Cinemax’s new pulpy crime drama Jett is set to premiere on June 14, but before that, Sebastian Gutierrez, the show’s creator, writer, and director spoke with Screen Rant about his love of pulpy novels and how that influenced him bringing this show to life. The series stars Carla Gugino as Daisy “Jett” Kowalski, a career criminal who is about to take on her final job, which, as those familiar with that sort of scenario can tell you, means it will be anything but her final job. The result is a gripping neo-noir series that also stars Giancarlo Esposito as a crime boss whose infatuated with Jett.
Gutierrez has a long list of films to his resume, including scripting duties on Gothika and The Eye, but he’s also written and directed a number of films like Women in Trouble and Elektra Luxx (starring Gugino), as well as the 2018 horror film Elizabeth Harvest. But Jett marks his first foray into television, and like many filmmakers who venture to the not-so small screen, they find a different sort of project ahead of them. And, like many filmmakers, Gutierrez likens the experience to filming a 9-hour movie.
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But Jett still works a piece of serialized television, albeit one that takes an unconventional and often exciting approach to how each episode unfolds. Here’s Sebastian Gutierrez discussing with Screen Rant his approach to Jett.
Tell me a little bit about how the project came about. How did you conceive this story and how did you know that it was better suited for a television series than a feature film?
How did you find making the transition from film to television? Was that easy for you? Did you have any challenges or any surprises that you were not expecting making that transition?
Jett has its origin as a feature film script. My favorite literature really are crime novels, and I’ve read a lot of them, my entire life. So, if I sit down in front of a blank computer and just feel like writing something, most likely that’s going to come out. My favorite thing is some sort of Nordic noir, Elmore Leonard-esque, sort of a playful crime thing where bad things happen, but it’s not necessarily dark and depressing. So, I had written about half of what in essence became the first episode of the series as a feature and suddenly I started looking around the TV landscape. And I thought, “Huh. You know. Interesting. Everything has moved into television and you can tell these character-driven stories in television.” I find like there’s really great male antiheroes, but there’s still a bit of a double standard with the female antihero, which it seems like, yes, women get to be bad-ass but they’re either relegated to a sort of Lady Macbeth manipulator thing or they have to be so socially awkward as to be almost like, you know what I call the daughters of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
And I thought, “If only we could have a character that would have been played by Clint Eastwood or Lee Marvin in the movie played by Carla. And by that I mean not taking on male qualities simply by being the protagonist, the pragmatic professional protagonists moving through a criminal underworld. So that’s really the origin of the idea. Then that that first episode is really… it really acts as a sort of true launch to the story proper. That being said, I had never done television before, it was really important to me that [Jett] not be like a crime-of-the-week show or a heist-of-the-week show or anything like that. It’s much more, which I think you start seeing that in episode two, but you’ll see this, as the series leaps forward, the sort of narrative clip is that last job that happens in the first episode that doesn’t quite go well. The fallout from it and every single character that we’ve met in that first episode, even characters that we thought were maybe just like a one line of dialogue character in the series become the main characters in it for the next nine episodes.
A lot of your past work is steeped in, like you said, in noir and there’s a certain, pulpy quality to it too that might be akin to what you were described as being Elmore Leonard-esque. Can you tell me a little bit about what draws you to that sort of storytelling and what ways you see Jett as being similar and different from the kinds of stories you’ve worked on previously?
You know, in this case it is not different at all. We made Jett exactly like a feature film, like a nine-hour feature film. While it’s true that I’ve never done a nine-hour feature film before, this was the exact process by which, you know loads of other independent films are made, so I had all the scripts written ahead of time and the actors had read all of them. And, and we didn’t shoot the scripts in order. We shot it just like you would in a the movie, based on locations and actors’ schedules. So the whole thing was one giant nine-hour movie. And then once we got into the editing room then I had to put them all in its actual order. It was pretty ambitious but the process itself was identical.
Let’s talk about the structure of the series and the episodes themself. Each episode is comprised of many moving parts and takes place in different moments in time. Is how you write the series different from how it’s put together? Is Jett on screen more or less how you see it on the page or do you assemble the episodes more during editing?
Well you know, I was born and raised in South America. So to me all American films, which is … let me backtrack… I vivaciously watched movies from a very young age from all countries, but the United States being a big world power and Hollywood being right next to it, a lot of American movies. So all of it is a little second language and foreign to me and I mean that in the best way. The stuff that I always gravitate to and why I like Elmore Leonard so much is because none of his characters will do the thing that they’re going to do unless there’s some fun involved with it. So maybe from social reasons, I guess if I was going to be borderline pretentious: when you grow up in the third world surrounded by what is basically social realism it can become like poverty porn, of watching people in hideous conditions and injustice after injustice.
