Page 1 of 2
When we interviewed Michael Jai White, we had no idea just how crazy Black Dynamite was. He plays the pseudo-blaxploitation hero in a film that spoofs the style of the ‘70s down to overt continuity errors left in the film on purpose. Scott Sanders directs the send-up of ‘70s African-American exploitation. He told us how this crazy little indie movie came out of he and White’s imagination.
Crave Online: What was your idea for breaking the fourth wall in Black Dynamite?
Scott Sanders: The cool thing about it is we tried to make sort of a meta movie. It wasn’t like Michael Jai White was playing Black Dynamite. Michael Jai White was playing Ferrante Jones playing Black Dynamite. When I was directing it, I felt like I was directing it as another director who just kind of was a hippie who smoked a lot of weed who was directing a blaxploitation movie. There’s sort of that in there. We have cuts where the light goes out of his eyes. He becomes Ferrante Jones. We don’t stop and he looks at the director and it’s a weird thing. It was always part of it that you’re breaking a wall. When the boom comes in, it’s now the second movie, which is the movie of making a blaxploitation movie comes in.
Crave Online: How would we know about Ferrante Jones except for talking to you about it?
Scott Sanders: Well, it was in there. We put it in the original trailer. We just put it in the trailer. There’s certain things that are just subtextual. The one joke that’s really hard for people to get is when the character reads the stage direction. Unless you’ve read scripts, it’s a hard thing to get but it’s just fun to have that stuff in there for people who get it. If you don’t get it, it just goes right by you. So that’s kind of like the Ferrante Jones thing. It’s a sort of subtextual, layered thing in there.
Crave Online: What’s your favorite Blaxploitation movie?
Scott Sanders: I think my favorite one is The Mack because The Mack is good. It’s cold blooded, crazy, it’s raw and just cold blooded. Pretty Toney, we used a lot of that. That’s to me a perfect one without it being jokey. It’s just funny that n*gger is in the title of at least two Fred Williamson movies, like he did Boss N*gger.
Crave Online: How long did the script take and how did you write with Michael?
Scott Sanders: It took a month, Bryon, Mike and myself. Byron and Mike did a really good job of holding onto what the tone of the movie was supposed to be. It was actually going off in a very extravagant place that needed to be brought down and Mike was very good about holding it down. But, having it so that a lot of wilder ideas could fit through the structure of it. Actually, after we got the rhythm of it, you could kind of expand upon certain themes, but it was very important for us to hold it down on some level.
Crave Online: But you shot a trailer before you even wrote the script?
Scott Sanders: We shot the whole fake trailer and then the trailer, which cost like $500, raised the money but we didn’t have a script yet. All the lines in the trailer didn’t have anything behind them. It just sounded like some stuff that was in a blaxploitation movie. “Your brother Jimmy’s dead.” There’s no Jimmy, there’s no brother, there’s nothing. It’s just a whole fake façade that supported the movie.
Crave Online: That says a lot for the simplicity of indie filmmaking. Do people tend to overcomplicate things?
Scott Sanders: Yeah, I think this was just such an organic process. It started off with Mike and all of us just kind of watching these movies and saying, “That’s funny. This is a funny thing. If we just had a light touch with it, it could work. You don’t have to go so far with it to overdo it.” The analogy I actually used is Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin. She just says what she says and it’s kind of funny. That’s how that all kind of worked and I think the sort of analogy works with Black Dynamite too. It’s just like a chord coming out of Fred Williamson’s leg and it’s supposed to be this hugely dramatic moment where they’re screaming about how his mother’s dead. It’s just like oh, there’s a chord coming out of his leg.
