American Cinematographer - June 2017 - 33A

Directing Sleight
By Jim Hemphill

Sleight was a low-budget labor of
love for director J.D. Dillard, who cowrote the screenplay with Alex Theurer.
Dillard had 16 days in which to shoot the
movie for, as he puts it, "well under a
million dollars. To be more precise, well
under $500,000." Collaborating with
director of photography Ed Wu, Dillard
transcended his limited resources to
create a visually dynamic and emotionally
absorbing character-driven thriller. AC got
on the phone with Dillard shortly before
the movie's release to discuss how he and
Wu made the most of their minimal
schedule and budget.
American Cinematographer:
Let's start with the origins of the
project. Did it grow out of a
conscious desire to write something
on a modest budget that you could
make yourself?
J.D. Dillard: Yes. My writing partner and I had been working more on the
studio side for quite a bit, kind of to no
avail. We kept losing jobs to the same
people again and again, and were
constantly swinging after jobs that maybe
we had no business swinging after. I left
the country for a year to work for J.J.
Digital Exclusive

June 2017

Abrams on The Force Awakens, and it
really lit a fire under me to shoot something - watching one of my favorite film
franchises come to life through the lens
of one of my favorite directors had a big
impact on me. So when I landed back in
L.A., Alex and I sat down and focused all
of our attention on writing something we
could make in our backyard for a price,
but which would still connect to the
larger world of genre movies that we're
really interested in. That mostly meant
things like keeping locations and the
number of characters down.
What were your initial conversations with director of photography
Ed Wu like? Did you connect pretty
quickly?
Dillard: Oh, yeah. Ed is the best.
There was something immediately attractive about his natural aesthetic when I
went back and looked at some of his
previous work, and when I met with him
we discovered that we both love British
crime dramas like Luther, Happy Valley
and Broadchurch. There's something
about the quality of light in the U.K., as
well as the framing. We wanted to utilize
that negative space and push characters
into the edges of the frame - [those
techniques are] weirdly routine in some
of these shows, and I thought that kind
of composition really fit for Sleight, since
American Cinematographer

it's a story about a kid who's isolated in his
environment.
[The process of] finding a director
of photography and connecting with
them is a difficult thing to articulate. It's
about finding common ground texturally
more than anything else - finding someone who's not too commercially slick, but
doesn't shoot everything like it's on
expired 16mm film. Ed has a really nice
balance of a realistic texture with framing
that feels composed and cinematic and
slightly larger than life.
How did you and Ed prep for
the production?
Dillard: We meticulously storyboarded everything, looking at the whole
film from the point of emotional continuity. Feeling the rhythm and pace, knowing that if we're coming from a kinetic
Steadicam oner, maybe next we want to
settle into a slow push-in on something
slightly more conversational. Even though
it's a micro-budget indie, Ed and I were
very insistent on focusing on the camera,
and not just making it a movie where
we're putting the [Arri] Alexa on Ed's
shoulder, pressing record, and collecting
data or documenting the scenes. The
philosophy was that the camera was a
character, so how do we use it to get an
enhanced experience?
How did the budget inform the

Sleight photos by Alex Hyner, courtesy of BH Tilt.

Street magician
Bo (Jacob
Latimore)
resolves to
extricate himself
from the employ
of a local drug
dealer after he
meets and falls
for Holly
(Seychelle
Gabriel).

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