Jess Jacklin’s captivating new film Quad Gods, about three quadriplegic New York City men who start an esports team, makes you think about a lot of things: friendship, how video games can be a form of physical and mental therapy, and the merging of real-life and online identities.
But what may stand out most is how little the men complain. Jacklin quickly noticed that all three of her main subjects have forged, as a survival tool, an astonishing sense of patience.
“What they’ve said to me over and over again is that you become incredibly patient when you go through the level of recovery they’ve been through. It just requires such mental fortitude. I don’t even think we can imagine how patient you become,” she told MovieMaker. “I think that that’s just a part of getting through life — deciding that you have to cultivate a certain mindset, right?”
The film follows three men with spinal injuries – Richard, aka “Breadwinner1007,” Blake, aka “RepNProof,” and Prentice, aka “Mongo Slade” – who meet at Mount Sinai Hospital’s Abilities Research Center with Dr. David Putrino, who is affectionately known as the “the Quadfather” and creates innovative approaches to rehabilitation and therapy, including video games.
The three men soon decide to use adaptive gaming controllers to form the world’s first quadriplegic e-sports team to compete in high-stakes video game competitions held in packed arenas.
From the start, Quad Gods, like the men it profiles, shifts smoothly from real-life to video games imagery. It opens with what at first appears to be a live sporting event and soon turns out to be a video game. The player is Richard, who we don’t immediately realize is disabled. Almost as soon as we do, the film also makes sure that isn’t our only takeaway about his life — he’s also a dad who starts his day helping his daughter get ready for school.
We meet Blake doing his job with UberEATS, speeding all over New York City in his Power Chair, frequently calling customers to ask them to come collect their food if their buildings aren’t wheelchair accessible. Even in New York City — a city more accessible than most — the buildings are often designed only with walking in mind.
Jacklin, a director, producer and film festival founder, met the Quad Gods in 2018 when friends introduced her to Putrino and she helped him make grant videos — short films to help him win financial grants to support his work. She became especially fascinated by it because she deals with chronic pain, and has tried many types of therapy.
She spent years with her participants, and also encouraged them to film themselves so she could gain more intimate access to their lives. Her work soon drew the attention of Oscar-nominated Jesus Camp directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, and debuted last week on HBO, where the warm reception was immediate.
“What’s been amazing about this film coming out is that they have been bombarded by people that are adaptive gamers. They can watch the film and then say, ‘Wait, I can actually game with these guys?’ Because the way video games are now it’s all connected. So they’ve got all these different people hitting them up. They’re like, ‘We have 250 new friends as of yesterday that have all hit us up that want to game with us.’ … The Quad Gods are getting bombarded with love.”
That was as of Friday, when we spoke with Jacklin about making Quad Gods. Here are excerpts from our conversation, which covers the benefits of gaming, telling a larger spectrum of stories about quadriplegia, and making the real and online world more accessible to everyone.
MovieMaker: Can you talk about having the Quad Gods film themselves?
Jess Jacklin: Our amazing associate producer Frantz Rocher went through so much footage, because there was so much of them just hanging out in the games, and because you always have cameras on when you’re gaming. We didn’t end up using a lot of this, but God bless Frantz, because he went through hours of streaming footage of them hanging out. It was everything from that to Go Pros strapped to wheelchairs and the sort of kinetic movement of the chair because you learned really quickly that they move so much faster than you move, and it was always this really funny exercise of, ‘What the perfect rig for this? Can we get a golf cart in New York and track it? We never pulled that off.
There’s that moment of Blake we got, which I love so much, where he’s always receiving phone calls. He’s the resident therapist of so many of his friends and family. People are calling him constantly for relationship advice: Where should I go on a date?
MovieMaker: What was your biggest challenge in making the film?
Jess Jacklin: I guess the biggest challenge for me was really working through how to make sure I was representing everybody’s very individual experiences around their disability. It was something I spent a lot of time thinking about and reflecting on. … It became the most important thing to me the more I understood about the community, and the more I got to know them as individuals.
A spectrum of experience requires multiple characters, right? We can’t really have two characters and have a spectrum of experience. You really need to have three in order to explore that more fully. But that’s a challenge, because then you can’t totally go maybe as deep as you want to in 90 minutes. And so I think as a storyteller, that was something I was thinking about.
But ultimately, it is the film I wanted to make… a provocative conversation around disability. Some people do want to recover and walk, and some people just want to see themselves represented and celebrated for who they are. And that to me felt like, you know, something worthy of exploring and the narrative.
MovieMaker: Yeah, one of the Quad Gods says at one point that he doesn’t care about walking again. And that he sort of opened up a new identity by losing his old identity, which was fascinating. It kind of reminds me of people in Deaf culture who aren’t interested in hearing.
Jess Jacklin: Oh, totally, that comes up a lot. And I think that all of them have had a similar experience of going through an injury. But there are so many people that are in wheelchairs that were born without the ability to walk. So for them it’s like, ‘Why would I want to walk when I don’t even know what walking is? This is who I am. I just wish people were cool with that.’
