local storiesNovember 20, 2025

Check Out Jack Kelley’s Story

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jack Kelley.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
The latest chapter our story is a new book that builds on and more deeply explores the concepts, science, and history in our hit international documentary The Atlantis Puzzle. This all started on the island of Santorini in 2019 when my wife and I were visiting the ancient ruins at Akrotiri. We’re standing in the hotel lobby waiting for a taxi and there’s a bookshelf full of history books and tourist info. My wife pulled out a book called “The Atlantis Conference 2008” and handed it to me saying “this might be up your alley.” I read through it by the pool on vacation and stumbled onto the work of Greek researcher George Sarantitis. As I read his papers, the hair on my neck stood up – this guy might have finally cracked the greatest mystery of the ancient world! We connected over the pandemic, and I wound up filming with him in Greece in 2021. Even after the documentary came out and got strong reviews in 2024, I still felt like I had a lot more questions I wanted to answer about the Atlantis story. Since I’d studied classical philosophy, language, history, and literature at Yale as an undergraduate, the puzzle had real allure, and it felt natural to revisit Plato’s ideas and re-examine what I thought I knew. A year later, the book is out in about a dozen countries on Amazon!

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Making a film is never easy, and neither is writing a book. But at least with the latter, you have only yourself to blame. All the personal challenges of the past few years aside, of which there have been many, while researching and writing The Atlantis Puzzle book I had to contend with my poor abilities in Ancient Greek, getting a concussion, and more generally a confrontation with my own ignorance. There is so much history, philosophy, literature, geography, climate science, archaeology, and mythology to absorb when trying to understand a story like this, that at times one feels one will never “figure it out.” But you have to build it brick by brick like anything worth doing.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I moved to LA to be a screenwriter, but got fed up with trying to peddle scripts to producers of dubious qualities. Instead, the actor John Ruby and I formed our own production company and made our first feature “SOLVER” together in 2016, which was released in Jan 2018. It delved into the world of puzzles, and this idea of the puzzle has stayed with me in many different forms over the years. The Atlantis Puzzle was a shift to the documentary world, to the idea of applying ingenuity to an incredibly complicated story. It was also an attempt to translate the work of Sarantitis to a global audience in a way that wouldn’t dumb it down, but would still be approachable. Now with the book, I hope legitimate scholars will take the work I’ve done to build on George’s insights seriously, as I find it to be just as grounded in textual and scientific evidence as anyone else’s academic work. Going forward, I plan on sticking to documentaries in the film world because of the joy of discovery and the depth of research, but continue to work on historical fiction on the side. I hope people will find that the level of work that goes into my projects is something that sets them apart.

We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
Leaving a promising career in New York City in 2014 to roll out to Hollywood was a huge risk, and one that definitely set me back financially. Risk is a tricky thing – too little and you don’t feel alive, too much and you feel like you’re standing on quicksand about to get swallowed up. I tend to alternate between periods of risk and challenge and slower periods of resetting. Not being very good at taking downtime by nature, it’s something I have to force myself to do in order to refresh the creativity that one must draw on to make new work. This becomes especially relevant when other areas in life are uncertain or in transition – there’s a reason why the saying exists that you shouldn’t change your work, your relationship, or your geographic location all at the same time!

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Image Credits
Images copyright Empire Builder Productions

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