Thanks to Prisoners and Sicario, director Denis Villeneuve has struck up quite the impressive streak with the esteemed Roger Deakins, an award-winning cinematographer who has worked on everything from The Shawshank Redemption to No Country for Old Men.
Alas, scheduling conflicts meant that Villeneuve had to elect a new director of photography for Arrival, and ended up turning to the up-and-coming Bradford Young. Deakins may leave big boots to fill, but based on early reviews for next month’s sci-fi pic, Young has crafted a unique viewing experience for Arrival that is as haunting as it is beautiful. Such a feat didn’t go unnoticed either, after he was elected DP of Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s upcoming Han Solo anthology movie.
Pegged for release in 2018, production is expected to kick into gear soon after the turn of the year, and during a recent interview with Collider, Bradford Young shed some light on what Star Wars fans can look forward to.
“It’s funny, here’s the thing about Phil Lord and Chris Miller: don’t let their track record fool you. Don’t put those guys in a box because they have a vision, they know exactly what they want. They have no hidden agenda, but they do have an agenda; they have a way of seeing that’s very special, and their collaboration is genuinely unique. So I have to say I had to get converted into that. I respect their work, I respect them as filmmakers, but I wasn’t quite sure if there would be a good marriage between what I’m trying to pursue and the work that I’m doing and what they’re doing, but they helped make that real clear to me early on by expressing some real interesting story [and] photographic ideas that really resonated with me. So once they started really pulling me into that world, I realized how much these cats have come from the same pedagogy of filmmaking—in the visual sense for sure, and definitely from an approach in terms of how we want to make movies, they come from the same school.”
A hands-off approach from Lucasfilm is certainly welcome news, and continues the studio’s new Star Wars strategy that burst onto the scene with the release of last year’s The Force Awakens. As the film will rein the focus in on one character in particular, there’s still much we don’t know about how directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller plan to tell their story – for instance, can we expect flashbacks? And are those mooted reports of a Rogue One cameo on point?
One way or another, come 2018, Lord and Miller will be introducing fans to a “complex, layered, smart [and] dramatic” affair.
“These cats are subversive, don’t let it fool you (laughs). They are prepared to say exactly what they wanna say and it’s complex, it’s layered, it’s smart, it’s visual, it’s dramatic, it’s funny, it’s uneasy, it’s unexpected. These cats are—I’m honored to have them in the list of directors I’ve worked with, that’s for sure.”
Disney’s Han Solo anthology movie is earmarked for launch on May 25, 2018, at which point Alden Ehrenreich and Donald Glover will be headlining the swashbuckling origin tale as Han and the young Lando Calrissian, respectively.