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http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/ct-ent-bradford-young-0527-story.html
Arts & Entertainment Movies
How ‘Solo’ cinematographer found light in his Chicago childhood
Bradford Young
Cinematographer Bradford Young poses for a portrait near his home in Baltimore on May 17, 2018. Young and his family are in the process of rehabbing their home. (Jen Rynda / Baltimore Sun Media Group)
Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune
There’s a scene midway through “Solo: A Star Wars Story” that’s set in Chicago, that happens right here, on planet Earth, more or less. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away? Try a long time ago off 91st Street and South Lafayette Avenue, in Princeton Park, just south of Auburn Gresham. Bradford Young’s grandmother’s place. In the movie, you see the hero, Han Solo, enter a gambling den, the room crowded and dark, the air hazy and thick. Above a card table, a single lamp casts smoky, jaundiced yellows. You see two-headed shrimp people, six-eyed card cheats, one-headed lobster men. You see, at the head of the table, Lando Calrissian, draped in silky mustards.
But Bradford Young?
He sees his grandmother’s apartment.
He sees where he grew up.
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He sees “that one light she always left on,” the shag carpets in the living room, the vibrant oranges, the way sodium vapor streetlights in Chicago came through windows at night and lit the plastic on her chairs. “I see all of that there, because I put it all there.”
Earlier in the movie you see Han Solo dragged before a crime boss who uncurls herself into a sort of menacing intergalactic caterpillar, her face barely discernible in a murky, muted blue light reminiscent, even here at the edge of the galaxy, of a lonesome winter afternoon. But Bradford Young, who has become one of the most acclaimed and sought-after Oscar-nominated cinematographers among studio and independent directors, sees his grandmother again, standing at her kitchen sink and peeling potatoes in the dark, barely discernible herself, lit only by the flicker of a small TV tuned to an evangelist preacher.
“I am always seeing that Chicago of my grandmother’s house, where I spent a lot of my high school years. It’s in all of my movies, in the way I light faces, in the way I photograph. It’s alive to me, always a reference. Her place was heavy on the senses, so sparsely lit, so textural. I guess I saw a vision there, a deep black aesthetic, in the way things were placed, a response to how space was used that felt specific to our DNA. It’s Great Migration-influenced, really. You don’t have a lot, so what you have you display. Plastic on the couch — black people were not the only people who did this, but for us it transcended the practical. We liked it. My grandmother had one of those Venice scenes on her wall, the kind with a light inside that twinkled. It was fine art to her — aspirational.
“Anyway,” he smiles, trails off, then something catches in his voice and he stops. He sits at a reclaimed table in a gentrifying part of Baltimore, where he lives now. He looks away and chooses his words, waiting a long, quiet moment.
“Anyway,” he says finally, “that’s what I see.”
Actually, he sees far more.
In “Selma” and “Arrival,” in independent darlings such as “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” “Pariah” and “A Most Violent Year” — he sees traces of Chicago adolescence, and the tragedy that brought him to the city, a hurt he is still unpacking. “The way I see my life, there were many things in Chicago that could have taken me under back then — violence against black men, violence against one another, a penal system designed to take us from classroom to prison, an underground economy that could have taken me to a grave. But film allowed me to survive just one day longer.”
Last year, Young, who is 40 now, became the first African-American nominated for a best cinematography Academy Award (for alien-meets-Amy Adams movie “Arrival”). But even before that was a critical and commercial hit, Lucasfilm sought him for “Solo”; his reputation in the indie film world ballooned after winning the cinematography award at the Sundance Film Festival two times in only three years. His eye was as gushed over and his signature style seemed uncommon: Scenes shot in minimal light, often from a single, indirect source, as likely to trace outlines as reveal bodies, forgoing virtuosity for tenderness — the best landscapes in his films unfold across his faces.
And all of it underlined with a clear, singular goal:
Advancing an American cinematography uniquely drawn, informed by black culture, a cinematography as culturally and philosophically sensitive to people of color as it is technically aware of how light plays on faces and underserved groups are depicted.
In a galaxy far, far away.
And a neighborhood closer to home.
“Bradford’s skill is in no way limited to African-American stories,” said director David Lowery, who hired Young to shoot his dusty, rural 2013 crime drama “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” a poetic homage to the austere lyricism of 1970s auteurs. “That said, he takes an unusual amount of care with something as seemingly obvious as lighting skin types and what that light means. I remember on ‘Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,’ we had one of the hairstylists on the set play a small part, and Bradford spent a lot of time lighting her. Technically, he was piecing together an incredibly luminous image. But as he put it, he wanted the totality of black history reflected in a single image of a woman in a bar.”
Indeed, there are times when Young’s images do for black actors and actresses what the paintings of Chicago artist Kerry James Marshall do for black figures in fine art — simply, they bestow a warmth and complexity on black faces long granted to mostly white faces. Consider the textures and variety of skin tones in his work with Ava DuVernay alone, in “Selma” and “Middle of Nowhere,” her 2012 Sundance breakthrough, both full of vibrant faces filling his frame with the deliberate adoration once seen in old Hollywood.
