When most people hear the term “love affair,” they think of romance and interpersonal relationships. However, one can also have a calling, a devotion, to a ne plus ultra skill. In the movie Devotion, which is based on Adam Makos’s 2017 book of the same name, Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner have a euphoric relationship with the sky. These elite Navy pilots had values that extended to their craft of flying and encompassed their circumference of friends and loved ones.
Jesse Brown was the first Black pilot to complete the Navy’s aviation training program and despite discrimination, his valor and supreme aviation techniques helped him soar in the role of Navy pilot. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Purple Heart. Jonathan Majors is Jesse in J.D. Dillard’s Devotion, a sweeping Korean War epic that focuses on the friendship between two pilots. Majors plays Jesse with an unwavering assuredness. He lets roles envelop him. Jesse’s relationship with his wife Daisy, Christina Jackson, is the heart of the story and radiates out to the rest of the layers of the true story. She completes him. Glen Powell, who is no stranger to the skies, plays Tom Hudner. Powell was Hangman in this year’s blockbuster film Top Gun: Maverick. While he’s still in aviation territory in Devotion, he’s also in richer emotional territory.
Jake Crane
Devotion screenwriter Jake Crane spoke with us about writing the script and his writing partner Jonathan Stewart also joined us.
On Projects Before Devotion
Jake: We sold a number of scripts prior to this project, but had just never gotten across the goal line on any of those. This was the first script that we wrote together that has been made into a movie.
On Previous Period Pieces
Jake: We had sold a project that was a book adaptation to Sony Tristar, I believe. It was a book about Arthur Axmann, who was the head of the Hitler Youth. It was a cool non-fiction book about the person who stopped the Fourth Reich from happening, a guy named Jack Hunter. It was set in the 1940s, right after WWII. Then we also sold another plane crash movie, set in 1957. It was about a plane that crashed into Riker’s Island Prison and the female warden at the time decided to let out some prisoners to help in the rescue. Our script on The Black List was a Cold War 1980s political thriller about bioweapons which sadly is very timely now.
On Getting Attached to Devotion
Jake: This project came about because we had a script on The Black List I believe in 2015. It was a period piece. Then we got hired to do a couple of other period pieces for Sony. Our manager sent us the book. This book came to us when we were very tired of period pieces…! We knew the landscape of how hard they are to make, so we were hunting for a project we could get all the way there. But we were so captivated by the story that we decided to pitch on it, and we got hired to write it and we stayed through the process of it.
We had done some work for Black Label in the past. We met them generally at first and were kind of developing a project with them. I suppose they liked us in some way. My manager sent us the book. We read it over a weekend and kind of fell in love with it and decided we wanted to pitch on it and see if we could get hired to write it.
On Approaching a Script That Has Two Strong Protagonists
Jake: The project originated from Adam Makos, who wrote the book, but Glen Powell was reading the book and decided it would make a great movie. He’s the one that brought it to Black Label Media to have them option it. So, it was already coming in with Glen Powell attached to play Tom Hudner. Jonathan and I understood that so we knew we couldn’t just make the Jesse Brown movie even though Jesse’s a very compelling character. It’s a two-hander with a little bit of weight towards Jesse.
Jonathan Stewart
On the Benefits of Collaborating
Jonathan: Jake and I have worked together off and on for well over ten years. The benefits of collaborating are pretty clear, particularly with thrillers and certain plot things when you’re losing your marbles on a daily basis when you’re trying to keep a hold of all of the moving pieces of it. In this project, it really applied with the book, which is our initial touchstone, then we did research and spoke to as many people as we could. In terms of talking about the book and filleting it down to those core parts. Where to start Jesse in that journey, we had that discussion. Where do we meet him? We felt from day one that we should meet him at a state of excellence. The pinnacle of the collaboration for this was talking it through, before we even met with Black Label.
Jake: It’s great to have an initial editor. As a writer, you have all these great ideas and if you’re solo, you can get tricked into believing that they’re all good. When you have a writing partner, you get a chance to interrogate some of the initial ideas.