That’s not what I want to make stories about. I’ve never been interested in movies that the premise is the world is horrible and you walk out at the end and the world is still horrible. You’re like, “Well, I knew it going in.” Like I need some sort of entertaining thing that lifts me up. And that may have come from leading a life that wasn’t so sheltered that I couldn’t imagine those horrible realities, you know? So, even though Jett takes place in the criminal underworld and the violence is real and it has consequences. It’s important to me that the comedy doesn’t necessarily come from the violence, that we actually showed that these things hurt and they’re not actually … that’s we’re not glamorizing violence. We are simply setting it … the reason why the crime world is such a great place to set a story is because you can tell big stories about loyalty and friendship and things in a very heightened way that you and I don’t get to experience in our day jobs.
That, I think, is somehow connected to growing up in the third world where there’s no guarantee of anything. There is no pension. There is no social security. There is no … none of that is real. Now, how it ties to stuff that I’ve done before and how it’s different. Look, I think it’s … I’ve been at my day job for a while, sort of writing or rewriting studio movies, and that’s a great day job to have. But I’m a very impatient person and so all I want to do is make movies. So for a moment there, I went and I made this teeny little like $50,000 movie called Women In Trouble and I shot it in 10 days and we had so much fun. We were like, “Let’s make another one. Then YouTube approached me and we’d make this other movie for $100,000 called Girl Walks Into A Bar and then they want to do another one. Suddenly I looked around, I was like, “Oh, no. People think that I want to make these weird fringe dialogue and character movies.” By character, I mean, we didn’t have even a set. There was no way of having anything visual. And I thought, “I need to remove myself and not go off and make a movie for a couple hundred grand, as fun as it is, and try and make a “real movie.”
And so I made this move the last year that I’m really proud of called Elizabeth Harvest which is a sci-fi take on Guinevere with Carla Gugino and Ciarán Hinds. And that was happening sort of at the same time that Jett, which had been doing the rounds for a couple of years, finally found a home atCinemax. It was a very deliberate decision to do things that were more cinematic because I love cinema. I’m like, no, let’s have some stuff where people aren’t necessarily talking all the time. Then you can have really composed shots and color saturation and that means something and you can create something that’s much less ramshackle than those little other films.
What sort of arc do you have planned for the series or do you have one at all? Is this something that you’ve created with a multi-season arc in mind?
In this case, in this particular case, pretty much what you see is exactly what was written. Now I don’t want to take credit and say, because I planned it so well, but I think there was a long enough gestation period to fit with the scripts and rhythm of the actors that we kind of knew. There’s very few things that changed. For the most part I’d say like 90% of it is exactly as written. Now going back and forth in time is something that’s built into this sort of crime storytelling. Noir has always been about how the past keeps crashing into the present and the future doesn’t look great because that one decision that’s supposed to save you or make you rich is probably your downfall.
So, the beauty of that, by the way, it is something that obviously Steve Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino, and many people have used brilliantly, that idea which I first read in Elmore Leonard book when I was like 12, was the fact that yeah, you and I are having this conversation that just ends this chapter. Then the next chapter starts with three years ago, Kevin was in blah blah blah. You’re like, “What? No. What was three years ago ?” The trick is to make that as exciting as what was happening before. And it really liberates you from having to fill your story with a bunch of exposition that you don’t need. So you’re allowed to just reveal the information when you need to reveal it. And it’s okay for the audience to be two steps behind. They’re going to catch up soon enough and it’s okay.
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To me that is the most daunting thing about television. We are in this golden age of television and at first I was really intimidated. I was like, “Man, you have to create entire world and go and pitch the thing.” Well, somebody told me something really simple, which I should have known, which was, “Don’t worry about creating worlds, just create a character you can follow in a bunch of different situations.” Right. And I was like, “Well that I could do. That I understand.” And then from that character, what happens? So the truth is I didn’t have a multi-season arc planned out because this was, like I said, made as a nine part movie. But, pretty soon into shooting the first season and seeing what was working, what wasn’t working, what was interesting, the second season became very clear. So, I can tell you that there’s a second season, and a third season story that I know what I want to do with them.
Jett premieres Friday, June 14 @10pm on Cinemax.
