By this point, if you aren’t following the Team Deakins podcast, you’re missing out on some of the best conversations about filmmaking out there. In a recent episode, Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bradford Young opened up about his experience filming “Solo: A Star Wars Story” and its tumultuous production.
Young explained that he almost turned down the offer initially, wasn’t sure if he should do it, and that it wasn’t in “conversation” with his previous work so he couldn’t even wrap his head around how he would fit into that milieu.
“I definitely totally dismissed it at the top,” Young recalled. “Before I even spoke to the directors, I was like, ‘no way,’ and then I spoke to the directors and they explained to me, ‘this is what we’re trying to do,’ and at the time they were really referencing [Robert Altman‘s] ‘McCabe and Mrs. Miller,’ and then I was like, “Oh! Ok, that’s one of my favorites.’ I felt like that was in conversation with some of the stuff I’d been doing.”
Still, he had to soul search, and even sought out and consulted with members of his Black and indie filmmaking communities to see if they thought he should do it. He was also fearful about being chewed up by the studio system and then having no indie community to embrace him if he failed. Ultimately, with an almost unanimous blessing from his friends, family, and community, he decided that, at the very least, he should try it out to give Black cinematographers of the future a point of reference, given there still aren’t that many Black DPs in the field.
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“You gotta go because what you learn from that film, you can bring back to the community and teach young people to navigate in those spaces,” was a piece of advice he received from some of the elder statesmen of black filmmaking.
“For the next generation, why not given them a reference?,” Young said, further explaining his intentions, citing some of the few Black cinematographers he grew up with inspiration, like former Spike Lee DP Ernest Dickerson. “Even if the story is I got destroyed in the process, at least I tried it. The thing I learned, number one, I really enjoyed it, I had so much fun.”
Of course, a big part of the conversation around “Solo,” is all about the very public director switch near the end of production. Young opened up about his experience witnessing it all behind the scenes.
“It was [hard],” Young admitted about the director’s being fired from the film with only three weeks of production left. “And that was playing up with my fears, ‘they just hatchet people, and the next person comes in!’ But I always understood that Kathleen Kennedy and [the late Lucasfilm producer Allison Shearmur], they don’t play around. They’re about the art. It was great to understand there were folks in the process that were about the art [and] wanted to make sure this film has this feeling. ‘We don’t wanna lose this, because this is what people count on from these films.’ That was really refreshing for me.”
He admits he had a moment when he, too, thought he should bail on the movie.
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“When they changed directors, I thought for a second, ‘maybe I should go?,'” Young recalled. “But then I was like, ‘Nah, I need to stay,’ because we had done so much work to develop this look, my team and I. The film needed it.”
Ron Howard was easy to work with and just as disconcerted about the difficult situation as Young was. He also praised the filmmaker for being as open and being equally bewildered about the absurdity of the scale of these movies.
“When Ron [Howard] came in. The thing that is so lovely about Ron, is that, it wasn’t like he was, ‘I got it figured out!,’ he was very open too,” he explained of the experience. “He was also like, ‘Man, I’m also like, what’s going on??’ [laughs] So we were both equally like [taken aback]. I remember once we had three cameras on a sequence, and it was great to look at Ron, and he looks at me, and be like, ‘Man, three cameras, this is crazy, what are we doing??’ I had a great time.”
Deakins calls Young the contemporary Gordon Willis (aka the legendary cinematographer who pushed the envelope of shadow so much he was dubbed the “Prince of Darkness”), and he asked if the younger cinematographer got any pushback from Lucasfilm because the film is so radically dark, especially for a mainstream blockbuster. “Some of it is really dark!,” Deakins said.
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“I had full support,” Young said. “I had full support, which made me want to stay even more. They’re doing what they said they were gonna do. Cause I had a lot of questions [at first]. I was like, ‘if I go down this route, are you gonna support the vision?’ And [all the producers] and Kathy Kennedy were like, ‘we got you.'”
“They were patient,” Young said, recalling how they set up “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” as a visual touchstone upfront, but then went on to explain how their faith wavered for a brief second, but it didn’t last long. “[On] the first set of dailies, they were like, ‘What’s going on??,’ you know? [laughs] But by day two, they were like, ‘oh right, right, right, keep doing your thing.”