What’s it like to spend a day with the producer of Mission: Impossible? In my experience, it included listening to Tegan and Sara in the car, buying ice cream at Purity, having brunch at the State Diner, and lots and lots of puns. After all, he is my uncle. I was lucky enough to drive around Ithaca with Jake Myers ’91 and his family this summer, talking about his experiences back in high school as well as his current job.
During high school, Jake Myers was a self-proclaimed “jock by day, AV nerd by weekend.” He was a wrestler at IHS and produced a cable access television show with his friends, claiming that the show was a better film school than NYU. He wrote an article for the former IHS Press and remarked that the current name for the paper sounded like a little “whistleblower.” Today, Myers has produced high-profile films including Interstellar (2014), The Revenant (2015), Dunkirk (2017), and most recently, Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018). His upcoming movie is the seventh installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise, which comes out in 2021.
Sitting across from him in one of the armchairs in my grandparents’ living room, I recounted what had happened earlier that day. I had watched Titanic with his wife Kea and one of his children, learning that they were both a lot more down-to-earth than I had anticipated. The rest of his children were fun as well, splashing around Buttermilk Falls with big, dimpled smiles. He had pointed out his childhood home, and I took myself back to the Ithaca he grew up in. I imagined the TV program he and his friends produced as teenagers, their classes at school, and IHS itself, which his father graduated from in 1958 when it was still in the DeWitt Mall. I laughed out loud when, over brunch, our grandmother wondered if Jake’s kid and I were talking about Monet instead of Monáe.
Raia Gutman ’22: First question: could you describe your job?
Jake Myers: Could I describe my job? My job is to put together the logistics and plans for how to turn a movie from a script into a final product. But mostly I spend all the money. I take money from a rich company and have to not spend too much or too little but exactly what they give me.
RG: Okay. What is the weirdest thing you’ve ever done for your job?
JM: Every day there’s a weird thing . . . You become an expert in all kinds of random things, whether that is what it takes to pilot a helicopter, whether it’s the science of traveling to outer space, or the logistics of moving a piece of equipment and/or set over a mountain or onto a glacier, or the weather patterns of some part of the world that you have not been to . . . I always find it weird when you’re doing . . . something very casual: you’re eating your lunch on a plate on somebody’s stoop in a city where you would never be doing that if there was no movie set around. Or maybe you’re in the middle of nowhere in a field and everyone’s talking, gathering, having a water cooler type conversation, in some environment that’s completely foreign to a workplace but treating it like it’s the office.
RG: Do you feel there is a meaningful difference between franchise films and original films? Do you think there’s any obligation to create art over more empty movies?
JM: Well, that’s a judgmental question because it implies that franchise films are empty on some level, but I would say that I understand the equation. I personally prefer original content because it has some more power to make [than] original content and to make things people haven’t seen before. But you can do things in franchise films that are also new. When we’re making a film like Dunkirk, it’s an original piece, and we’re putting something to the screen that people haven’t seen before, but also war movies are quite common, so in a way, you’re doing something that has been done before. In the case of making Mission: Impossible, the conversation of “we want to do something that’s never been seen on film or that nobody’s ever done before” happens every day. That’s a very driving factor in making those films, so ultimately you actually have the same drive to do something new even in a franchise film, at least for me, and I can’t speak for what it’s like in Fast and Furious. I do think it’s important to try to make financially viable original content because it shows the financiers in the movie business that we can make movies that are meaningful and have them make money. But on the second part of the question, although film is an art form, like painting or writing or anything, it exists in this country as a business, and so all of these are commercial endeavors. It’s really finding a marriage between artistic endeavor and commercial viability that is the producer’s job at its core. We don’t get to make them if they’re just artistic, at least in the financial model that the film industry is based on.
RG: And, finally, what are some of your favorite films?
JM: Well, I always say that The Best Years of Our Lives is my number one favorite film, but it could be anything. I love Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, Hitchcock is a big favorite . . . I like an eclectic group of films. Everybody has their own taste. There were great movies that were made in my generation.