Glowing, rich, less experimental than elegantly stylized.
“Understanding craftsmanship and understanding the texture of a culture should not be separate problems,” DuVernay said. “That Bradford combines them is what a great DP (director of photography) does. The thing is, many image-makers are divorced from emotional resonance. But when a technical skill set meets a strength of vision, you get excellence. It’s never technical dexterity alone — it’s always deeper if you’re thinking, ‘Damn, that’s beautiful.’ ”
Even among 40 years of familiar “Star Wars” images, Young’s photography in “Solo” is distinctive. This does not look like other “Star Wars” movies. Everything seems to happen at dusk or dawn, scenes are traced in golds and blues, coated with white fog. Tribal clans are lovingly shot, never one-note lumps of exoticism. Alongside cleverly referenced bits of film noir, and the sort of grimy, crowded dehumanizing spaces that migratory people get pushed through. Young himself says he recognizes the literal darkness in his work has only grown darker with each production, regardless of the budget or the scale.
After Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the initial directors of “Solo,” were fired by Lucasfilm a year ago and replaced by Lucasfilm with the steady, predictable hand of Ron Howard, Young says he assumed he would be replaced too. He says he asked Howard bluntly: Would you have hired me yourself for this movie? “And Ron, in that sweet Ron Howard fashion, said ‘Probably not.’ But he asked me to stay. I suppose he liked what he saw.”
Bradford Young carries a fast, easy smile, a faster, staccato laugh. He is warm and direct. A flannel cap rests on his shaved head. He wears a long denim shirt over a white T-shirt, canvas running pants and, around his neck, a Maori stone, a present from an assistant cameraman on “Solo.” He came here, he explains, via New York City, and before that Howard University in Washington, and before that Chicago — but before Chicago, he had a childhood in Louisville, Ky. He quickly establishes a couple of themes: His family was “very race conscious” and, in many ways, his mix of high aesthetics and grounded imagery is a reflection of his background.
His father came from a working-class family in Bronzeville, “and my father’s father was a preacher with a church at 95th and Greenwood who also worked as a cook in Wilmette and Winnetka. It could be family mythology, but the story goes he cooked for the Marshall Field family all week then served as a pastor at his church on weekends.”
They provided him with a textural, sensory basis.
His mother came from a prominent Louisville family — they ran a funeral home, still operating and among the oldest African-American businesses in the country. “My grandparents there were very much about supporting a black dollar and black life. I went to Howard, but many in my family also attended historically black colleges. My grandparents (in Louisville) were pragmatists, they had beautiful taste in African art, and my grandfather was board chairman at the University of Louisville for a while. After my parents got divorced, my father moved back to Chicago, and I lived with my mother in a 99 percent black community, corner stores, struggling people. My grandparents were generous. On weekends I went to their house, which was full of black art, black books.”
They gave him a headier, philosophical grounding.
“My mother was a single parent and struggled,” he says. “She got her college degree but she didn’t (have a degree) for much of her life, so my grandparents, who very much were about establishing yourself and striving toward prestige, were concerned.” In 1993, when Young was 15, and already traveling back and forth between parents, from Louisville to holidays and summers in Chicago, his mother died of complications related to having been HIV positive.
“Small town, big problems, no one understood, and my family was well-known,” he says. “I didn’t grasp the extent of it myself, but I heard about people who came to clean the carpets only to realize what happened and bolt. I got weird vibes from classmates.” He moved to Chicago, where his father (who died a few years ago) was a real estate developer and executive with the Neighborhood Housing Services in Englewood, working to streamline the mortgage process for black families. Young says he was struck by how segregated the city often felt — how even the music scenes seemed harshly stratified.
At Howard, among the film students, he found community.
Despite several notable cinematographers graduating from the school — including filmmaker Ernest Dickerson, who directed “Juice” and shot “Do the Right Thing” and “Malcolm X” for Spike Lee — there was no formal cinematography major or track. Said cinematographer Hans Charles, who met Young at Howard and served as his assistant cameraman for seven years: “The Howard approach to film was cultural. It assumed you would learn technical skills you needed, but the real currency was applying your own heritage. A group of us recognized there are always people who master a craft but, in a very conscious way, we could consider what we had that others couldn’t touch. You don’t normally hear every cinematographer talking about their grandmother’s house.”
They studied black film history, the way equipment — indeed, film itself — was far from colorblind, but often designed early on without regard to darker skin tones.
Young’s first major job after graduating was shooting director Dee Rees’ 2011 Sundance hit “Pariah,” about a teenager in Brooklyn learning to accept that she was gay. His approach, a kind of ingrained knack for leaning back and settling on faces and actions in long, steady takes that appear to almost nuzzle a performer, developed further in “Middle of Nowhere” with DuVernay, and in “Restless City” and “Mother of George,” both about African immigrants in New York, directed by Nigerian-born Andrew Dosunmu.
His work, as it rose in profile, also became darker.
