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Bradford Young is all about pushing the boundaries. In his latest efforts to keep pushing, he's currently off in Sri Lanka with Tibetan director Khyentse Norbu filming a feature about class struggle in India. He has done a documentary on the postwar world of Liberia (with Dee Rees), he has shot more than a few movies about the struggles of being an African-American, and with Pariah he dove, headfirst with writer/director Rees, into the challenges of a teenager embracing her new identity as a lesbian.
Cinematographer Bradford Young won the Excellence in Cinematography Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. |
The film follows Alike (pronounced ah-lee-kay), a 17-year-old African-American woman who is coming into her own. With peer pressure and parental dissent, she manages to dive into the obstacle course that is teenage-hood with tenacity and courage. As heartbreaking as the story is, Alike proves that perseverance and a strong sense of self-worth can take a young woman a long way.
The story is semi-autobiographical, written on lunch breaks by Rees while she was interning on Lee's Inside Man and finishing graduate school at NYU's film program. It was originally a feature-length film, but Rees needed a thesis so she took the first act and shot it as a short with Young. Pariah (the feature) was bought for distribution by Focus Features, and Rees is now in the developmental stages with HBO and Margaret Nagle on a new project starring Viola Davis.
"From a visual perspective, it was all about camera serving character," says Rees. "As [Alike] came into herself, we used more and more white light and widened out the lens. In each character's case, we wanted to use color and contrast to show who they were. It was a very expressive and lyrical approach—more about how things felt than about how they were."
For Young, who always does his own operating, this was his first attempt at taking a short and turning it into a feature. He feels they were able to create a nice bridge between the two, but admits that the short always had a bit more integrity to it.
"It was more robust," he says. "We were younger and less apprehensive about pushing the limits. The older you get, the less secure you are in your decisions, I believe."
The short was shot on Kodak Vision2 5218 film stock. The reason they went with film was as much a creative decision as it was a decision of the times. "There weren't any good enough video options to push the boundaries we wanted to push," Young states. "This was around the time that the HDCAM was emerging, so it wasn't really possible for us to use it. We felt like film was the only thing that would hold true to what we wanted to do with color and contrast and being able to go deeper into the image in terms of shadows. Film was really the only thing that would be representative of that."
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