Born of A Career Failure & Anchored In the Parable of Five Loaves & Two Fishes – ‘The Chosen’ Creator’s Story

Dallas Jenkins, the creator of The Chosen series, revealed how the series about the life, times, passion, and death of Jesus Christ came to be, in conversation with Reverend Father Mike Schmitz.

The series, he said, was the result of a career failure that led to a spiritual awakening anchored strongly in the biblical concept of ‘Five Loaves and Two Fishes’.

The son of the author of the Left Behind books, Jerry Jenkins, Dallas got his storytelling genes from his father. But it took his watching Stanley Kubrick’s ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ to decide that he wanted to be a filmmaker.

And while he had always wanted to make a standard faith-based film, he also wanted to be a successful filmmaker. Because then, he would use that larger platform to share the gospel with others. Success for him meant winning an Oscar that would give him the legitimacy and affirmation (praise) he needed from others.
When the opportunity came to make that grand-scale faith-based feature from Jason Blum, a man responsible for most of Hollywood’s classic horror films, he took it. But the resulting film bombed commercially.

“I was disappointed in my failure. I thought God had opened so many avenues to this project. The signs that He was in it. I began to doubt that the Lord was in it all.”

Inspired by God, his wife urged that they both read the bible passage about ‘The Feeding of the Five Thousand’ where Jesus fed a crowd of people of about 5,000 men, women, and children, and they gained insight and conviction.

“God brought those people to a place of desperation and hunger where they had no access to food or water except by a miracle. That was intentional. We connected to that experience and thought God had brought us to this place of desperation. There is bound to be a miracle.”

The film never did well, but early morning the next day, at 3 am, while he was typing up a 15-page memo analyzing what went wrong and right in the project, a message pops up from his Facebook account from a social media acquaintance Alex, whom he had never met, which read, “Remember your job is not to feed the 5000, it is just to provide the loaves and the fish.”

Shocked, he asked Alex, why did you send me this message. “Oh, it wasn’t me. I was moved by God to tell you this.”

“That moment changed my life,” said Jenkins. “I said to God, if I never make another show as long as I live, but I am in your will, that’s enough for me. And I truly meant it.”

In the spirit of Five Loaves and Two Fishes, he pushed forward the production of a short film script, about the birth of Jesus through the shepherd’s eyes, that he and his co-writer, Tyler Thompson, had written a year and a half before.
The film was shot at the back of his friend’s barn, 15 minutes away from his home. “It didn’t feel like five loaves and fishes. It felt like a loaf and a half of fish. For me, it was a big step down from my Hollywood dream.”

The film came out great, and was another discerning moment for him as he confides to his spouse.

“I never felt more comfortable and, in my wheelhouse, as when I filmed Bible stories. What we did was, I have read this story in the Bible so many times, but in the process of taking it from the scripture, and I am not changing the scripture, just adding some context, like historical context, plausibility, etc. It is unlocking the story for me in ways it never did.”

The idea for ‘The Chosen’, he said, came from binge-watching a show on Netflix when he realised that what kept him returning to it was the interest in what happened to the characters, from episode to episode, and season to season: the characters’ backstories and the nuances of their relationships with each other.

“I thought, “This has never been done in a Jesus project. We have had films and a mini-series about Jesus, but not like the way I was doing with my short biblical films,” including ‘The Two Thieves’ which explored the story of the two men who were hung to the left and right side of Jesus at Calvary.
“I didn’t think I’d be the one to do. But I thought whoever does it is really smart.”

An opportunity came knocking again when he pitched the idea to a production house that loved it but opted to fund the film via crowdfunding. Initially, he refused for valid reasons. He had no social media followers and thought crowdfunding would never raise the sort of money needed for such a project.

Yet, in the spirit of Five Loaves and Two Fishes, he acquiesced. “We raised $10 million on crowdfunding from 16,000 people around the world, who watched the short film about ‘The Two Thieves’, which went to the making of Season 1 of ‘The Chosen’. Now, it’s five seasons, with the sixth about to premiere,” said Dallas.