“There’s a bit of this fantasy about what is means to be a director, and an auteur, and this power that you have over the picture and the scripts. And then the next thing to come out from a major studio is a crime story.”ĭirector X has an unromantic take on his profession.
He continued, “How do you market a movie that you know people will enjoy - you’ve shown it to people, you’ve tested it, and it consistently gets these high scores, and people come back, and have such a great time - but at the same time, to the general public, they perceive it as a step backwards? The audience just went to see ‘Black Panther.’ They put on African dashikis and went to the movie theater: They’re in a very different headspace. Read More: ‘Superfly’ Trailer: Trevor Jackson Targets a Mexican Drug Cartel in Remake of ’70s Classic - Watch “If you’re going into ’SuperFly’ all super woke and you want to get super serious about what this is, then this isn’t the movie for you.” “The social relevance wasn’t the driving engine, the entertainment was,” said Director X. “We’re light on moral lessons.” Yet the finished product includes the murder of an unarmed black man by a white police officer, and a capsized Confederate statue. “It’s an escape with melanin,” he told Deadline at CinemaCon. While promoting the project, Director X liked to describe the film as a good-time crowdpleaser. Whereas some filmmakers claim “they didn’t want to draw the attention away from the story, blah blah blah,” Director X ensured “everything’s got a little extra shine on it.” “ key positions, some people weren’t comfortable moving that quickly,” although Director X was well suited for the job, thanks to the chaos of the music-video world that often packages luxury on tight turnarounds. “It’s hard to get a crew at some points,” he said. Production was swift, beginning in mid-January. “ doesn’t kill people, he helps people in need, he’s trying to get out of the life, he’s a much more modern antihero than the original ‘Super Fly.'” (Later he observed, “Trying to make Joel Silver go and do a hard, gritty, independent movie, it’s not going to happen.”) “We shaped this to be a Hollywood movie,” said Director X. O’Neal was 35 when he stepped into the role of Priest “SuperFly” star Trevor Jackson (“Grown-ish”) is just 21. One of the main adversaries in the film is Snow Patrol, a gang that slinks around the South in head-to-toe Arctic wear even their guns and Rolls Royces are white.
Although the remake - still rated R - includes shootouts, strip clubs, and a threesome, it is a more humane movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Thus, the filmmaker treated Parks’ tale as a beat sheet. The hero can’t tell his friends, ‘I’m going to fucking prostitute your girlfriend.'” The brutality and raw honesty of that era make that movie something … This is a Joel Silver action movie. “But that’s part of the charm of the ’70s. “They’re snorting coke every time they turn around, the guy’s just threatened to put one of his worker’s girls on the fucking street,” laughed Director X. He describes O’Neal’s protagonist as “hardcore” and “not a good guy,” who carries out a “revenge fantasy.” The collaborators studied Gordon Parks, Jr.’s film, which left Director X somewhat stunned.
So, they agreed, and said, ‘All right, let’s do ’Super Fly’…There is where we took their script and basically started from scratch.” They’d been working on it for about 20 years. So I was like, ‘Look, I’ll do it if we do ’Super Fly.’ We’ve gotta be true to the source material … We’ve all been through the experience of Hollywood taking something we loved, changing it, but calling it that thing we loved but it’s not … I didn’t want to do that.
“Honestly, when they first sent me the script, it was this weird - it had been through a very Hollywood process. “I wasn’t immediately on board,” he said. In “SuperFly” (the remake opted for a one-word title), a man descended into even more danger and corruption. In “Super Fly,” Ron O’Neal played Youngblood Priest, a drug dealer who wanted one final, lucrative score that would allow him to abandon a life of crime. Even though Director X hadn’t seen the predecessor, he knew something was amiss. (Born Julien Lutz, the Trinidadian-Swiss 42-year-old christened himself “Little X” as a teenage hip-hop fan in Toronto, and graduated to a more mature moniker in his 30s). “They put the name ‘ SuperFly’ back on the King Lear script and gave that to me,” he said.
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Sony picked up the rights in late 2017, but sent the old script to Director X. From that bizarre pronouncement, the unnamed studio commissioned a new script based on a Shakespearean tragedy.