It’s surprising that Shade isn’t getting more attention for writer-director Damian Nieman. Not only is it a movie with a stellar cast for a first timer – including Stuart Townsend, Thandie Newton, Gabriel Byrne, Jamie Foxx, Sylvester Stallone and Melanie Griffith – but it’s also really good. The indie film was produced by RKO Pictures, but because they made a deal with Blockbuster, the film is only getting a minor theatrical release in a few cities before debuting on video and DVD on May 23.

But Hollywood’s loss is our gain, as Nieman is still quite accessible for interviews. That may change as Shade leads him to high profile films that do get major theatrical distribution, but for now, we got him to talk about the amazing course of events that led him to make an all star film his first time out. Based partly on his own experiences studying magic and card tricks, Shade chronicles the adventures of a group of poker hustlers in the underground card scene of Los Angeles.

Nieman was always ambitious, making as his student film at Loyola Merrymount a “Die Hard in a Nuclear Power Plant” piece. At 60 minutes in length, teachers were upset that he went over the 5-7 minute time limit, so rather than let them grade a portion of the project, Nieman left school before graduation. 10 years later, he is a working filmmaker, which is more than many people with film degrees can claim.

What were you doing before making this movie? I was working. I went to film school but that prepares you for nothing in life, so I bounced around in commercials and music videos a little bit. Taught tennis for a while. I worked in post-production for a while, oversaw some different things, worked as the vault assistant. Basically where I was when I started writing this thing, I was working at a post-production facility and decided if I had a post production facility kind of at my disposal, I should try to make a movie. So that’s why I wrote this to shoot and wrote it the way I did, as mostly dialogue, mostly interiors, wrote about what I knew and places I thought I could get for cheap. I was going to shoot this on my own dime with credit cards and stuff. And through the casting process, just me giving it to friends and them giving it to other friends, actors or that type of thing, it got into the hands of the actor Bo Hopkins. A friend of a friend got it to him, he read it and called me out of the blue and said, “I love this script. I’ve always wanted to produce something. Let’s go and do this together.” So we met, got along famously and became good friends. And we chased every kind of cliché money you can think of. Eventually, he got it to his ex-brother-in-law who is kind of running Merv Griffin’s feature division. That’s when things started to get going. They read the script, they liked it, optioned it, set it up and then it went on the wire from there because just trying to make the deal with other people, with other money and eventually it got to some other producers and RKO got involved. Then we were off and running so this little film turned into this big thing.

What do you mean by cliché money? Oh, because we wanted to try to retain as much control as we could, Bo and I. We didn’t want to just go straight into a studio and just lose it and have some other director. But we met with people from out of town, all over the country, they’d come in and say, “Yeah, I’ve got a million and a half dollars and I’d love to do this, but my girlfriend here would love to play Tiffany.” Every cliché thing you can think of we pretty much went through to get this movie made.

Where did you learn your directing style? In my backyard with friends, just on 8mm and VHS. And then watching every movie I could, stealing from everybody. I’m a huge, huge fan of classic movies and old movies. I have a voracious appetite for film.

How did veteran actors respond to a first timer? It was amazing. They all were in the right mindset. They loved the script to begin with. That’s why they did it because nobody did it for the money obviously. And they just took a crap roll. We met, I sat down with them all and did some card stuff with them, told them about the world, told them about my influences and how I wanted to shoot it. And they loved it. They were open to direction and with such great actors, it’s a breeze.

Who was the biggest surprise? Well, Stallone was pretty amazing in the fact that he was the kind of wild card. You didn’t know what he was going to be like. You hear stories about people and egos sometimes and there’s a lot of room on the set with all of these different stars for ego to come in the way. From the get go, Stallone was right there ready to go. He was such a pro on set, on time, no ego. Knew his strengths, knew his weaknesses and would be open to whatever I wanted to do. I told him, “Hey, I want you to play this older and more refined, gray up your hair, play this kind of statesman like card legend.” And he was totally all about it. Stuart Townsend was amazing in the movie in the fact that he had to do some really tough card stuff because I really didn’t want to use hand inserts. I wanted to show the actors, especially Stuart, doing the movies. But he does some things in there that will go by real card guys. They’ll buy it. He’s really doing the work.

