Exclusive: Director J.D. Dillard Talks Sleight
Staci Layne Wilson
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J.D. Dillard is a director pretty much “plucked from obscurity,” as the saying goes, by uber-producer Jason Blum. Blumhouse reps saw Dillard’s feature Sleight on its festival run, picked it up for distribution, and now the “little” sci-fi genre blender is ready for big-screen primetime courtesy of Blumhouse and WWE Studios.
The film stars Jacob Latimore as Bo, a young street magician who turns to dealing drugs to support his little sister. When she is kidnapped by his supplier, Angelo (Dulé Hill), he uses his sleight of hand and keen intelligence to find her.
We caught up with Dillard, who also co-wrote the film, and here’s what he had to say.
Dread Central: You wrote, directed, and financed Sleight yourself; put it out in festivals; and then powerhouse producers Blumhouse came on board… is that correct?
JD Dillard: That’s right, yeah. We shot it in the summer of 2015 and got into the Sundance Film Festival for 2016 and Jason had some people there at the festival and it was our second screening. We had the Salt Lake City screening, and just as I came out of that screening, my film started blowing up, and it was Jason… he had just seen the movie and he immediately had a vision for it and a plan which he thought would work best and share this movie with the world, and shortly after we locked it up with him.
DC: What does it feel like for one of the biggest, most exciting names in horror and sci-fi now to love your film enough to put their logo on it?
JD: Yeah, it’s funny; I think every step of the way with Sleight it’s just been hitting these new thresholds of gratitude. I think even finding financing for a low budget film, if that was all that happened and we just got to shoot a movie we would have been excited and obviously Sundance itself was a deadline, not a goal, so getting that goal, I think we all cried pretty hard that day and if Sundance was the end of the road and we just shared it with a festival audience that would have been enough but getting a call from Jason and hearing his passion for the movie, his plan for the movie, that just kind of sent us into the stratosphere in both our excitement and our continued gratitude. You know it’s always the dream, when you make a movie, kind of in the dark and outside of the system, to have someone call and want to plug that movie into the system and give your film a future and an audience, a year and a half later we’re still pinching ourselves.
DC: You have so many genres colliding here… did that help, or did it challenge you, as you got started and then bought it all to fruition?
JD: Yeah certainly, that unusual mix, it’s certainly the core motivating factor of it all. Alex [Theurer, co-writer] and I come from a sort of science-fiction genre background already, up until Sleight the things we were seeking and really playing with were much bigger ideas and certainly ideas that if we had ever got them made, I would not be be allowed to direct nor would he be allowed to produce, so Sleight had been an idea in the back of our heads for a number of years and we had very organically landed on this idea. There was a very natural intersection between street magic and crime. They utilized a lot of the same skill sets and the crossover is pretty obvious but being genre guys, we wanted to find another way to infuse something different about it, not that crime and magic weren’t enough but we still wanted to play with something more robustly genre and that’s kind of where the science-fiction/telekinetic/electromagnetic came from. We will never say that Sleight is the nuanced love story or the most complicated thrilling crime story but it’s really about blending these things and mixing these things all in the same story and to us, that’s what the fun of Sleight is. All of these things mashed together like you’ve never seen before, more than it is being the most insanely new idea of any of its core elements so it’s really about the blend that made it exciting for us.
DC: To what do you attribute the fact that it all works as a whole?
JD: This movie really came to life with being able to work with incredible actors. I think the success of this movie, the success of any movie really, is though the people playing these characters and the great thing about Jacob is he has this effortlessness and he is really able to kind of navigate the different worlds that this movie sends him to. You want someone who has the street cred to work with the gangster, you need the tenderness to talk to his sister but then also the charisma to perform magic and also at the same time the charm to talk to Holly so we do need an actor who can step into all of those worlds and then also not to forget to be able to command the intellect to be able to talk about the science aspect of the film. Jacob can really put all these hats on across the movie, off and on and step into these different roles in a way that became so important for Bo. Then you look at someone like Dulé, and all of these characters help build Bo up because if we have a bad guy that was so traditionally like a gang banger and from the moment we meet him is wearing the gun in his waistband, I think it kind of does a disservice to Bo because we know how smart he is, we know that if he did start this line of work, he thought there would be a level of innocence that he’d be able to maintain through it and I think having a guy we haven’t really seen in a role like this, in Dulé, it really helps sell how Bo slipped into this. We also have a great supporting cast as well, Seychelle Gabriel as Holly, certainly more at the forefront in being a woman also dealing with her own problems and really helped us build a story and having a female character that, are males aren’t going to come in and kind of save her life but it’s two people who help each other realize that they have power over their circumstances, more so than they thought they did, and they help each other reach that realization, that was a really important piece for us. I feel like in so many genre things, that power can be taken away from your female co-star and I wish we had more time to go farther back into Holly’s home and see what she’s dealing with. At least in the way we approached it we wanted to make sure that Bo wasn’t saving her life, they were saving each other’s.
Jacob Latimore, Storm Reid, Seychelle Gabriel, Dulé Hill, Sasheer Zamata, and Cameron Esposito star. J.D. Dillard directs.
Look for Sleight in theaters on April 28th.
Synopsis:
A young street magician (Jacob Latimore) is left to care for his little sister after their parents’ passing and turns to illegal activities to keep a roof over their heads. When he gets in too deep, his sister is kidnapped, and he is forced to use his magic and brilliant mind to save her.
Categorized:News
