Jake “The Snake” Roberts has always been a tormented man, which is largely what made him such a feared opponent in the wrestling ring. His inner demons, however, weren’t just part of his disturbingly convincing persona. His downward spiral of drugs and despair has been well documented, as has his recent road to recovery (including on Georgia Wrestling Now a few times). Roberts’ journey from being broke, alone and in terrible physical condition to coping with addiction, living healthier and being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame has never been chronicled in such emotionally-stirring detail as in The Resurrection of Jake the Snake, a documentary that had its world premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival earlier this year. Following a week-long engagement in Portland earlier this month, Slamdance Presents continues its theatrical release of the critically-acclaimed film at Atlanta’s Landmark Theatres Midtown Art Cinema Sept. 18-24 (with appearance by stars “Diamond” Dallas Page, Roberts, Scott Hall, producer Chris Carey and director Steve Yu on Sept. 21 and 22).  With several more theatrical screenings over the course of the next month, as well as the long-awaited opening of the DDP Yoga Performance Center this week, Yu talks to Wrestling with Pop Culture about how he went from being an IBM project manager to working with DDP on this film and numerous other projects.

How did you end up directing The Resurrection of Jake the Snake? Were you already working for DDP Yoga and the film arose from that, or was it the film that got you involved with DDP Yoga?

I met Dallas randomly at LaGuardia Airport. He was reading a magazine and I started talking to him because I knew he lived in Atlanta, which is where I lived. I asked him if he wanted to be part of some documentary projects I was working on. Dallas is open to anything, even if he just met you. He said, ‘Yeah, sure. Send me an email.’ It was kind of shocking that he would just say OK to doing that. He had moved to Los Angeles at that point, so we started corresponding via email and phone and working on inspirational projects following people’s fitness using his program.

We were working on building his company when the Arthur Boorman video went viral and DDP Yoga went from doing maybe $1,000 a day to tens of thousands of dollars a day in sales. Dallas moved to Atlanta by himself and bought a house. I was helping him with his company and he said, ‘Hey, I just talked to Jake.’ I was like, ‘Jake who?’ He said, ‘Jake “The Snake” Roberts’! He told me about their history and how Jake actually taught Dallas a lot about wrestling. Then he told me how Jake wasn’t doing well physically, was really out of shape and was financially broke. He said, ‘Maybe I can help him financially and maybe he can try doing my program.’ It sounded like Jake needed more support than just a fitness program. I suggested we move him to Atlanta to live with Dallas and film the whole thing while we try to help him. I thought it would be a very interesting story, but Dallas was very hesitant because he had lived with Jake before and it was pretty crazy. Even though he was nervous about it, he told Jake about the idea and Jake saw it as a window of opportunity. He was in a hopeless state in his life and was basically just waiting to die in Texas. When Dallas saw that Jake had a positive response and was excited to do it, he said, ‘Now we can’t not do it.’ I remember multiple times when I was on the phone late with Dallas, who was in L.A. while I was in Atlanta, and he was like, ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this.’

What is your background as a filmmaker prior to The Resurrection?

I had known Dallas for about eight years when we started talking about that project. We were working on another inspirational documentary called Inspired: The Movie about fitness that I haven’t finished yet. I had no background in film prior to that. I went to Cornell for economics and was a project manager for IBM when I met Dallas. I decided to leave IBM to create inspirational projects in 2005.

I was inspired by watching Super Size Me. I thought it was really interesting how someone could create a documentary film that could change a large number of people’s perception of something. That was really powerful and I remember wanting to create something that would inspire people to get healthy. Everything since then has been a learning process. We bought our first camera back then and didn’t know how to use it. It’s been interesting.

As the director of The Resurrection, how involved were you in guiding the story along? Did you mostly record things objectively as they happened or did you ever influence the way certain things played out in the film?

In the beginning I was doing a lot of interviews and just trying to learn what makes this person tick. Dallas and I had experience helping people get healthy and fit. So, the theory was we put these things in place to get them healthy, then a lot of good things happen. We had a hypothesis of what would happen, but we didn’t realize Jake still had such a bad addiction problem. We can’t really script that, it just started happening. We didn’t want it to happen. In many ways, everything we shot was unplanned and was whatever was happening at the time.

One example of where, as a director, I might have guided what we captured was when Jake got some really positive news from WWE and was about to call Dallas right away to tell him. He was out to dinner with [assistant editor] Garett Sakahara and Garrett said, ‘Wait. Don’t you need to tell Steve about this before you tell Dallas.’ They called me and I said, ‘You can’t tell him without us filming.’ We had Jake wait and set it up where the news was a surprise to Dallas. It ended up being one of the most powerful scenes in the film. The emotion that we got was unscripted, but we were hoping for that reaction and were lucky we got it.

 

Now that The Resurrection is out, will you be revisiting Inspired?

Yes. Everybody who worked on this film will become part of that project, which I started by myself ten years ago.

www.jakethesnakemovie.com