Netflix Crime Drama ‘The Brothers Sun’ Lights for the Laughs

There’s a moment early in Episode 2 of “The Brothers Sun” that goes way harder than it needs to. It’s not any of the bodily dismemberment as gangster Charlie (Justin Chien) breaks up the pieces of an assassin with the calm help of his mother, Eileen (Michelle Yeoh), while his estranged younger brother Bruce (Sam Song Li) looks on in horror. It’s not the ambush where Charlie and Bruce need to escape hitmen wearing inflatable dinosaur costumes. It’s not any of the machinations of the Taipei gangsters now gunning for the Sun family. It’s just this little beat of Yeoh sitting at a vanity, taking a moment amid the massive disruption to her life brought by Charlie’s arrival from Taipei and the failed hit on her husband Big Sun (Johnny Kou).

The room is drenched in color and yet ringed by shadow. The image is mellowed by a softer focus and spiced up by a flare that arcs through the frame just ahead of Yeoh’s face. Director Kevin Tancharoen and cinematographer C. Kim Miles crafted the scene so that the image visually dramatizes both the character’s emotions and the show’s tone towards that character. Visually, in other words, the scene’s got vibes.

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Making mundane moments feel heightened or creating a distinctive sense of space through cinematography certainly isn’t new to TV or film — one need only look at “Atlanta,” “Euphoria,” or “Beef” to find different ways that cinematographers crank up colored lighting, arrange contrasts, and shape shadows in order to better tell the story. But it’s interesting to look at how “The Brothers Sun” approaches its vibey visuals because the juxtaposition of how the show looks and what’s happening on screen is a huge part of how the series wants to rubber-band between thriller and comedy.

To start with, Miles created different look up tables, or LUTs, for the different “worlds” within the series (LUTs adjust color values to allow filmmakers to view a camera’s source image as close as possible to the filmmakers’ final, desired look after it’s been color graded). Miles wanted a sharper, cleaner image shot through with stronger colors for the gangster or Taipei worlds of the film and a warmer, dirtier image for the Sun’s humbler, middle-class family lifestyle in the San Gabriel Valley.

“San Gabriel had a dirtier, higher contrast, more gritty kind of look, and we were doing things with diffusion filters — like, we had bronze diffusion that we were using in front of the lens in San Gabriel to add a little bit of a dirty brown to the shadows and that sort of thing,” Miles told IndieWire. “Then for Taipei, we built a super slick, moderately contrasty LUT that was very clean and a little bit cooler in the shadows.”

Instead of striking an overall balance, “The Brothers Sun” goes for it from the jump. The first scene of the show is one of Charlie fighting a set of toughs in his lux apartment in Taipei; though their most cruel act, perhaps, is the fact that the fight interrupts Charlie baking a cake while watching “The Great British Bake Off.” The very cleanness and coolness of the image, with the kind of anonymously minimal, vaguely Scandinavian interior design that would be at home in “Succession,” is what makes the fight and the specificity of the “GBBO” reference funny. It’s not just that the lighting supports the story. The look of the space is the setup for the punchline of the flying punches.

This is the baseline from which cinematographers Miles and Andrew Mitchell, and production designers Mark Hutman and Ray Yamagata build. By the end of Episode 1, the gangster club lair is arranged with the kind of red and black color palette lined with teddy bears that wouldn’t be out of place in “Scott Pilgrim,” and Miles wanted an exotic animal dealer’s space to feel like walking into “Blade Runner.” Wherever “The Brothers Sun” can, it uses color and shadow to transform what should be a normal space into one that’s gangster-fied, genre-fied, and visually more than the sum of its parts.

But the show also wants to emphasize comedy in the look of the Sun’s domestic spaces. “The story that I’ve been telling is [for Mama Sun’s] house in San Gabriel, there’s this bright orange street light outside. It always blindingly floods the living room with light. And the reason [the Suns] live in that house is because they got a good deal on it because nobody else wanted to live with that obnoxious light coming in,” Miles said.

The bright orange streetlight is the diegetic excuse for folding the Sun house in warm colors that initially isolates each of the characters and makes us focus on the distance, visual or emotional, between them. But it then allows Miles to create a softness and a grittiness to the imagery that makes the characters more tangible and relatable than the larger-than-life villains ranged against them. “Every time you look at L.A. in the movies, it’s always this romanticized metropolis that’s got the glitzy lights, and it’s always where everyone wants to be, but in reality, it looks a lot like the San Gabriel Valley. It’s dusty and kind of strip mall-y and not really romantic at all. So we wanted to embrace that and make that almost a character in the show,” Miles said.

Miles also used different lens sets to accentuate the different environments, again emphasizing a modern, clean, more perfect look for Taipei and the associated gangster worlds while going with lenses that had more character for the San Gabriel sections. “For San Gabriel, we were using a set of [ARRI Rental Prime DNAs] that are a little bit dirtier. They’re derived from collections of old glass from different lenses,” Miles said. “We were able to tune them so we could darken corners of the lenses, and we could defocus sections of the frame, building different looks and different fields for different parts of the world.”

The contrast between San Gabriel and Taipei was carefully planned in advance, but exactly how much the look of both worlds would stretch to make the visuals feel as large as the fight choreography was something that really came together in the shooting of that early Episode 2 moment, which is Miles’ favorite sequence in “The Brothers Sun.”

“For every show, there’s a moment. Despite all of our planning and prep and everything, it’s all kind of nebulous until a specific moment happens, every show at a different time. And on this show, we were doing that sequence on day two and we were moving a light around outside to provide the sunlight coming in,” Miles said. “It just momentarily paused in the frame, this big flare coming in, and that was the moment for me that this show gelled. I was like, ‘Stop moving that light. That’s where it goes, right in the shot.’”

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