“Pawlak, whose work with Cretton on the indie feature Short Term 12 helped the film win the 2013 SXSW Competition Award, calls America Born Chinese a clear departure. “Destin and I’s past work has been for stories that don’t require a heavy-handed visual aesthetic, so we leaned in a ‘less-is-more approach to the cinematography,'” Pawlak reflects. “But this was based on a graphuc novel, so we gave ourselves permission that ‘more is more,’  and tried to have fun with it. We didn’t want to replicate the comic book, but we did want to lean into the folklore of the Monkey King and the many different worlds portrayed in the show.”…

…Unique to American Born Chinese was the close connection between 1st and 2nd units. McCleery, who had worked on a large Chinese film Zhang directed, says lensing for Zhang “is a delightful challenge. Peng is precise and focused, and demanding about the specifics of the fights, as they serve the storytelling in a vital way,” McCleery shares.”

Read the full article here (article starts on page 22).