X marks the spot between Xerox and exciting
Director X unzips his white hoodie during an interview to display his affection for the original Super Fly, the 1972 blaxploitation classic he’s reimagined for the justreleased Superfly.
“I’m actually wearing my Super Fly shirt today,” the filmmaker and music video maestro proudly says, displaying his vintage T-shirt. “I love the original.”
Love, however, doesn’t have to mean unthinking devotion, as far as the Brampton-raised X, 42, is concerned. He brings a similar creative intelligence to a blaxploitation archetype as he does to the music videos that made his name, which include Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” Rihanna’s “Work” (with Drake), Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” (with Charli XCX) and Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta.”
The original Super Fly starred the late Ron O’Neal as badass Harlem cocaine dealer Youngblood Priest, who was looking for one last big score before going straight. It had the tagline, “He’s got a plan to stick it to the man!”
X’s update, written by Alex Tse ( Watchmen) and starring the considerably suaver Trevor Jackson as Priest, shifts the action to music mecca Atlanta. It has a sly in-joke about how Priest is making up his getrich-go-straight plan on the fly — make that the Superfly.
Where other directors might have felt daunted by the thought of chipping away at a cultural touchstone like Super Fly, X’s approach was to respect the original but then follow the direction it pointed in. “I’m a big source-material guy,” he elaborates, speaking in a Ritz-Carlton Hotel meeting room that might have seemed incongruous for Super Fly, but not Superfly.
“I really, really hate people taking a book and changing the ending or changing the character. It seems like change for change’s sake. It feels like, ‘I know a better ending.’ No you don’t! No one asked you what you know or think.”
He maintained that philosophy as he retained most of the original film’s characters and basic plot, before adding some new faces and extrapolating the story to the global drug trade and police brutality realities of the 21st century. “The changes we made came out of necessity. There are some things from the 1970s that don’t translate to the 21st century, such as how Priest in the original movie gets attacked by two junkies. It’s hard to believe that a big-time drug dealer in Atlanta who’s making millions of dollars is anywhere that junkies are going to get their hands on him.”
Superfly replaces those incongruous junkies with a rival drug gang called Snow Patrol, which is loosely based on a real-life Atlanta outfit called Black Mafia Family, or BMF.
“They’ve had a really long run,” X says. “They were international, with hundreds of millions of dollars. At one point, they had a billboard in the city. Can you imagine?”
Another plot tweak advanced by Superfly sees Priest travelling to Mexico to meet the druglord supplier of the coke that pushers and cops are eager to get their hands on. The first Super Fly just had corrupt cops supplying the coke, with no hint to its origin.
“It didn’t feel believable,” X says. “They have to get it from somewhere. So we said, ‘All right, the suppliers need to be bigger, especially if (Priest) is talking about making a score that means something today.’ And so that opened the door to the Mexicans.”
X felt he had to downplay one aspect of the original Super Fly: the rampant snorting of cocaine. So much blow is done on-screen by so many people, director Gordon Parks Jr. at one point resorts to a montage set to “Pusherman,” one of the tunes on Curtis Mayfield’s masterful Super Fly soundtrack album.
“They snort coke to say hi. Literally, like, ‘Hey, how you doin’, try this!’,” X says, laughing. “I didn’t want to make it that way. I knew I was making something kind of slick and cool, and I just didn’t want to put that visual in peoples’ heads, of all these really cool people that you’re supposed to love and care for who are all constantly snorting cocaine every time you turn around.”
The trickiest aspect of updating Super Fly had to be approaching the film’s soundtrack, a masterpiece that Rolling Stone ranks as No. 72 on its 500 Great Albums of all Time list, right behind Paul Simon’s Graceland but ahead of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti.
How could X and Atlanta producer/composer/rapper Future top Mayfield’s conscious falsetto groove on such tunes as “Pusherman,” “Freddie’s Dead” and “Super Fly”?
The answer was just to go their own way, with a mellower R&B/hip-hop soundtrack matching Future’s Auto-Tuned raps with friends that include Miguel, Lil Wayne, Khalid, 21 Savage, Young Thug and Mississauga’s PartyNextDoor.
X put in the film a little of the late Mayfield’s original “Pusherman” and “Super Fly,” as a sign of respect to the original genius.
“As we did for the film, we also said, ‘All right, what’s the thing about the music?’ Beyond it being one of the greatest albums ever made, what got it to that point? What was the thinking behind it? Well, it’s a singular musical vision with a commentary on the movie, and we said, ‘ That’s what we’ll focus on.’ And so we didn’t get caught up (saying), ‘we need a ‘Freddie’s Dead!’ We weren’t competing with the soundtrack. We embraced the philosophy that made that soundtrack, so we have those elements within here.”
X’s collaborative approach to bridging the gap between Super Fly and Superfly is also evident in the generosity he extends to up-and-comers like his protégé Karena Evans, 22, who started as an intern in his office three years ago and who is now a hot video director in her own right. Evans directed the new Drake video “I’m Upset,” which launched online Thursday and reunites him with the Degrassi cast. Evans is also an actress, appearing in the recent Every Day and starring in the upcoming Firecrackers. “We saw her work, we saw her work ethic, we signed her to the company,” X marvels. “She did a year of really amazing work last year that got her the Lipsett Award for being this new innovative talent ... She’s an actress, she’s a director, she’s just really one of those special talents. I’m honoured to get so much credit for her.”