To celebrate the DVD release of the critically praised summer film “Blindspotting,” Lionsgate hosted a dinner with director Carlos López Estrada at the West Village bistro, “Barbuto.”
The film, which stars Hamilton breakout actor Daveed Diggs, follows his character on his last 3 days of probation, who is left shaken and confused after being the sole witness of the police shooting of an unarmed black man.
The film was semi-autobiographical and written by Diggs and his co-star, Rafael Casal. Estrada, who made his feature directorial debut with this project, looked to the duo a lot for collaboration on set.
“I think it was a real challenge for me to tell a story about a place that I knew and had been to, and understood more or less, but I had definitely hadn’t spent enough time there,” Estrada told The Knockturnal about the film’s Oakland setting.
“I felt good about my decision to direct this because I knew that Daveed and Raf were going to be really integral to the process, and I knew that they were going to be with me exactly from day one until we finished the movie…I feel like the only way to tell this story from an authentic way was to use them as a filter and to make sure everything I was doing felt true to this place,” he continued.
On comparisons, the film has received to black movies like Sorry to Bother You, and Blackkklansman, Estrada sees them as a good sign. “I think it’s really great that in a year there’s at least five, if not more, notable movies that are featuring black main characters. That are featuring issues from communities that normally don’t get movies made about them.”
“Many people ask if [comparison] is a problem. I personally think that it’s kind of amazing that our problem is that we have “too many” black movies, or too many black stories that are making a splash and being talked about.”
Blindspotting is currently available on digital and will be released on Blu Ray and DVD November 20.