Amy Adams learns of the aliens in “Arrival” from a newscast; we never see a screen, only a flicker against her pale, shadowy face. In “A Most Violent Year,” with Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, every sky threatens and every surface seems in debt to the velvety classicism of Gordon Willis’ iconic work on “The Godfather.” The small, sad recent drama “Where is Kyra?”, which he made with Dosunmu and Michelle Pfeiffer, is almost Caravaggio territory in its bleakness and embrace of inky spaces. His sets, he admits, are often so dimly lit he regularly hears cracks about turning the lights on. “I am well aware of how dark my work has become,” he says, “but it’s a response to the atmosphere, politically, socially and culturally. That darkness, for me, is not just technical. It’s psychological, from a dark place — it’s taken me a long time to say that.”
He says, even as his star rose, he found the supposedly progressive independent film world almost “an adversarial community with few filmmakers of color.” He recalls ”endless emails from agents who code language, who say my work lacks ‘scope,’ as in, ‘We’re interested in Bradford but worried he only knows how to expose black skin.’ These people don’t know, if you can expose black skin correctly, you can expose anything. I mean, until David Lowery came along, I never expected to work with a white filmmaker.” For his part, Lowery, who made the acclaimed drama “A Ghost Story” and the Disney remake “Pete’s Dragon,” said, “I am obsessed with texture. I want movies you feel you can reach out and touch, and Bradford does that, but also, the truth is, you have to want to spend five months joined at the hips with a (cinematographer), and after one breakfast with him, he was so generous I felt like we were related.”
For months, Young didn’t return calls from Lucasfilm.
He worried about selling out, assumed he’d be told the images were too dark, anticipated crippling compromise and was apprehensive about special-effects people.
“Then I met with Phil and Chris, and their constant reference was ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ ” — the dirty, smoky 1970s Western from Robert Altman. “They said they were making a Western. When artists like Ava and Steve McQueen (“12 Years a Slave”) work in the studio system, you never want them to lose the thing that got them there. So I started to think, ‘You know, there is no reason why I shouldn’t make a ‘Star Wars’ film.”
Young lives Baltimore with his wife and two sons, to have an affordable life, to be near college friends, many of whom live in the area. He left gentrifying Brooklyn only to land in gentrifying Reservoir Hill, a predominantly black neighborhood of rehabbed brownstones and rising rents. He also moved here to be near Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima, a Howard professor and leading force in the LA Rebellion, a 1970s Los Angeles-based black filmmaking wave that gave rise to directors such as Julie Dash (“Daughters of the Dust”) and Charles Burnett (“Killer of Sheep”). Gerima, though, is Young’s Yoda, the final place he looks before taking a job.
“I told him to do ‘Star Wars,’ ” the 72-year old filmmaker said, “because, if no for other reason, he comes out with knowledge, having gone into the white power structure of Hollywood and walked away enriched. Everyone benefits.”
He says a black cinema aesthetic, with “an African-centered cinematography,” is no concept: It’s real, just not an absolute success, and hard to explain. He says, “What Bradford and others at Howard are getting in their films is that it’s not enough to film black people in a frame and call it black cinematography. It might not even be a strictly visual aesthetic, but a holistic one. Jazz didn’t become jazz without an audience and discussion, yet film remains a European dictatorship — therefore a distorted vocabulary.”
In practice, at the moment, an African-American-oriented cinematography can mean Young strapping a camera to Oprah Winfrey for the scene in “Selma” where she is tackled by police. And it can mean, Charles said, “just a simple conversation with an actor about how they are lit — and I have had conversations with A-list actors of color who’ve never had that conversation with their cinematographer.”
DuVernay, who begins shooting “Central Park Five” with Young in a couple of months, said she “finds it odd how darkness (in his photography) would necessarily be equated with anything pessimistic. I think that has more to do with the standard cinematic tropes about blackness being a negative thing. Again, it’s about a cultural perspective.”
Young himself said, early in his career, he often felt “a deep inferiority” about his work compared with other cinematographers coming out of more famous film schools like New York University. “So I would have to start reminding myself, my aims are different — be patient.”
In 2014, he collaborated with New York artist Leslie Hewitt on an installation for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, about the mutability of images of civil rights landmarks. More recently, he collaborated with jazz pianist Jason Moran on an installation for Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art; right now, he’s working on a new piece for Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, about the history of black Americans and medical technology.
Hewitt said that Young’s work is often so interested in providing a lineage to the history of images, “and how we come to recognize beauty exists within things and people and places once perceived as having a deficit,” that a switch of careers would not be a surprise. Lowery said that Young has often talked about quitting movies to open a coffee house.
“Or work a community garden,” Young adds.
He grins, looks at the table and loses his grin.
“I’m looking for one script that says something big and final, then I never shoot another movie. I’m open to whatever that looks like. Seriously. I mean, I feel free — I’m certainly not chained to Hollywood, and I work with artists who give me a lot of room. But the art world is quieter, and I’d be more insular, and have more control. So, one last film. Then I vanish into the darkness. At least that’s the dream.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @borrelli
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