CR 046: Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank on Balancing Life, Love, and Many Creative Projects
The acting-writing-producing-directing duo discusses their latest film, “Brooklyn, Minnesota.”
For 25 years, Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank have been partners in life as well as work. Not ones to shy away from a challenge, the multi-hyphenate creatives have made a career out of bringing powerful, human-centered stories to the stage and screen. Together, they’ve traveled to Jordan to interview Iraqi refugees for their off-Broadway play Aftermath, worked with Grammy Award winner Steve Earle on their 2020 docu-play Coal Country, and during the pandemic created The Line, a play crafted from interviews with first responders that was streamed through The Public Theater’s YouTube channel. In addition to their theatrical projects, they’ve worked in film and television, bringing their own productions to the screen while also acting in various series. (Erik has had roles in The Walking Dead, Mr. Robot, and The Americans, and Jessica has appeared in Made in Jersey, Ramy, and Blue Bloods, among others.)
Still, none of their hard work or experience could have prepared them for the events of 2023. The couple had just completed production on their second feature film, Brooklyn, Minnesota, when Erik was diagnosed with Stage 4 colorectal cancer. Rather than put the project on hold, they decided to forge ahead with editing the film—something Jessica says was crucial to Erik’s healing.
“Knowing my husband and having been his creative partner for 25 years, this is a guy that needs to be making things at all times. So it was an enormous gift to have this project to work with and to be in the particular phase of production that we were in. The edit and post were manageable during cancer treatment; production might not have been. So to be in that phase of the process and have a project that he could really pour his heart into, I think made the treatment a lot easier to get through.”
Brooklyn, Minnesota, which is currently screening in film festivals, stars Erik alongside the couple’s daughter, Sadie Jensen-Blank, in her film debut. Co-written and co-directed by Erik and Jessica, the film tells the story of a headstrong teenager who travels with her single dad from Brooklyn to Minnesota to attend the funeral of the grandfather she never knew. A story of family and forgiveness, it’s one that Erik says is desperately needed during these fractured times.
“I cannot tell you how many people have come up to me who are thirsty for this kind of film,” he says. “I really think people are thirsty for a human story about connection and about people coming together when things are so split in the country. That kind of film gives people hope. I won’t speak to whether it’s healing or not, but the number of people who came to me and said, ‘We miss films like this. We want films like this. We’re bored with the other thing,’ I personally believe we’re fortunate enough to be part of the tip of the spear of this kind of filmmaking.”
I recently spoke with Erik and Jessica about the film, directing their daughter in her first film role, and how they choose their many creative projects.
SANDRA EBEJER: Erik’s cancer diagnosis came as you were making this film. How did your work help you to navigate such a difficult time?
ERIK JENSEN: I didn’t find out until a day or two after we were done filming, so I was grateful to be able to do something with my daughter that’s indelible. You can’t erase it. We got to spend time together and act together. It was wonderful. During the editing process, it gave me the perspective of, what if this is the last piece of art I ever make? I really better pay attention. So I’d go to the hospital, I’d do chemo, I’d come home, I’d sit in the editing chair with a couple of blankets over me, and Jess and I, as usual, would make editing decisions together, along with our editors. I think there was more care put into the editing process. We went for the heart of the movie rather than the funny. We were really going for character motivation and the heart of things because it could have been the last picture I ever made.
JESSICA BLANK: It was definitely a giant whiplash kind of scenario, to land from this extraordinary production experience we had, not only with our daughter, but with our crew and our whole team, and then get a diagnosis. I remember bringing our producing partner and an editor over to share the news and our producing partner was like, “Well, of course, the movie is on hold. Nothing matters except getting you well. What do we need to do to change the schedule?” And Erik was like, “Oh, no. Actually, more than anything we need to keep going with this movie.”
Our team came together around us in a beautiful way. Our editor moved his rig into our office space so that we could work downstairs, and Erik could rest if he needed to. Luckily, we had already established that sense of family and care around the whole creative process of making the film. But I think our team really got on board with, this is what we’re doing, and it might not be as much of a churn-out-the-production deadlines factory as it normally would be. There’s some flexibility and grace involved in editing a feature film when you’re in super intensive chemotherapy and then doing the rest of post while recovering from a very major surgery. But we did it.
How did Brooklyn, Minnesota come about?
JESSICA: We both have Minnesota roots. Erik grew up in Minnesota. I grew up on the east coast but went to Minneapolis-St. Paul for college. It’s a place both of us really love. We were on vacation with friends who also have some Minnesota connections. Our friend Han Shan is best friends with two guys that run a commercial and documentary production company in Minneapolis, and we were all standing around talking about how we wished we had a project that would bring us back to Minneapolis, so we could make something there.
