it’s a testament to good acting; they make it all feel improvised.
MM: Did you rewrite at all around different scenarios that you found? 
SJ: We didn’t write around scenarios we found, we wrote around restrictions. I think one of the luxuries, if there are any luxuries in independent filmmaking, is that you have confinements. Extreme confinements and it’s up to you to accommodate your vision to those confinements. Two months before we started shooting, we were still looking for an airplane hanger and the whole plan was Claire has her realization about her regrets on a plane and we had contacted an air strip in Van Nuys but literally we couldn’t find money for it. So I said, “Well okay, it’s just too expensive to work. It would have been great production value but is there a better way or equally strong way to tell this story.” And I thought of her getting into another taxi cab that’s not the one we’ve come to know and love, hopefully, by the end of this movie. Restrictions like that can inspire, kind of raise the bar as far as the significance of the storyline. Everyday when we were on the road trip we were behind schedule so I would literally pull off the road, spot some hillside next to a barn and we went up into that hill and hope we don’t get arrested. It was a happy mix of stealing locations and using permits in the places that you need permits.
MM: This is your first feature, but you’ve worked on short films before, three in fact…
SJ: Yeah I had wrote and produced Advantage Heart, which was a short film starring Kate Bosworth and I had done a movie before that called Quiz Bowl. Then I kind of prepped myself for the directing, which I had never done (with) a short film called Untold, which was an adaptation of a chapter of this classic novel called Winesburg Ohio that was written back in 1919. I learned quite a bit along the way about what was necessary in the film and what was unnecessary when we got to editing it.
MM: Did you feel that really prepped you having those three short films heading into a feature?
SJ: I think it was all a solid build up. By that time I had written maybe about three other screenplays before Take Me Home. I think the greatest preparation, other than when it came to do whatever job I had to do, I’d really try and do my homework. So if it’s directing I read several cinematography books and different approaches on directing from various filmmakers. The most preparation I think I had was I’ve been writing movies since high school, if I really think back on it. Across the board as a filmmaker, confidence is key so if you can sell people on your idea and justify everything in your screenplay then it’s easier to convey that image and that message to your actors and crew. I think one of my attributes is I often consider ever angle to a subject. I was thankful that I had already made up my mind about a lot of the aspects of the film by the time we started shooting.
MM: Is the plan to go from festival to festival while seeking out distribution deals?
SJ: Yeah, you know the festivals are helping get the word out for it. We’ve had some interest from reviewers and critics about when the movie’s going to premiere in their cities and the hope is that we do find some distribution based on good reviews and so forth because I feel like it’s a movie worth it’s time. I feel like people watch it and don’t regret their 95 minutes. I think the quest now is to help this movie find its audience, however we can do that. I’m willing to go to those lengths, especially knowing how long it took to get it made.
MM: Do you have projects coming up? Obviously you have the next season of Parenthood…
SJ: The next project I’m working on personally is I’m writing another screenplay to be shot in Nashville this coming summer. It’s kind of in the same build as Take Me Home. I guess you would call it a dramedy where there are a lot of fun, magical moments to it but it has some real depth and heart. I’m just kind of seeing where that takes me.
Take Me Home Starring Amber Jaeger, Sam Jaeger, Lin Shaye, Bree Turner, Cristine Rose, Victor Garber. Written and Directed by Sam Jaeger.
You can see Take Me Home as it plays at a film festival near you very, very soon! Next up on the plate is The Boston Film Festival, followed by the Savannah Film Festival, and then The Napa Valley Film Festival. Watch the official trailer below and you can get a full schedule of upcoming festivals, behind the scenes pictures, and constant updates on the official sites for Take Me Home, listed below! We’ll also be following its chart to success right here as well, on BVEW!
OFFICIAL SITE: http://www.takemehomemovie.com/
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/takemehomemovie?ref=nf