What was the biggest lesson you learned? The biggest lesson was first and foremost get yourself a good crew and good people surrounding you because that’s what made this thing possible. With such a tight budget and a tight shooting schedule, if there was any problem along the way, it could’ve been disastrous at any point. I had a great line producer, Carl Mazzocone. What I loved out of this is that I got a really good group of people out of it. I don't know if I lucked into it. Carl was responsible for getting a lot of these people involved. They’re the people I’m going to use over and over again. Susanna Puisto, Greg Van Horn, all these crew members that are some of the best people in the business and I was really lucky to find them. Now I’ve got a family around me to work with, so that’s the biggest thing that I learned, is to have the best people possible around.

How do you make a movie about card sharks without giving away everything? Well, I wanted this movie to be about more than just poker and stuff, because I could obviously do a movie just about card stuff and show all the interesting things there, but it wouldn’t necessarily be interesting to that many people. So it really had to be about the characters. This movie I tried to do as an homage to all the classic con movies and card movies of the past, everything from The Hustler which was about pool but it does have a lot of overtones. It’s a lot of homage to The Cincinnati Kid. Everything from House of Games, Big Hand for a Little Lady, all these kinds of things. Just kind of taking some of the feelings and story structure and playing with that. The audience these days are so [astute] these days, especially movies about cons and hustlers. They’re always looking for the con and the double cross. I tried to guise them a little bit differently than some of the other ones and hopefully I’m successful.

How did you manage to do a big action movie as your student film? The reason I went to Loyola at the time was they were pretty much the only one where you really got to make your own senior thesis films. As opposed to like USC where they only make four or five films a year, and it’s sort of like a little studio. They pick a director, they pick a writer. So that’s why I liked Loyola, but I’ve been making 5-7 minute long films with sound since I was eight years old. I wanted to do something fun, which is why I ended up shooting this thing. I didn’t use any school facilities at all, other than maybe a couple lights. I had some really good teachers at Loyola that were great, where you sit and watch Billy Wilder films, which I’d never be able to see projected any other way. Those things were great, but a lot of times, people especially in some business like this where it’s so up and down, there’s a lot of bitter people that end up teaching and don’t really root for your to succeed. So when you go do something that’s different, or above and beyond, or isn’t gritty black and white about midwives, that’s about guys and guns having fun…

How many action scenes did it have? Oh, we had a lot. We had a lot of fun. We shot it at five different power plants. Just all kinds of fun and gunplay. It was just us goofing around. The fact that they only wanted to grade the first five minutes of it just kind of upset me.

Why not add another half hour to make it a feature? It wasn’t [a feature]. There were no actors in it. It was just kind of a calling card to get other things going, and it did. I got a couple meetings out of it when I went in and worked in commercials and music videos at a certain level, so it helped me in that. I never actually went and totally finished it to a final cut.

Has Shade led to more opportunities? Yeah, I have a few other things going on right now.

Because they’ve seen this? No, because people are just now starting to see it. My career’s been in a weird place for the last year and a half. Nobody’s been able to really see the film. Everybody loved the script and I got along well with people, so now they’re just seeing the film so now all these other offers and things are coming into play as far as directing. I’ve had a lot of writing off of it.

What are your next projects? I’ve got a couple different ones. I don't know which one’s going to go next. I’ve got one called The Lift which I wrote which is actually sort of a sequel in theme to Shade, just in the fact that it takes place in the same sort of world. It’s about a group of professional pickpockets and their machinations, so that’s kind of fun. I’m writing another script that I’m almost finished with. It’s kind of a modern day, Swingers generation Deliverance sort of things. Guys on a trip that get involved in something much bigger, scarier than they thought.

After you write what you know, how hard is it to find things to write about? It really isn’t that hard. It’s just something that I really enjoy, so I obviously want to do more in this world because I’ve barely scratched the surface on it in Shade. I do like these kind of characters and I love this kind of world and it’s kind of duplicitous relationships. I love the cheating hustler mentality because these people are so interesting. I’ve been around them a lot. The fact that these are some of the most intelligent, charming, clever individuals you’ll ever come across, if they spent even half the efforts on a legitimate profession, they’d probably be millionaires and retire 10 times over, but they love the thrill of the game and the hustle. Money won is twice as sweet as money earned type of thing. It’s an interesting psychological conceit.

