Sleepless is de nieuwe Jamie Foxx film waar in hij een corrupte politie agent speelt die van de verkeerde mensen gestolen heeft, die op hun beurt weer zijn zoontje hebben ontvoerd en hun gestolen waar terug willen. De eerste trailer showde dat dit een soort van mix tussen Taken, Trainingday en John Wick is. Vandaag verscheen er dit interview met de regisseur Baran Bo Odar op de website Collider en daar van kan je hier onder alvast twee vragen zien.

Can you talk about how this project first emerged?

BARAN BO ODAR: Jamie was already attached to this project when I came on board. The producers were looking for directors, and my movie that came out in Germany was a big success there, and then of course it's Hollywood. They look at big successes and watched the movie. They liked it and screened it everywhere. I guess that's the reason why they found me. Then, I met Jamie in London where he was doing press for another film. We met there and we liked each other. Then, it took them two weeks to finalize this whole project.

You shot this in Atlanta, but aside from the chase scenes on the Strip, it's pretty much confined to this one casino. What were some of the challenges of shooting Atlanta for Las Vegas and creating a big action movie that's somewhat contained?

ODAR: I love Atlanta. It's a great city with great crews there, but it's really hard to make it into a Las Vegas version of it because it doesn't look at all like Las Vegas. There's no deserts. There's only trees. So, we decided to get as much as possible in interior set-ups and build up the casino floor. As you know, the movie is based on a French movie (Nuit Blanche) that's set up in a club, which is also a nice location, but we always felt like it's too small for 90 minutes. You can't really do much in just the club. We liked the idea of having this entire casino tower, which still feels like a prison for Jamie. It's a bit like a fairytale. You get the knight that goes into the castle and has to fight the bad knights to get his son back. We also felt like sometimes you have to get outside of this entire thing. There were also draft versions where the showdown was outside, taking place in Vegas on the monorail. We always felt because we were so grounded, as least I think with this action movie, that we didn't want to have this typical big Hollywood showdown, but rather something that was very rooted in the characters. We felt that going into that garage was like going into your dark side or a metaphor for that. We felt it fit better than having a typical huge Hollywood explosion.