Bradford Young has built himself a successful career, most recently with movies such as Selma, A Most Violent Year and upcoming sci-fi drama Arrival. Phil Lord and Chris Miller hired him to shoot their Han Solo Star Wars stand-alone movie and he's been talking up what we can expect – or rather, that we should expect the unexpected.
Given the dramatic weight of many of his past jobs, he might seem an unlikely choice for the space opera saga's most famous rogue. But, as he admits to Collider, he soon figured out that Lord and Miller, who have a history of confounding expectations, have big plans. "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," he says. "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."
And apparently, Disney and Lucasfilm have so far left them largely to their own devices. "We’re doing our own thing, that’s why we’re there. Phil and Chris are there to bring what they bring to their films, their very unique vision, their perspective on story and they asked me to come bring what I bring, and so just for that it won’t feel like any of the other films. And nobody at Lucasfilm is asking us to betray that, they’re saying, 'We’re in full support of what you do and we wanna make sure that we’re able to help you do it in the best way.'
"It’s gonna feel like a Star Wars film, but we’re definitely gonna break some rules, and we’re encouraged to do that. Visually, narratively that’s a good mandate. They really are about, from what I’ve seen so far, supporting up and coming artists, artists who have a strong vision and voice and perspective, and they really wanna permeate the films with those kinds of voices. So it’s interesting, very interesting. Not what I thought it would be, that’s for sure. I’m pleasantly encouraged and pleasantly surprised." For more from Young, head to Collider.
We were already intrigued to see what Lord and Miller will do with this one; their casting of people such as Alden Ehrenreich and Donald Glover have been spot on, so we'll wait and see. The Solo movie will be out in May 2018.