Dallas Jenkins
speaker
227 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Dallas Jenkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
We are in Caiaphas' house. Yeah. High priest Caiaphas. Now, it's in Texas, not Israel. We film in Texas. Texans believe Jesus lived here anyway. So that's why we film in Texas. This is where he would choose to live. Exactly. And when he comes back, he's coming to Texas first. But we built this set. This is a season five set. It has not been released to the world yet.
So you're introducing Caiaphas' set to the world. Chosen fans have not seen it yet. But this is the room in which not only Caiaphas and Judas make a deal, but ultimately where we'll see Jesus come for his quasi-trial. His Sanhedrin trial took place at Caiaphas' house under cover of night, away from the traditional place because they were trying to do it quickly.
With that uplifting, lighthearted note, this is where we're filming this conversation.
Well, season one of The Chosen was... crowdfunded and at such a low budget. We were starting from scratch, so we were finding places to film and trying to make them look bigger. It was after season two that we realized we have to have our own place. We can't just keep chasing The kinds of places around the country that some of which don't exist.
We need our own home and we need to stay in one spot. And so that's when we started to build some of these places on here in Texas on a property owned by the Salvation Army. There's no pun intended on that. It happens to just be the place that had... That's hilarious. Yeah, hundreds of acres of open land and some already interesting infrastructure. And so we built these sound stages.
So right now we're in a sound stage that contains Caiaphas's house. 50 yards away is a potential place where we would film the Garden of Gethsemane. There's another building that has Simon Peter's house, Pontius Pilate's house. We had a place where we've got the room for the Last Supper. And then we've got a backlot where we've got a first century Capernaum recreation.
So it's all over the place, but within about half a mile of each other.
It was birthed from failure. So for... Coming up on 20 years leading up to 2017, I've been a filmmaker for that long. I've made several films with varying degrees of success, but all independent, outside of the studio system. When you hear the term indie film or independent film, it means not financed by the studios.
I've had varying degrees of success, but I was very eager to make a film that was either financed or affirmed or endorsed by Hollywood, and I finally got a chance to do that in 2016. It released in 2017.
So January 20th, 2017, turned out to be the lowest moment of my life or at least my career because the film that I had gotten a chance to make released in theaters around the country with several big Hollywood studios attached and working on it, and it completely failed. And that was which film? It was called The Resurrection of Gavin Stone.
And the fact that you haven't heard of it is part of the reason why it didn't do very well. So what happens is on a Friday afternoon, a math equation takes place. The numbers come in from the East Coast, and you can then decipher how a movie is going to do that day, how it's going to do that weekend, and most often how it's going to do for the life of it.
And within a couple hours, I went from being a filmmaker who had a very bright future to a filmmaker with no future because the movie bombed. The other stories that we were hoping to tell with these companies, the companies said, no, never mind. Apparently, clearly we don't understand this audience, this approach, the kind of faith-based filmmaking.
And so out of that, I was home alone with my wife, Amanda. And we were crying and praying and confused because You hear all the time, God's not the author of failure. And so when you fail, you must assume that the calling that you thought you'd received to do this work must not have been a true calling.
You know, any time we feel called to something, it's hard to decipher sometimes whether it's a calling from God— Or a temptation. Or a temptation, or just a desire, a fleshly desire. And sometimes it's a fleshly desire, and it's okay. It's not, you know— When we choose what we're going to eat for dinner tonight, I don't wait for God to reveal it to me.
I just have a desire for something, and it's fine. But I had spent two years of my life developing this story and seeing so many moments throughout that where doors were opening and God clearly seemed to be present. And so then when it failed, I thought, I guess I was wrong. I guess God wasn't present and wasn't calling me to this. And so in the midst of my devastation,
Amanda came to me and said, I feel very strongly and clearly like God is putting it on my heart. Open the story of the feeding of the 5,000 in the Gospels. I don't know why. I just know that that's what we're supposed to do. So we open the Bible to the feeding of the 5,000. That's a story I've heard many times before. I've been a believer as long as I can remember.
So what about that story was for us? Well, the thing that we noticed in that story was that Jesus had been preaching for several days. The disciples come to him and they say, Master, the people are hungry. We need to send them home to get food. And what I hadn't noticed before in the story was that Jesus didn't say, oh, good point. I hadn't realized that. We should get this taken care of.
He already knew it. In fact, it was his fault they were hungry. He'd been talking for two days, two, three days. And his response was, oh, no, we can't send them home because they're so hungry they'll faint along the way. So we realized in that moment, just because you're at a place of hunger and desperation doesn't necessarily mean that God's not in it. And in fact, it may mean he is in it.
Depending on your theology, he either allowed it or he caused it. But being brought to that place of hunger and desperation doesn't necessarily mean that God— You're being abandoned.
Why did God tell the Israelites to camp out at the edge of the Red Sea? in advance of the Israelites being pursued by the Egyptians, he said, go to the edge of the Red Sea and camp out. He put them in this place where they had no place to go. When the Egyptians came and pursued them, they had no escape. And he put them there on purpose.
Showing 1–20 of 227 · page 1 of 12
Next →