At the same time, our daughter, Sadie, who has grown up on sets and in rehearsal rooms with us and previously had always been like, “This is your thing. I’m not really interested in acting,” had had an audition for a major television franchise. She didn’t get it, but she came out of that experience being like, “This is interesting. I’d like to try it.”
So, Erik and Han went on this hike, and they came back three hours later with the whole story of the movie downloaded. Happened to have a central role for Sadie in it, but it wasn’t conceptualized as a way to create a role for her. It just came out that way organically. They pitched it to me, and I was like, “That’s a great movie. Let’s write it together.” And I said, “Sadie is only going to be 13 once, so if we’re going to do this, we’ve got to be in production a year from now in Minnesota.” And so we dove in. We cranked out a script in about six weeks and then got going, raising the money. During that process, I brought on Michael Cuomo, our producing partner, who is now a new creative partner. He’s working on several other projects with us. And we went from there, and were, in fact, in production in Minneapolis a year from the time we got the idea.
Sadie is fantastic in the film, especially given that this is her debut role. She’s acting in many scenes opposite Amy Madigan, who is an Academy Award-nominated veteran actor. What was it like to direct your daughter, a relative newcomer, alongside someone like Amy?
ERIK: I was nervous to work with Amy at first. Not by reputation. She has a stellar reputation. I was just nervous for myself. As a co-director, would I be able to convey what we needed for the scenes to work? And the answer was, she was so beautifully connected to the part, there were very few disagreements on set about what direction we were going. Also, Jessica and I go out of our way to create a safe environment where all ideas are viable, so everything is open to discussion. But even when Amy would disagree with us, I was watching Sadie observe Amy and how Amy managed herself professionally on set. And before I knew it, Sadie knew everybody’s name. She knew what everybody’s job was. She said please and thank you. She said good morning at the beginning of the day and thank you at wrap. She mimicked this off of Amy. And these are the essential things when you’re number one on the call sheet. These are the essential things to lead a crew and a cast. You set the example. I’ve been on plenty of sets where that number one is not setting that example, and it’s a poisonous atmosphere, and so we encouraged that in her.
And I watched my daughter learn screen acting from an Oscar nominee! It was thrilling. The one thing that we had to separate was, when are we mom and dad? When am I an actor acting with her? And when are we directors directing her? She asked us to separate those things. She’s like, “I don’t know when you guys are this, that, or the other thing.” So in a very mature way, she came up to us and said, “We need to delineate what your roles are.” I don’t think she used the word delineate. It was awfully close.
JESSICA: It was even more complex for you than it was for me, because you had three hats. You had dad, director, and actor, and you were her scene partner a lot of the time. And generally speaking, you don’t direct your scene partner when you’re on camera with them. So we had an agreement that all the scenes that Erik was in, he would put his actor hat on, and I would run them.
But, as Erik said, she really was clear about wanting clarity about when we’re Mom and Dad and when we’re directors. I would be working with her on a scene, and she would say, “Nah, I don’t want to” when I would give her a direction. And that would open up a conversation about, “You can totally say that to me as your mom when it’s about doing the dishes, but as a director, actually, it’s part of your job as an actor that if I ask you to do something, to try it.” Because we can’t figure out what works unless you try everything that we’re suggesting. She took to that really quickly.
Maintaining a work-life balance as a creative is difficult, but I would imagine it’s even more of a challenge when your spouse does creative work, too. How do you structure your work? Do you take time apart to work on something and then bring it to the other person? Or are you constantly bouncing ideas off one another?
ERIK: We’re fortunate to have an upstairs that we live in and a downstairs where we have an office, and we try to, as a rule, [have] no work talk upstairs. If we want to talk about work, we do it downstairs. We also have a cutoff time. It’s not the same every night, but we definitively say to each other, “We’re done working for the night.” We’re going to watch TV, we’re going to watch a movie, or we’re going to just have dinner as a family.
JESSICA: In terms of our creative process, it’s very different depending on what the project is and what stage of the project we’re in. Generally speaking, if we’re working on a script together, we will work together verbally to talk out what the story is, who the characters are. I’ll be taking notes, so I’ll write it up, and then we’ll talk it through after I’ve written it up. And we go back and forth in that phase until we have an outline of a project that we’re both happy with.
One of us will [write] what we call the “bad draft.” Calling it the bad draft is quite valuable, because the idea is that it’s supposed to be bad. It’s the first translation from the outline into stage directions and dialogue, and it takes the pressure off of having the dialogue be fabulous. It’s like, get it in script form and then we start the elaborate refining process of working on it in layers to shape it, which we will usually hand back and forth to each other. And eventually, once we get to a point where it’s close to finish, we work on it together.
You’ve worked in many different mediums and genres. What does a project have to have in order for you to say, “We want to spend our time working on this”? Because they’re often very time consuming, not always the highest paying, and not the easiest. So what is it that drives you to say yes to something?
JESSICA: I think our first criteria is when an idea won’t leave us alone. For example, we got the idea for Coal Country when the event that it is based on was in the news. That was 2010. We had just had a baby, so we weren’t in a position to embark on an intensive, travel-based research process for a documentary play at that time. But once our kid was five, we could do it. So if something sticks like that, we know we have to do it.
The core of our work is always based in character. We are character-driven storytellers. We are interested in the human beings at the center of the story. So if there is a human being whose story we feel is important to be told, that’s the guide. And we have a whole body of work that also uses that character-based lens to look at larger societal issues or things that are happening that affect not only the characters in our plays, but lots of other people, also. And that bring up sticky questions that we believe that we should be grappling with as a society. That’s something art is supposed to do. It’s supposed to raise questions about what kind of world we live in. So there’s a lot of our work that deals with those larger questions, particularly in theater.
We also have an affinity for artists, creative people, and the creative process. So if you are looking for a common thread in our work, it is always, how do people make things together and navigate all of the obstacles inherent in doing that, whether that’s making a new world that is more just than the one we’re currently living in, or making art and learning to survive as a person through that process?
ERIK: Or also, on the flip side, making systems that keep us down. The process of that is interesting to us. Right now, one of the things that I’m working on, I can’t get into details about it, but it’s with one of the guys who created The Wire. It’s about somebody who has a normal job in 1933 Germany, and they witness a system coming up that’s intended to keep people down. Positive or negative, these systems and how they come about and how they evolve fascinate us.
Who or what are your influences?
JESSICA: The Wire is my absolute favorite piece of storytelling art of all time. It’s a structural masterpiece. The structural complexity of that show is unbelievable. It’s unparalleled in television. The way they were able to manage to create that structural complexity with such integrity and keep us deeply invested in all the individual and very human characters at the same time is majestic to me. The way that it grapples with major political and societal questions that are pressing, without once departing from the world of the personal, and the way those questions impact real human lives. It’s funny as well as really serious and tragic. Also, what David [Simon] and Ed [Burns] did on the production side—they created a television and film industry in Baltimore. They created jobs for people that needed jobs. They trained crews. They created a place for creative work where it hadn’t existed before, and they incorporated real people from Baltimore into the show. All of that is great.
ERIK: I have two answers, one visual and one auditory. When I write, I listen to the Grateful Dead, because each of their concerts is a hero’s journey. Their concerts have a traditional aspect to them. You know what’s coming. But that particular story, told in a particular way every night, leads to the penultimate song, leads to the denouement. And then, the Wyeth family. I go for the drama in [N. C. Wyeth’s] drawings and paintings. And Andrew [Wyeth], I go for framing. He did that famous painting called “Christina’s World.” I go to them for broad feeling and for depth of field and activity within a frame.
What advice would you have for creatives who are struggling and aren’t sure how to proceed with their work?
JESSICA: Every great work of art that any of us has experienced out in the world is at least the hundredth draft of that thing, right? So that’s number one: not expecting it to look like it’s finished form when it comes out. The creative process is an iterative process. You do it over and over and over again. The short answer to your question is, do it. There is no escaping just sitting down and making the work. And you learn. Knowing how to make the work is not a prerequisite to making the work. In fact, it’s the other way around. Everything that we have made we have learned to make that work of art through making it. We’ve learned to make that movie through making that movie. We’ve learned to write that play through writing that play. You actually learn how to do it through the act of doing it. And a lot of people have that flipped. So that’s number one.
Number two, one of the jobs of the artist is to get really, really comfortable with “I don’t know.” To not have that be something scary, to have that zone of curiosity and not knowing actually be your friend and your companion, because that’s where everything starts from. Then once you’re comfortable with “I don’t know,” you can identify, “Here are the things that I need to know in order to make this thing that I want to make.” And then you can go find the people that know those things and enlist them and learn. I’m now at the point where I’m a coach and I’m a professor at Juilliard, but I’m a perpetual student all the time, and expect to be for as long as I’m making work in the world.
ERIK: We have a lot of mentors. We mentor up. This idea of an auteur is ridonculous. Nobody ever learns anything on their own. When we get stuck, we don’t just sit there trying to figure it out. We go to a mentor who’s experienced. That’s the key to not getting stuck.
JESSICA: You find your people, including the ones that know more than you from older generations and the ones that might be newer from younger generations, and you pull together and you help each other. I don’t think it’s about favors; it’s about gifts. And the ideal way to operate as a collaborative artist in the world is to create a gift economy with the people that you are creatively aligned with, and then to nurture that. That’s what we’ve always done.
ERIK: You are never on your own. There’s always somebody back there to catch you. It’s like a trust fall, but an artistic one.
To learn more about Erik, find him on Instagram.
To learn more about Jessica, find her on Instagram and Substack.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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