A Little More Grace

He built stop-motion movies out of his Legos, talked his parents into buying him a green screen, and spent his spare hours taking films apart, studying behind-the-scenes breakdowns and writing his own short stories in middle school, absorbing the craft long before he had a name for what he was doing.

The turn

The shift came during his sophomore year of high school, when he began asking himself the real question of what he wanted to do with his life. Acting had started to lose its hold on him, and while he still loved it, he no longer felt the pull in his chest that tells you to chase something for good. What he did feel that pull toward was everything surrounding the acting, the depth of his love for movies and his own long history with storytelling, editing, and a stack of gloriously bad short films. Filmmaking, he realized, was the thing, and since that year he has not let a single day pass without thinking about it, a claim he makes as a plain fact rather than a flourish.

A five-day film challenge through Cleveland State University's Odyssey Program last summer settled the matter for good, because he came away from it with people he loved working beside and a short film he is proud of, How To Survive A Card Game. He has been making his own films and social content steadily ever since, with film school squarely in his sights the moment he graduates.

Talk To Trees

Earlier this month Jackson made what he calls his first real short film, and he built it the way real productions get built: he wrote his own script, found a cast of actors he trusts, drafted his friends into a crew, and got to work. It follows a teenager named Willow whose attachment to a single tree in a local park runs strangely deep, until the day she learns the tree is scheduled for removal and her whole world comes down with it. He guards the ending far too carefully to say any more. Releasing in July.

What he loves

Jackson believes one of the fastest ways to understand a person is to look at the films they love, and he offers his current Letterboxd top four without much explanation, leaving what it says about him for you to decide: The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Booksmart, Begin Again, and Eternity. As a storyteller he is pulled hardest toward the real and the down to earth, the human-sized stories, and while he happily admits to loving Mission Impossible and the Marvel films, it is movies like Past Lives and Lady Bird that move him most and shape what he wants to make.

Why he makes it

His reason for doing any of this is refreshingly clear. He wants to tell stories from the heart and to hand audiences a perspective they did not walk in with, because he believes film is one of the most effective ways a person can learn empathy, setting you down inside a character you might not understand until you have lived through their whole story alongside them. That is the entire goal for him, to leave a viewer with a slightly new approach to life and a feel for how much nuance runs through the world, and to make the case, one film at a time, that all of us could stand to give each other a little more grace.