Never Die Alone : Bringing Never Die Alone To Life


“Everything’s been building up to this point. Getting out of that hell-hole city. Re-inventing myself...Whoever said there was no such thing as a second chance in life was an ignorant fool. This is America...” - King David

NEVER DIE ALONE was shot in just 18 days, which only seemed to heighten the rough and tumble, street intensity of the story for the cast and crew. To bring the whole thing to life, the focus was on a gutsy authenticity. DMX grew his hair out and even put a little gray in it to better embody an aging gangster. He also worked on King David’s distinctive speech patterns. “I always talk fast,” explains DMX, “but King David moves a lot slower. He’s real curled-lip, slick-talking, but he’s got an easy tempo. I had to bring out that smooth mac daddy thing.”

Every detail was important to DMX. “I really put this character together. I picked out his Cadillac, I was there for the wardrobe and I even got comfortable wearing a suit,” he notes.
The fevered pace of the production kept the intensity going. “We were working so quickly that I really got an opportunity to get deep into the character,” DMX comments. “On bigger productions, you’re always taking breaks. But here, we just kept shooting with very few interruptions so you don’t ever get out of character. I was King David all day. For me, it was all part of trying to give a more heartfelt performance.”
David Arquette had a different challenge in preparing for the role of Paul – he had to experiment with essentially becoming a silent film star. “A lot of Paul’s scenes are just him listening to King David, taking it all in and absorbing it like a sponge. It’s an odd challenge for an actor, but it was also an incredible opportunity to explore a whole different side of acting,” he says.

Meanwhile, Ernest Dickerson was collaborating with cinematographer Matthew Libatique to create the film’s striking visuals. A lauded cinematographer himself, who helped develop the bold, jazzy look of Spike Lee’s movies, Dickerson has a distinctive visual sensibility that always comes to the fore. He was, in turn, drawn to Libatique, who is becoming one of the most sought-after DPs working in Hollywood today, with a filmography that includes such visually arresting films as GOTHIKA, PI, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM and TIGERLAND.

The merging of Dickerson and Libatique’s soulful creativity became a keystone of the film’s expressionistic style. “Like a lot of noir, a lot of what happens in NEVER DIE ALONE happens in the shadows,” observes executive producer Edward R. Pressman. “But sometimes the darkest moments happen out in the open, like when we see King David first establishing himself in the harsh white light of LA. The combination of Ernest and Matthew has resulted in a film shot through with an explosive visual energy that I’ve seen only rarely in my career.”
Shooting in Los Angeles, Dickerson aimed to create a kind of murky, nameless, universally claustrophobic city. “We wanted to capture that noir, city-at-night feel, and in the way that we shot, we sort of let the city light itself,” explains Dickerson. “We used a special film stock that Kodak has developed which allows you to shoot deep into shadows, and this allowed us to do a lot of scenes in the dark city using only available light, which helps give the film its look.”

Says David Arquette about Dickerson’s neo-noir style: “Ernest Dickerson has that rare combination of being both very story oriented and at the same time very visually oriented. He orchestrates each scene like it’s a dance. I think he’s really succeeded in bringing to life the incredible energy of this story and taking the audience into the wild, turbulent world that Goines writes about.”
Producer Alessandro Camon summarizes: “Ernest has brought a level of sophistication to NEVER DIE ALONE that sets it apart from the urban gangster genre, and makes it an ambitious, complex study of violence and Karma.”