Welcome fellow surfers-of-the-web and film fanatics to the official website of DETOUR!
My name is William Dickerson, the writer/director of the film (well, I technically wrote the film with my screenwriting partner, Dwight Moody, but "writer/director" has such a nice ring to it, doesn't it?).
DETOUR started out as an experiment in the simplicity of filmmaking. Why keep it simple, you may ask? Well, it is survival instinct (keep this theme in mind, it's going to come up again). How does one survive in a town [Hollywood] that is purported to eat its young and go back for seconds? Some of you may take that statement literally, some may view it as a metaphor for high-concept fare that overshadows independent films and, in doing so, sparks an endless number of sequels; either interpretation is fine.
Dwight and I came up with the idea of a man trapped in a basement after his house in the hills gets besieged by a landslide. It was something we could afford to do, outside of the Hollywood machine. Both, the story, and the act of making this into a film, involved that survival instinct I mentioned previously. I needed to make a film, that's what I came to LA to do, and I wasn't going to wait for anyone, or any institution, to give me permission to do just that. Writing DETOUR, something I could go out there and make myself, gave me all the permission I needed. With that in mind, there is a lot of me in DETOUR's Jackson Alder. Jackson must learn how to survive on his own in a world that's most certainly not on his side. He's got to fight hard against the antagonistic world of unpredictable natural disasters, to persuade the ground to move in his direction, but if he can't convince the earth to swing its vote, well, he has no choice but to dig his way right through it - even if it means certain death.
