Devotion director J.D Dillard was able to get closer to his father who is the second Black naval aviator to fly with the Blue Angels, through the telling of Jesse Brown’s (Jonathan Majors) story
“That scene hurt, man, and it’s supposed to hurt,” Dillard tells. “It’s one of those scenes where you love your actor and you know that this is a performance, but it hurts to see hurt. So there was this odd shift where I needed to be there not just as director, but also as a friend and safety net, even if he didn’t need it.”
Dillard is the son of Bruce Dillard, the second Black naval aviator to fly with the Blue Angels, and with his dad serving as a consultant on the film, JD was able to get closer to his father through the telling of Jesse’s story, something he recognized even at the script level. “As I cried my way through the script, it was not just being overwhelmed by how incredible the story was on its own, but then also just immediately sensing how much overlap there was between Jesse and my dad 30 years later,” Dillard says. “So I found myself with this very odd but overwhelming opportunity to not just honor Jesse and Tom, but then also get to tell my dad’s story in a way that I never expected.
I think it’s for a lot of reasons. It’s smack dab in the middle of two wars that are very, very historically loud, and America’s relationship to it is much grayer. So it’s hard to celebrate in that regard. And between those two things, it’s just been hard to draw stories from that world, but in being introduced to Jesse and Tom’s story, you realize how many stories have yet to find their way to the populace.
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