Jesse Atlas on Making Directorial Debut in Sci-Fi Thriller

Jesse Atlas spent the better part of his 20-year career as an editor while directing shorts and documentaries. For his directorial feature debut, he partnered with Aaron Wolfe to co-write the science fiction thriller Assassin for Saban Films. The film follows a private military operation led by Valmora (Bruce Willis), who invents futuristic microchip tech that enables an agent’s mind to inhabit another person’s body to carry out covert, deadly missions. But when Sebastian (Mustafa Shakir), an agent, is killed during a secret mission, his wife Alexa (Nomzamo Mbatha) takes his place to bring the man responsible to justice. Atlas spoke with Bleeding Cool about the inspiration behind the film, casting, and working with Willis before his retirement.

Assassin: Developing the Sci-Fi Action Thriller

Bleeding Cool: What was the inspiration behind Assassin?
Atlas: We wanted to look at a new kind of warfare. We’ve seen some interesting films about drones, drone pilots, and making choices about other people’s lives from far away. The evolution of that for myself and Aaron Wolfe, my co-writer, we wanted to explore what it was like to be a soldier who is returning to being a civilian soldier, who’s starting their day here, jumping into the heat of the action, and jumping right back into the heat of the action coming back. What that immediate switch from place to place does to a person’s psyche, and how you would have to struggle to maintain your core identity and values amidst that, especially when you’re doing something like what you’re doing in our film, which is horrible with using another body as a weapon. That leads to all kinds of scary places ethically and places that you’re going to have to challenge yourself to resolve, even though you’re doing it for what you think is a good reason. It’s such a rich and interesting territory to explore.

Can you break down how the casting process went down and how it fell into place?
My casting philosophy has always been “an interesting actor, first and foremost, has to be an interesting person.” Specifically in this business and in this town of Hollywood or near Hollywood culture that we have. When you’re looking at actors, people must have an inner life and an inner set of beliefs that drive and guide them. You take one look at Andy [Allo] ‘s material on her website and the things that she cares about in her life, the fact that she’s a musician and has had a lot of lives up to this point.

It made it for me. It was like, “This is somebody I want to connect and talk to.” Once we started talking, we already shared such a common language because of Andy’s experience with ‘Upload’ and falling in love through bodies other than her own. That was an interesting place for us to start the conversation. Andy was having so much fun talking about the concept and how she would approach the character. I thought not only was I familiar with her acting chops and her on-screen presence, but through that first conversation, it was like, “This is somebody that I want to collaborate with and work with.”

The same thing for Nomzamo. We were putting Nomzamo into some dark places, and something that applies to both Andy and Nomzamo is Aaron Wolfe. My co-writer and I were both so confident about letting the script take us to dark places and how we play against the innate natural, dark path that the script will lead us down. In doing so, we wanted to balance that with lightness, love, fun, and humanity. Andy brings this sense of energy and fun to the role in her day-to-day life. Nomzamo is such an earnest, honest, vulnerable, caring person, and seeing that come up in my conversations with her, knowing about her, how she does humanitarian work, and she’s a UN humanitarian. She opens schools and shows how much air and love she has for other people organically and naturally without even having the layer of a character on it.

These were interesting places for me to start where for both roles, and I said these are both people I want to collaborate with. I didn’t sweat the issue of “Are these two going to pair well together? Do I need to cast one about the other since Nomzamo, whose character, spends a fair amount of time in Andy’s body in the film?” Based on my conversations with both and my interest in working with them, I knew, “We’re going to come up with our language of how that works. There’s nothing in the casting process that needs to reflect that. That’s going to be three people collaborating.

This is your feature debut. What helped guide you in the process of making this film? Can you speak about what it meant to have Bruce on set?
It’s sad and heartbreaking that Andy, Nomzamo, Dominic [Purcell], Mustafa, Fernanda [Andrade], and I will not get a chance to sit down, watch the film with him, and have an opportunity to celebrate what we did, and that sucks. Rewinding the clock to when we started talking to his team and talking to him about the role, there was a lot that resonated with this role for him. Specifically, I think he knew he would do a few more films in his career. This was something that spoke to him in terms of being like an elder statesman in the sci-fi realm and being like a godfather in the action thriller, sci-fi, and the trajectory from years ago when he was in ’12 Monkeys’ and being that poor, vulnerable guy in that chair with a scientist poking, prodding at him and tell him, “You can do this, you have to do this and here’s why.”

Now it’s Nomzamo as Alexa in that bathtub full of ice, and he’s on the sideline, being that same kind of scientist role, looking from the outside in and still having such a weighted presence in the film. He knew that he was showing up to help Godfather in a younger generation of new filmmakers, new and up-and-coming talent. That was special for him and each of us in our way, we had a great moment or two with Bruce Willis on set, and watching that guy slip in and out of character so seamlessly was terrific. I’m thankful that we got a chance to have him.

Assassin is available in theaters, on digital, and on demand.