Some people only have one story. I think I’m a font of useless knowledge so hopefully I’ve got a lot of things to write about here.

Are any of these upcoming projects to direct also? Yeah, I really want to follow on the writing and directing path. I’ve done a couple rewrites and polishes here in the last year or so. I like doing that. I like coming to a script and punching it up a little bit. But I really enjoyed the process of coming up with something from nothing or just from a gem of something or even from a remake and totally redoing it myself. It’s not an auteur thing but I think you have more control over it, it seems more easily accessible for me.

Would you direct someone else’s script? Yeah, I totally would. If I come across a script that I think is great, absolutely. And my writing is not the end all of anything. I said that with the actors. It’s like hey, this is a jumping off point. If you guys come up with something better, hey, that’s great.

Do you have a regular writing schedule? I don’t actually. What I do generally, and what I did on Shade and actually The Lift in sort of the same way is that I have ideas and things kind of float around in my head for a while. I kind of just let them marinate and gestate in there. And then all of a sudden one little thing and then I’ve got the shot. I know what it is. It just kind of spills out of me and I write really quickly. It just pours out and I just write one draft really quickly and then walk away for a little bit and come back and look at it, do a quick revision and that’s it. Do a couple changes here and there. Shade, I kind of just played around with the cons, trying to think of the best cons to work. These are all just kind of classic cons that have been around forever, so finding the right ones and using them correctly.

Did you have any crappy day jobs while you wrote? Oh god, yeah. I was a PA for the longest time. On films, on commercials, on music videos. I was on staff PA for a production company, so I did that. I did some telemarketing for a while at one point. It wasn’t so much telemarketing. I’d call up some place in Texas for whatever radio station and played them clips of 20 songs and asked them, “Do you like this song? Have you heard it too much? Have you heard it not enough? Do you want to hear it more?” Really bad country music or something. I didn’t have to sell anything which was good. I taught tennis for a while. That wasn’t a bad job. Then I worked at Post. That was actually kind of fun, especially at nights because I oversaw all the sessions that were going on in post. I got to play on all the different machines and then just write at night. It worked pretty nicely.

How did you first get an agent? Actually, after I got the movie going, I had no agent or anything. I just had a friend who was an entertainment attorney who kind of penned my basic deal. And actually the guy who’s my agent now, a guy named Dave Boxerbaum at MTA Metropolitan, he actually used to work in RKO a while ago and he actually came across the script when he was already out of RKO and he was an agent, and he started pushing at RKO, saying, “You guys have to do this. It’s a great script.” He’s the one who kind of got them excited about it long before knowing me or representing me. The deal was set, the movie was going and I found out that this guy was a big supporter of it. I figured if he worked that hard for me without getting a percentage, he might do pretty well.

You never pounded the pavement? I wasn’t going about this in any kind of typical fashion. I really didn’t have any connections, no nepotism. I literally just wrote the script to shoot, and this was supposed to be my little calling card of a film to get me other work or to get me an agent. So I had no other illusions than maybe doing this on some base level festival circuit or something like that if I got it done. It just blew up from there.

How do you think of character names? That’s a tough thing for me because I’m not really good with names. On this one, it was interesting because I decided to use all famous in the world magician’s names, hustler names, card guy names. They’re all just homages. None of them are actually supposed to represent anybody that they actually are talking about except for the character that Hal Holbrock plays. He plays a character who’s nicknamed The Professor. He was a real person at Magic Castle. He actually was the greatest sleight of hand artist in the last century and was the first guy to really realize that the skills of a professional card cheat and hustler could be used for entertainment purposes. So he pretty much spent his life seeking out these guys. When he heard about somebody that could do some move, he would track the guy down, befriend him. They would teach him the move and then he would take it back and rework it and use it for entertainment purposes. And he was nicknamed Professor by the rest of the magic fraternity because of this amazing ability he had to hone the tricks and really present them beautifully. So he was the resident legend at the Castle until he passed away in ’91, ’92. So this is Hal playing this character that everybody from Ricky Jay to David Copperfield to Doug Henning all at one point in time studied with Professor and considered themselves a student of his. His name’s Guy Vernon so I used his name twice, with Vernon the lead character and then as The Professor. Then all the rest of the characters, Miller, Jennings, Freeman, Scarne.