Within the disabled community, there’s a lot of different perspectives.
MovieMaker: One thing I love about this movie is that it’s showing gaming not just as a distraction or a way of expressing yourself when you have physical limitations, it’s also therapeutic. Can you talk about the benefits of gaming for these guys? Personally, I’ve sometimes thought of gaming as a waste of time. But then I see this, and I realize I’ve been really ignorant about the benefits for many people.
Jess Jacklin: There’s two things about gaming that I would talk about in terms of wellness. The first thing is how they’ve improved physically. The range of motion in Richard’s hands is pretty incredible, just from holding and moving the controller. The repetition of movements on the controller he’s using has improved his range of motion.
One of the things about physical therapy is it’s just so boring. So if you can make it entertaining, it’s both helping the brain be more malleable because it’s entertained, and therefore it’s more effective, but you’re also doing repetition of physical movement. So that’s one of the reasons video games are so big in that specific community.
And Richard will talk a lot about how much more his hands can move and stretch and how he’s really improved from playing a lot. He plays a lot — he’ll game all night long. So I think he’s seen the most benefit, just because he’s the one that’s gaming every single day.
But I think the interesting thing about gaming is that to an outsider, it looks like you’re isolating in a room and just like playing in the corner. And what really is happening in a video game, most of the time, is highly, highly social. Like when Richard is up all night, he has 100 or 200 people hanging out with him at one time, bantering with him.
And for somebody that’s at home a lot of the time, when the world isn’t always the most accommodating, so you don’t leave all the time, that socialization is so, so huge. It’s so good for somebody’s mental well being and their level of understanding of purpose. Their connection is something we don’t expect to really realize about video games that I see with all of them.
MovieMaker: And in just a few days they’ve gotten all these requests from people who want to game with them.
Jess Jacklin: Yeah, they’ve been so fun. They’ve been screenshotting all the messages from people as they come through. And sometimes it’s long stories of what they went through. And sometimes it’s like, ‘My brother is a quad and he just got a controller like you guys.’ It’s just a whole range of people from as far away as Australia and Norway. It’s just amazing.
Jess Jacklin on the Traveling With Quad Gods
MovieMaker: Can you talk about your experience with the Quad Gods’ resilience?
Jess Jacklin: It was astonishing to me, because I traveled with them. Like there’s just a short little moment where we’re at a big esports stadium. There was a whole trip with Blake where we flew to Los Angeles, and he saw the pros play. And what was astonishing was we waited for a cab to pick us up from the airport, and it was almost two hours before we could get an accessible cab. I think we got into the hotel at like 2 a.m. Like, we’re all exhausted, we’ve been flying.
Blake was like, “It always happens.” He was just so chill. And we were outraged. We were like, “This is ridiculous. Like, how could this be?” And he just like, “Oh, I’ve traveled a lot.”
Knowing him now, the way he operates, he just sort of had acclimated to this reality a little bit more than the rest of us. And it was so incredibly eye opening for me, because then we got to the hotel, and it supposed to be an ADA accessible room, but there was like a lip on the shower that wasn’t really what he needed. But then he’s like, “Oh, I can work around it this way.”
There’s just definitely a quality of this other layer of existing that you just take for granted when you can walk around. And then you start experiencing the reality that they have. And it’s like, “Oh, wow — nothing is designed for these guys.” And New York’s kind of the best, but it’s still not great. You’d have to work around everything constantly.
That was hugely eye opening. And I’m amazed they don’t complain more. And I think they’ve just chosen — you know — chosen to not give into that, so that they can enjoy life.
MovieMaker: This film is specifically about people dealing with quadriplegia, but it also feels like there’s a metaphor about the way that everyone is sort of in the Matrix a little bit more than we used to be, in terms of having a life online and a life in the real world. Do you feel that this is sort of foreshadowing the way that humanity is going?
Jess Jacklin: I do think that the future is very exciting, and I’m optimistic about it. But I’m also thinking about the responsibility in these spaces. I do feel that if we don’t think about design in that world, we’ll really be missing an opportunity. Like, why I love the scene where they’re all designing their avatars, and the AI couldn’t get [the concept] of a wheelchair.
Maybe there wasn’t enough imagery or representation of wheelchairs, or there’s just something strange in the AI where it just couldn’t quite do a Power Chair. And even a lot of the wheels on the chairs were so strange. Like AI thinks this is the 1930s. There was something really profound about that. We’re looking at this very forward-thinking modern technology, and yet it’s just not really reflecting our reality.
It just flags to me that there’s a certain type of person kind of designing this future, and are they thinking about universal design? When I say universal design, the best version of it is curb cuts. We created curb cuts [a ramp cut into sidewalks connecting them to streets] because we wanted streets and sidewalks to be accessible and for wheelchairs. But then strollers can also move up and down. Everyone just benefits.
If you just think about how you’re designing from the beginning, and do that right the first time, it’s going to work better for everyone.
Quad Gods, a Loki Films Production, is now streaming on Max.
Main image: Quad Gods. HBO