James Laxton Takes The Underground Railroad To A Lion King Prequel

Sometimes your favorite filmmaker has several loyal collaborators who have yet to reach the top of the awards season mountain. And, often, it’s their Director of Photography. For someone like Wes Anderson, it’s Robert Yoeman. For Chloé Zhao, it’s Joshua James Richards. And for Barry Jenkins, it’s James Laxton. And while all three cinematographers earned Oscar nominations only to lose out to one of their peers, the latter of the three may earn a well-deserved Emmy Award next month.

READ MORE: Barry Jenkins, Underground Railroad Barry Jenkins Hasn’t Let Go Of ‘Underground Railroad’ Yet [Interview]

Laxton’s work on Jenkin’s masterpiece “The Underground Railroad” is remarkable even in a year where his fellow nominees include Ben Richardson (“Mare of Easttown”), Steven Meizler (“The Queen’s Gambit”), and Shabier Kirchner (“Small Axe”). While he awaits word on his Emmy fate, Laxton is beginning work on yet another collaboration with Jenkins, a prequel to the “live-action” remake of 2019’s “The Lion King.” A project that will be shot and conceived of completely in digital form.

READ MORE: ‘The Underground Railroad’: Barry Jenkins’ Brings Poetic ‘Instant Light’ To The Ideas Of Black Humanity & Emancipation [Review]

“I mean, it’s a completely different way of filmmaking that is brand new to me, so I’m learning just as much about it as I possibly can as quickly as possible,” Laxton says. “But yeah, I mean, it is completely digital, just the last one with Jon Favreau, but in that one, Caleb Deschanel was the cinematographer. And he and I spoke about it before going [forward], to get my head wrapped around what I was jumping into. He spoke really highly of the process. It’s an incredibly creative space. In many ways, anything is possible because you’re just going to be animating it. So, while it’s new, it’s a space that I think as cinematographers we need to being really conscious of that because maybe [it’s] not the near future, but a distant future. This digital animation, but with the cinematographer’s voice baked into it as something that we should, I think, embrace. It’s pretty powerful stuff.”

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Earlier this week, Laxton took a few moments from that massive Disney endeavor to discuss the monumental work that went into “Underground” in a conversation you can follow below.

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The Playlist: I know you worked on this quite a while ago, and I’m sure it feels like a memory at this point, but belated congratulations on “Underground Railroad.

James Laxton: Well, thank you very much. I’ve finished it now. Thank you so much. It was a long time ago, but it was a very memorable year of my life. So, hopefully, it’s still stuck in my brain somewhere.

Does it go without saying that this was the hardest project you had worked on to this point?

Yeah, I think that’s pretty fair to say. I think it’s a project that definitely asked the most of me and the most out of me. I mean that both physically, but also spiritually and mentally as well.

When you initially talked to Barry about doing it, did you know what you were getting into? Was it clear that it would be this much, or was it not until you started reading the scripts and everything that you realized how epic the whole tale would be?

I think I had a conceptual idea about what I agreed to undertake, the director’s idea, the DP, the production designer, etc., the team in general, all taking on every episode of a 10 part series. I conceptually understood what that meant. I knew it would be exhausting and requires the dedication that I have yet to experience. But I think it was not until maybe halfway through that I really, my body, really understood what that meant. Just the levels of, whether it be exhaustion or what, but it definitely dawned on me really probably about halfway through the production, like this really was what it was going to be like, amped up. But it didn’t deter me, obviously. I wanted to give as much as I could to this show and, while I was maybe tired some days, it didn’t make me feel any less dedicated to the project.

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You previously shot films such as “Moonlight” in 23 or 24 days, so you know how to work quickly. Did this feel like indie film fast or television fast, or did it feel like you had more time?

I think it felt very similar, actually. It’s a good question to bring up. It didn’t feel like a departure in terms of pace. In many ways, Barry and I have always enjoyed the pace by which we film our projects, be that the indies or now television, in this case. It’s felt like the same. This time around, the scope was bigger in terms of just what we wanted to accomplish, but how we wanted to accomplish it seems like a different undertaking than before. But yeah, that creative pace and the demands of a schedule felt very familiar in many ways.

You’re a visual artist based on what you do, and it is a collaboration with Barry, but when you read the script, was there any scene or any moment that you were fixated on visually? Anything in particular that stuck with you?

I think a good example of that would probably be the series of shots of Ridgeway [Joel Edgerton] and Cora [Thuso Mbedu] falling that bookend our series. You see them in the opening montage, but spoiler alert for those who haven’t seen the show, it comes back around towards the end of the series as well. That was so beautifully written within the scripts that I felt like I saw it when I read those pages. It was wonderful to see those come to fruition because it did take a while. It was quite a large undertaking to film those scenes on huge blue screens and shot with what we call Phantom cameras, which are these high-speed digital cameras. It wasn’t until the VFX was done that we saw the images in our heads for months and months. But when we [were] very, very pleased and felt like, for me anyway, [they were the] kind of images that sit with me and stick with me, as I think about the show.

