Interview with Bradford Young
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Bradford Young
American cinematographer from Louisville, Kentucky, who studied at Howard University. His films include Selma, A Most Violent Year and Arrival.
Source: Somerset House on YouTube
These answers are taken from Upgrade Yourself: The Cinematographer's Lens with Bradford Young on Somerset House's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What drew you to a career as a filmmaker?
I'm the kid who grew up on Star Wars, Goonies, all of these films that sort of colonized not only my perspective about what light and shadow are, but also my whole perspective about who I am as a person of color, as a black man, as a black person living in this world. Films haven't always risen to the occasion as the most caring, humanist art form. It's one that's oftentimes driven by commerce and puts commerce before the story. So to go to film school and be introduced to films that were literally all about humanity, about etching the human dilemma in film in the most caring, loving way, really rocked my foundation.
Ashes and Embers [by Haile Gerima] is a work that really transformed my whole understanding, sort of decolonized my whole understanding of what filmmaking was. And I didn't even know there was something called black cinema until I saw Daughters of the Dust. I knew about Spike Lee, I knew about John Singleton, but I didn't realize that black cinema was a question about an art, a question about form and content, that people were working hard to try to understand.
How did your filmmaking career unfold?
Ernest Dickerson, Arthur Jafa, Malik Sayeed and I all attended Howard University under Mr. Haile Gerima. I'm just trying to show you the lineage, the story of four or five cinematographers who went through this system of understanding image making and storytelling as a reflection of our experience.
Don't look at where I am now. Where I am now is 20, 25 years. I've been doing this since I was 17 years old. Look at my journey as 20 years of not eating at all. It's only been in the last few years that I've been able to have a certain level of, not financial comfort per se, but comfort in the fact that I can say no now and not face a whole earthquake of repercussions. It's a rocky road. There are very few slots, but I believe that everybody has a slot, and your slot is guaranteed when you are in tune with your lineage and your story.
Over a five-year stretch I made a decision that I need to start archiving my process and start thinking about my practice as an artist beyond just the blue-collar, hired-hand perspective that we all have to deal with when we work in the film industry.
What advice do you have for new filmmakers?
Don't let this filmmaking process, that seems oftentimes so singular, tell you that you are disposable because there's somebody else that can do exactly what you can do. It's not true. Only you can tell your story. The way you see light and shadow is determined by the story you have, and your story is unlike anybody else's.
I always say to young filmmakers: do you want to be hungry now or hungry later? Sometimes in order to secure your lack of starvation later, you have to be a little bit hungry now. But the hunger cannot drive you to make irrational decisions. The hunger should allow you to access the most powerful word you have in your process, which is the word no. I will not do that film, because it does not stand up to the things that I want to say in my body of work. That may mean you're going to shoot less films. That may mean less money right now. That's okay, because at the end of the day it will come.
I've always followed my gut. There are films where my gut said don't do it, and I still did it. Films where my gut said don't do it, I didn't do it, and it's the best decision I ever made.
If you're just starting out now, don't throw anything away. Save as much as you can, and really be intentional about organizing that.
How do you keep your cast and crew communicating well on set?
Vulnerability. I think you need to be an unguarded person in the process of making films. It may seem kind of illogical that you would be the most vulnerable in front of people that you don't know. There are many people on a film set that you don't have a previous relationship with. But that's part of the role that we play: we are the ones on the set that can never be guarded. We have to have the most amount of trust from every department, and every department has to have a lot of trust for us, because without images there's no cinema. It's just radio.
We have to be ready to share our emotions but also take in and absorb other people's emotions. Our role is to embody the words and turn them into what people have seen in their mind's eye, but our own experience can never be free from that process.
What's happening behind the camera, even with the director, isn't always the most trusting environment for performers. I think we have to be the ones in front of the actors where they say, actually, I trust you.
Who is your favorite filmmaker, and why?
Haile Gerima was one of my teachers, mentors, friends, brothers, my surrogate father. If you haven't seen any of his films, many of his films are at the BFI, and probably his seminal work is Harvest: 3,000 Years. He's one of the film artists of our time. The United States has had a hard time respecting his work and giving him the money to make as many films as he wanted, but in spite of a lot, Haile is able to continue to make films.
I remember I asked Haile Gerima, when I watched Harvest: 3,000 Years for the first time, why didn't you shoot in color? And he said, because there was too much green in the grass and too much blue in the sky, and I didn't want that to be part of the conversation. I didn't want anybody to talk about the colors. I only wanted people to talk about the story. And I was like, wow, that's why cinematography is so powerful. You have to make the right decisions.
Gordon Willis I consider to be one of the great mentors who I never had a chance to meet, but who taught many of us: using minimal tools to express deep emotional quality, staying out of the way so that the performance could persist, but also giving something very painterly to look at.
Describe your filmmaking style.
Before I shoot, I'll create a lookbook, and hopefully the spirit of the book shows up in the film. If not, that's also part of the learning process. You make a hypothesis, and you either support the hypothesis through your process or you debunk it. Either way it's all good. The redundancy of it gives me great comfort when I'm on set, because I know that I'm moving from a place of knowing, not a place of unknown, which gives me a lot of freedom to not know on the day and say, I don't know, I need to figure it out.
[On one film] I wanted these characters to feel like wood. I wanted them to have deep, rich mahogany, ebony, cypress colors in their skin. When you create that sort of tonality in a frame, you oftentimes need primary colors to offset it so it's not monochromatic. It's about finding the sweet spot of where you expose so that everybody gets their fair share.
I don't always think cinematographers should be seen. Sometimes we just need to be not seen but felt. Whenever somebody's talking about the cinematography in the film versus the film itself, I think the film has failed.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your filmography.
I've had to create opportunities and take on opportunities where I can work in isolation, by myself, without directors, so that I can assure myself that I'm still the image maker that I want to be. So I oftentimes do film and video installations, and I've been fortunate enough to have them in public institutions, so I can display them to a public that might not come see the films I've made. Arrival or A Most Violent Year are films a lot of people don't get to see. They get to go see Solo or Star Wars.
I'm a human being who just happens to also shoot movies, so films cannot determine my happiness nor my sadness nor my joy. I find a lot of that when I'm making my installations, and just down the street with my Bolex shooting grass, trees, the faces of my children, kids playing, mothers and fathers walking with their babies down the street.
One installation I did was about Teenie Harris, the photographer from Pittsburgh. I went back to some of the places where he shot in the Hill District to study the particulates in the air that are no longer present, because the industrial sector has been removed. That was all shot on Super 16, by myself in Pittsburgh at the crack of dawn.
Bradford Young's Full Biography
Bradford Young is an American cinematographer. His feature films as director of photography include White Lies, Black Sheep (2007), Pariah (2011), Restless City (2011), Middle of Nowhere (2012), Ain't Them Bodies Saints (2013), Mother of George (2013), and Arrival (2016).
In January 2017, Young became the first African-American cinematographer to be nominated for an Academy Award, for his work on Arrival. He is also the first person of color to be nominated in the Academy Award cinematography category since 1998 when Remi Adefarasin was nominated for Elizabeth.