Jakob’s Wife Director Travis Stevens Details What Drew Him to the Project

From Cheap Thrills to Starry Eyes to We Are Still Here, producer Travis Stevens has developed a number of the best indie genre films from the past decade, with the filmmaker finally stepping into the director’s chair in 2019 with Girl on the Third Floor. Also written by Stevens, it was clear that he had a much more personal connection to the twisted material and filmmaking sensibilities of his own, while also showcasing the various influences he had absorbed from collaborating with some of horror’s burgeoning auteurs. Stevens’ sophomore directorial effort, Jakob’s Wife, came to him by way of Barbara Crampton, who has similarly worked with some of the genre’s visionaries, who specifically approached the director to recruit him for the project. Jakob’s Wife makes its world premiere on Wednesday, March 17th at 8 p.m. CT and comes to theaters, On Demand, and Digital HD on April 16th.

“When I read the script, I immediately saw why it was the perfect movie for Barbara to make at this point in her career,” Stevens recently detailed to ComicBook.com. “And I saw the potential that this could be a showcase role for her. If I hadn’t had that, such a strong clarity of vision, I probably would have been nervous because you don’t want to fumble your way through working with a legend. But it was clear, I just saw it and I was like, ‘Oh, okay. I see what it can be.’”

In Jakob’s Wife, Anne is married to a small-town minister and feels like her life and marriage have been shrinking over the past 30 years. After a chance encounter with “The Master,” she discovers a new sense of power and an appetite to live bigger and bolder than before. As Anne is increasingly torn between her enticing new existence and her life before, the body count grows and Jakob realizes he will have to fight for the wife he took for granted.

Unlike Girl on the Third Floor, this was an existing script from Kathy Charles and Mark Steensland, which Stevens then contributed to.

“I think a lot of my work on that screenplay, there were a couple elements that I thought needed to happen. The one was we needed to focus the story entirely on Anne rediscovering her power,” the filmmaker expressed. “There had been a lot of extraneous activities going on in that script and I was like, ‘Let’s focus it on Anne becoming confident to state her lead again.’ And then another thing was, and we want to make sure Barbara Crampton has this, it’s a transformative role for her, wanting to make sure there were enough scenes in there that could show a big dynamic range for her to really flex her muscles as an actor and show people, ‘Hey, look at me, I can do all this stuff.’”

He continued, “Another aspect was in this particular subgenre, trying to both pepper in tributes to what I considered to be classics of this subgenre, as well as some new contribution to the subgenre that maybe people in the future will look to and say, ‘Hey, that was really great, that type of scene.’ And then back to the character side, there’s this parallel between what Anne the character goes through that Barbara’s own story as a person and as an actor [went through]. She had this career going and then she stepped away from it to raise a family for 30 years and got back into acting recently and wanted to become more active as a storyteller herself. And so having conversations with her about what her life was like, what that experience was like, and finding ways to incorporate those details into the script was another aspect of it.”

Jakob’s Wife makes its world premiere on Wednesday, March 17th at 8 p.m. CT and comes to theaters, On Demand, and Digital HD on April 16th.

Are you looking forward to checking out the new film? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars.