So, a big part of my journey was to watch great movies and seek to learn. I remember seeing Pulp Fiction for the first time and walking out of the theater with my mouth wide open, thinking, Wow, there are no rules. That’s unquestionably a masterpiece. I even found spiritual truths in the film of darkness and light.
Another waypoint was when I came across an old proverb that says, “It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” When my dad and I started our company, Jenkins Entertainment, 25 years ago, the logo started dark, and then you hear the strike of a match, and then a candle is lit. The inspiration came from the feeling that we always complain about the darkness. We complain about the negative influence of Hollywood maybe, and we’re encouraged by lots of Christian voices to avoid it all. But what if instead of cursing the darkness, we lit a candle? What if we tried to utilize the storytelling strengths of great film?
I started to realize that the Bible actually tells one of the darkest storylines imaginable. And I thought, If you made a faithful movie about the Bible, it would be rated R. It has some of the most awful, horrifying stories and settings in history, and yet, would never be considered wrong by the church. So, it’s not the ratings per se, is it? It’s not the darkness that’s the problem. It’s a lack of light.
All these thoughts influenced me toward focusing on art not only as a career, but as a Christian calling. I decided to do my best to focus on making great art. Now, to be clear, I think that’s what a lot of Christians feel when they get into the arts. Especially college students today, for example, where getting into media entertainment is now considered by many to be a noble calling, an important calling. It’s much different than it was even a couple decades ago. A lot of them are like, I don’t want to be a Christian filmmaker. I just want to be a filmmaker who happens to be a Christian.
At one point during those years—about 2005 or so—I experienced one of the probably five times in my life when I most clearly felt the Lord speak to me. I was thinking through my career aspirations, and I remember the Lord laying it powerfully on my heart that the church deserves good stuff too. The takeaway was clear. I thought, Why are you trying so hard to be cool, trying so hard to almost apologize for explicitly Christian content, and trying to avoid doing it? The problem isn’t that there’s no Christian content, it’s that it’s just not very watchable. Why don’t you try to make good stuff but quit trying to shy away from the explicitness of the message?
I told my wife that I was feeling called out to be more unabashedly faith-filled in my storytelling. She was kind of embarrassed by that idea, and so was I. But that’s where I shifted.
That ultimately led to me doing the movie What If … in 2010, which was an unabashedly, explicitly faith-based message film. It turned out to be my best film up to that point, and the most successful. It was the most meaningful to people who weren’t believers, who just thought it was a good movie. And so that’s the time when I was like, You know what? Like my dad, I’m going to carve out my own space in this genre, or in this world, of media and arts. I’m not trying to be cute. I’m not trying to outsmart myself. I’m trying to tell stories and infuse truth there. I’m going to tell unabashedly Christian stories, and try to make them as good as I can, try to be the best filmmaker that I can with each project. All of this led me to a point where I’m not ashamed to be a filmmaker who is making stories of faith.
With that in mind, how do you view success and failure in your work?
Well, that changed a few years ago. For about the first 20 years of my career, I measured it the same way everyone else does. I wanted success at the box office, and I wanted to win an award. That was how I measured success.
So even though movies have to make money in order for you to be able to make more of them, I was never motivated by being wealthy. I wanted to make a living, and I wanted to be able to keep making movies, which is, in and of itself, very rare. To make a living making films is very difficult. Most people who try can’t do it, so that was the minimum that I sought, but I wasn’t seeking wealth.
But early on, I was motivated by affirmation, which comes from success at the box office and winning awards. And I think I justified that motivation by saying, “Well, if I do that, I can have more impact. Think of how cool it would be for a Christian project to be taken seriously by the world.”
That’s what excited me when I had the opportunity to make The Resurrection of Gavin Stone. I made the film in 2017, but its story goes back to 2010. That year I had decided to accept a job at Harvest Bible Chapel in Chicago. I moved from Los Angeles to Chicago with the understanding that I would be able to make movies using their resources. After filming, we would find distribution and get it out to the world. Ultimately a short film that I made for the church’s Christmas Eve service got into the hands of Jason Blum, a top producer in Hollywood, particularly of horror films. He was exactly the kind of guy that I would want information from and want to work with. His work has won multiple Academy Awards, and has been monstrously successful at the box office. He loved my short film and wanted to make a faith-based movie with me.
He got the script that I was developing, The Resurrection of Gavin Stone. His company liked it. It’s a long story, but it got into the hands of the WWE, the wrestling company. They liked it and wanted to finance it. And now I found myself in a situation where a horror film company, a wrestling company and a church were combining to make an explicitly faith-based film.
I got to make the film I wanted to make. Before we released it, it tested through the roof. Audiences were super excited about it. The team wanted to make more movies with me. We started planning it out: five faith-based movies over the next 10 years. We were going to forge a new path. And then the movie came out in theaters and completely bombed. It was lower than our lowest projections. They all pulled out of future projects, and I was left with nothing.
It’s a story that’s on the internet and easy to find—I tell it a lot—but this led to one of the other times that God spoke very explicitly to my wife and me. He pointed us to the story of the feeding of the 5,000. I read that, and then someone randomly out of the blue from across the world, whom I’d never met, reached out. They said that God had told them to tell me—again, that same day that we were reading that story—“Dallas, it’s not your job to feed the 5,000; it’s only to provide the loaves and fish.”
In that moment, everything changed. That’s when I had my definition of success dramatically redefined. You know, I wish it could have happened earlier, but I went from someone who did feel responsible for “successful” results, and measured success by whether the 5,000 were fed, to someone who simply cared about if I were giving God everything that I had. That box office failure brought me to a place where I was truly only measuring success by whether God was pleased.