On Doing Research for Devotion
Jake: We spent a lot of time with the families of both Tom Hudner and Jesse Brown. We got to talk to Jesse’s daughter Pam and his brothers, who have sadly passed since. And his granddaughter, Jessica Knight Henry, who’s very instrumental in this whole process.
Jonathan: Adam Makos had met many relevant living survivors and we had technical advisors.
Jake: We want to do as much research as possible because then that gives us the broadest base from which to base the narrative script on. We got a chance to read Jesse and Daisy’s letters and Jesse’s book, where he wrote down all of the terrible things that happened to him. We got an intimate look at what happened to them, which was mostly brokered through Adam Makos. The supplemental things we were able to get from the families were important to the script.
Jonathan: With a true story, you’re limited in one sense by the truth. The payoff of that is that when doing research, you’ll dig up golden nuggets of truth. Imagination will never trump interesting truth. Also, when my parents ask what I’m doing, it feels like a proper job when you’re doing research…! It gives a sort of maturity to the process.
Jake: The structure of the movie is such that the scenes with Daisy and Jesse showed their robust relationship. There’s a sequence of them meeting…the first time they meet….and Jesse wooing her. There’s stuff from their relationship prior to arriving in Quonset that’s interesting and I discovered during research but just couldn’t fit into the two-hour time frame of the movie.
On Why This Book Was Ripe for Adaptation
Jake: The initial hook for me was when I read the book, I was anticipating it ending a certain way. I didn’t know the story of these two celebrated wingmen. When I got to what actually occurred, I think that presented a unique take on a war drama. It’s hard to be unexpected in this genre space.
Jonathan Majors (Jesse Brown) Photo courtesy of TGMG
On Making the Secondary Characters Distinct
Jonathan: In this case, there was a real richness to a whole variety of characters. In those first thirty-five minutes in the training camp, in the book you learn the individual backgrounds of these people. It’s a very ethical movie. Shows the “right” way to live. There’s the relationship between Brooklyn Jews, people who’d fought in WWII, and the men of German descent and at the heart of it is Jesse.
On Writing Period-Authentic Dialogue
Jake: I think we both favor simpler is better. You read the book, then you look at old movies and news footage that shows that people spoke a little differently than we do today, colloquially. In the research, you can come up with how they sounded and what sort of slang they used. I don’t worry about that so much as long as they don’t sound too modern.
On Writing Shorts vs Features
Jake: I find writing shorts actually harder in some ways because while you don’t have as many pages… my brain is very hard wired in three acts. In both of our cases, I think we write by an eight-sequence method. A short film for me is difficult because I don’t know how to beginning, middle, and end it. The idea has to be strong. I haven’t attempted to write a short in a very long time.
Jonathan: Many people start with shorts. I’ve made some that are very bad…! I’m here in London working on a limited series now and it’s like a long six-hour movie. A short film is like a poem. We worked on several shorts together that fomented our creative bonding. They were good for our working relationship and professional friendship but the output was another thing!
On Writing and Life Lessons Learned from Devotion
Jake: The writing lesson for us is that the writing process never stops. You can have a draft of the script that’s going to get people excited but that draft is going to go through so many changes. We had the good fortune of staying on until the end. We had the ability to work with J.D. We had the ability to run lines of dialogue with Jonathan Majors. You understand that you can’t be precious about your script. We’d both agree, and people would agree, we wrote a great first draft of the script but what that first draft was and what ultimately became the movie are two vastly different things because there are so many people who are involved in the process. As a writer, you have to be constantly prepared to edit, change and evolve and be open to change. To be ready and collaborative was the writing lesson for me.
Jonathan: To piggyback off that, my big lesson was… after we read the book, we had a shared vision of a tiny match flame of an idea. Everything has to change, as long as it’s consistent. The life lessons are the ethics of the story. Jesse was someone who walked the walk, he didn’t just talk the talk. He did what he said he was doing, and he influenced Tom to do the same.
Jake: Writing it at a time where we’re having a sophisticated conversation on race and hopefully making progress on that front, I think that’s an important part of the movie and the story. What initially attracted us and J.D. to it was that it wasn’t going to be this typical movie, a 1990s war movie updated. The scene between Christina and Glen at the end embodies the life lesson for me.
