Director brings blaxploitation classic ‘Superfly’ into 2018
LOS ANGELES – In a nondescript room on the mammoth Sony Pictures lot, music video veteran-turned-filmmaker Director X edited a semifinalized version of the upcoming “Superfly” remake, chicken salad in hand.
The film, screened before a small audience of friends and family the following day, was undergoing a last-minute cleanup before it was scheduled to be shown to studio heads in its entirety for the first time.
When asked whether the version of the film being edited will be the same one theatergoers see upon the film’s release Wednesday, the director, born Julien Christian Lutz, laughed good-naturedly.
“It all depends on Monday,” he said. “But this is what we’re presenting.”
“Superfly,” which stars “Grownish” actor Trevor Jackson as the titular drug dealer, is a highly stylized action-flick update of the 1972 blaxploitation hit of the same name.
After less than 40 days of shooting, it will open just in time for summer blockbuster season — a superfast turnaround compared with the Hollywood standard.
“It was not a lot of time to get this together,” X admitted.
“But I tell my guys, ‘All those jobs where you had all the prep time you needed and time to get it right, this ain’t that job. All those jobs prepared you for this job.’ When they say, ‘Smooth seas don’t make experienced sailors,’ this was not a smooth sea.”
As for the director himself, “I’m born from chaos filmmaking,” he said. “So it didn’t bother me a bit.”
It was important to X, the vision behind music videos like Drake’s “Hotline Bling” and Miguel’s “Skywalker,” not to stray too far from the original.
“We respect the original story,” said the director. “That’s what the foundation of this is, the original movie.
“I can’t express my hate for going to see a movie and they changed the ending or they ‘fixed’ it for us, and it never needed to be fixed.”
To stay as true to the original as possible, the director even kept the 55-page script from the 1972 version with him, constantly seeking to distill the heart of the story into its simplest bits.
So what’s at the heart of “Superfly”? Director X summed it up this way: A drug dealer decides to leave the game after being attacked, goes to his supplier for one last big score but is denied, and finds a new supplier only to catch the attention of a pair of crooked cops. “Then with the help of his girlfriend,” X said, “he manages to outsmart everybody.”
The film features the same characters as the original, with story arcs that are “tonally or spiritually” the same, X said. “I’m treating this like hood Shakespeare.”
Despite the intended tonal similarities, X did take the liberty of making small changes to combat the original’s misogyny, most notably the title character’s attitude toward women.
“In the original (it was) ‘Get out of here,’ ‘Shut up,’ ‘Do what I tell you,’ ” he said. “There’s a lot of that. But he doesn’t speak to them like that (anymore). They’re his partners now; they’re his peers.”