You answered my next question, I think. I’m guessing that the entire show was shot on digital cameras?

We shot on the Arri Alexa systems and, more specifically, the Arri LF, which is a large-format Alexa basically.

Had you shot on digital for a feature before?

Yeah. I mean, Barry and I, when we first met each other back in film school, we shot exclusively on film because, at the time, the digital platform really hasn’t had made its way into filmmaking yet. But we graduated when the opportunities to shoot digitally became more apparent or more prevalent and quickly transitioned to shooting digitally. So, actually, every single project we’ve ever done after film school has been shot digitally, be that “Medicine for Melancholy” or “Moonlight,” or “If Beale Street Could Talk,” were all shot digitally, actually.

What is your secret formula, then? Because I see so many DPs who are lauded and have good credits work with digital, and I’m like, “Yep, that’s digital.” But your films never look like that.

I think it’s funny. Some people would say that we’re trying to add film grain to digital images or change the color. I think Barry and I are after just images that strike us on a deeply personal level. And we create in a way that feels connected to the stories, and images that we feel give us the emotional impact we’re looking for. So it’s not as if we’re trying to mimic a film stock. I mean, we do a lot of work digitally, and in the aftermath and in post-production with our colorist too, his name is Alex Bickle. And with him, we’re tweaking colors and changing all kinds of different things, maybe adding a bit of texture, which might be film grain might be digital grain, might be something that makes the image feel a bit more organic than maybe some digital cameras come out the box with. But we’re just searching for the images that speak to us. But yeah, a significant amount of work does go into it and post-production. And in this case, for example, on the series I sat with Alex Bickle for, I think about three months probably. In a dark room, what people in the still photography world would call editing and Photoshop, but we have a similar process in motion pictures called color correction. And it’s just about changing this and the way the colors are transformed and are then presented.

The Gaze Barry Jenkins the underground railroad

Does that become mind-numbing after a while?

It’s a part of the process that I’ve always really enjoyed, so yes and no. I miss the outside world when I’m in those places, but I do really feel like it’s quite powerful, and I think the work we do in those rooms is actually very integral to the images and the stories that we tell. So, because of how important it feels to us, I never quite feel like it’s redundant or bad use of time. I feel like it actually brings a lot to our stories.

Did this process for “Underground” happen during the stay-at-home period in 2020?

Yeah, exactly. Alex, who lives in New York City, was in Los Angeles; we were doing what everybody else was doing on the planet. These long zoom or, in our case, FaceTime calls, where we would sit in a call, in a private little black dark box and talk about colors all day long.

You’ve been nominated for an Oscar and an ASC on the awards side, but did the Emmy nomination mean anything to you?

Oh, completely. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s funny nowadays, as we all talk about, I’m sure you’ve talked about, the idea that television is clearly going through a Renaissance at the moment. We call ourselves filmmakers, but we might as well call it our storytellers, not sure what the nomenclature needs to change to be anymore at this point. But I guess the show premiered on Amazon, and in this streaming space of content these days, the Emmys are incredibly meaningful to me, and the nomination of that is meaningful to me. It’s incredible to see the stories that people are telling these days on streaming services. “Small Axe” is one of my favorite stories I’ve seen on screen in a long time, and I think I could say that about a lot of shows that came out in the last year. I have to say this, the incredible other shows that are nominated this year. There’s quite a lot of just incredible talent that are coming onto our streaming screens these days. And I think the Emmy nomination means just as much, whether it be a big screen or small screen.

After going through this process, are you open to doing another episodic, streaming, or television project again?

I think so. It would need to be a particular thing, as you might imagine. I mean, I think I was fortunate, I’d say, to have my first television series be something where it was helmed by a showrunner slash, in this case, director of all the episodes. I think that’s pretty unique. And I think that if it was a world like that again, I felt like it was being led by someone like Barry or otherwise? Yeah, I’d be happy to, for sure. But I think it’s that director vision that I love to connect with as a storyteller, filmmaker, and cinematographer.

My last question for you is, I know you’re working with Barry again on the “Lion King” prequel, but as far as I know, the Jon Favreau “Lion King” was completely digital. Are you excited about that challenge?

I mean, it’s a completely different way of filmmaking that is brand new to me, so I’m learning just as much about it as I possibly can as quickly as possible. But yeah, I mean, it is completely digital, just like the last one with Jon Favreau, but in that one, Caleb Deschanel was the cinematographer. And he and I spoke about it before going [forward], to get my head wrapped around what I was jumping into. He spoke really highly of the process. It’s an incredibly creative space. In many ways, anything is possible because you’re just going to be animating it. So, while it’s new, it’s a space that I think as cinematographers we need to be really conscious of that because maybe [it’s] not the near future, but a distant future. This kind of digital animation, but with the cinematographer’s voice baked into it as something that we should, I think, embrace. It’s pretty powerful stuff.

“The Underground Railroad” is available on Amazon Prime Video worldwide.