Exclusive: Director J.D. Dillard Talks ‘Sleight’Posted by Wilson Morales
April 26, 2017
Currently in theaters from WWE Studios and Blumhouse Productions is J.D. Dillard‘s directorial debut ‘Sleight,’ which premiered this year at the Sundance Film Festival and stars Jacob Latimore, Dulé Hill, and Seychelle Gabriel, along with Storm Reid, Sasheer Zamata, and Cameron Esposito.
When Bo, a handsome and gifted high school student, suddenly becomes the sole caretaker for his little sister, Tina, he foregoes college to dedicate his talents to the craft of magic. He wows audiences as a street magician but still has to make ends meet, so he cleverly uses his skills to peddle drugs for the local dealer, Angelo. However when Bo falls for Holly, an adorable teenager in need of support, he decides to get out of the drug business, causing Angelo to threaten his family. Bo must now rely on his sleight of hand and brilliant mind to save the day.
For Dillard, this was his first feature and he’s started working on his next feature “Sweetheart,” starring Kersey Clemons and Emory Cohen and he’s in talks do the remake of the classic horror pic “The Fly.”
In speaking with Blackfilm.com, Dillard talked about working on ‘Sleight,’ casting Jacob Latimore as the film and in his future projects.
How did the film come about?
J.D. Dillard: So, Alex Theurer my writing partner and I starting putting this together because we wanted to find a story that we knew we could self produced. Having written a number of things and never seeing the actor the words and never watching those scenes come to life, we became obsessed in finding something that we think we can launch. Sleight had first existed as a shot film that we had written but were unable to finance. When we were for this idea that seemed grounded and could be done for a price, we remembered that we had written this hot and it seemed like the perfect thing to expand and turn into a feature. Very early on, we were attracted to this natural relationship and I feel like that street magic and crime both require a particular personality and the level of defeat is involved and a bit of savviness is needed. We come already from the genre space and we wanted to find one extra element to add and introducing science fiction to it as well.
Quite randomly, I met our producer Eric B. Fleischman at a Halloween party and we started talking about this and flash forward to a few months, Alex and I had written a script and showed it to Eric. He greenlit the movie for us to start shooting in June 2015. It was a quick shoot of 16 days, all in LA. We felt that it was like summer camp. It was a young, youthful, super sweaty and hot experience but it was a lot of fun and the energy was pretty special. As far as Sundance, it was more of a deadline than a goal. We knew we had to hand in a work-in-progress cut and mid-October seemed like that mark for us; so getting that call in November that we had been accepted was severely unexpected but so exciting. We both cried all day long and cried again and when we realized we had to finish the film in basically four weeks. We rushed the movie to get it ready for Sundance and shipped it off at the end of the year. That’s the cliff notes journey of the film.
Can you talk about casting Jacob as the lead?
J.D. Dillard: Jacob was one of the guys who came in to audition for the film. We needed someone who could be a chameleon. Someone who has the tenderness to talk to his sister, have the personality to be a street performer and have the charisma to talk to Holly but then be savvy enough to work with Angelo on the criminal side. We had Bo come in and out of these worlds. We needed each piece to feel authentic and also the science mind aspects of it as well. We needed someone who can talk about how much coke they are cutting and talk about the bio-chemical process of building an electric-magnet and Jacob could really do that. It became really clear. We needed someone who can go in and out of those worlds and he did it.
How did you incorporate the magic tricks in the film?
J.D. Dillard: We wanted Jacob to seem comfortable with the cards when the camera was circling him as he was holding a deck. It needed to seem that he had done this a 1000 times. In the process we focused a lot more on his comfort level on being able to execute tricks. Some tricks we could help him behind the scenes, but there’s a comfort level that you can’t fake. He had to learn how to work the cards with shuffling and everything else. We hooked him up with Zach Mueller, who runs a company called Fontaine Cards, and they are at the head of this subculture that’s growing in the community called cardistry. The culture is more like skateboard culture and Zack lived right off Fairfax in LA, which is like this hip area. When you look at Zack’s videos, they look like skate videos. We linked Jacob up with him and some of his friends to help build his comfort level when dealing with cards.
How does it feel to have your first film go to Sundance and now you’re working on your next project?
J.D. Dillard: It’s been really exciting. The learning process from Sleight..it’s a movie we made two summers ago and we’ve been watching it expand and develop an audience. All we wanted was to tell a good character story. The film I’m about to shoot with Blumhouse called Sweetheart is sort of the same thing. We want to put different lens on familiar themes and that’s the exciting thing, just blending them together.
There’s talk that you may do a remake of The Fly?
J.D. Dillard: We’re in the negotiation stage. We’re early days in with Fox. It’s a really exciting prospect and a franchise that we love. There isn’t much to say at this point but fingers cross that it works out. It is a world that we would love to get into.
Official Trailer
Clip – Police
Clip – Left Hand
Clip – No String
Clip – Window
Red Band Clip – Cross The Line
