Movie shot in his grandparents’ Charlotte home premieres at American Black Film Festival

Bryant Terrell Griffin was a Charlotte teenager when he first made headlines for his artistic talents.

His 9-foot-tall, 9-foot-wide sign sculpture included a 5-foot-in-diameter polished aluminum globe. The sculpture won a competition at the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics when Griffin was a 17-year-old student, and it still graces the Durham campus.

Thirty years later, Griffin is making headlines again, as a filmmaker.

“ Young King ,” a narrative feature that he shot at his grandparents’ and other homes in Charlotte in July 2021, made its world premiere June 15 at the American Black Film Festival in Miami. Scenes also were filmed in Gastonia.

Lead actor Vincent Washington won the festival award for best actor portraying an Iraq War veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder .

Film portrays Black middle class life in NC

In a recent hourlong interview with The Charlotte Observer on Google Meet, Griffin said he based the film on a childhood friend. Griffin was stunned to learn that his friend had been charged in a homicide. The man was found not guilty by reason of insanity, he said.

The movie is “an emotional roller-coaster,” Griffin said from his home in Culver City, California.

“It has laughs, it has extremely tense moments,” he said. “In the ending, I got a response from the audience that was really emotional. But it’s a tough watch. It’s beautiful, then it has real tough moments to watch. Part of the aim is to ground this in reality.”

“I wanted to tell a story that I could afford to tell,” he said. “And a story about middle class Black life in North Carolina, where no one’s a drug dealer, no one is a gang member.”

“We go to church on Sundays,” he said. “We try to contribute to the community in positive ways, just middle class working life, which you rarely see” in film.

Filmmaker: Veterans with PTSD deserve our help

That middle-class life narrative co-mingles with one “that pushes things forward, in terms of PTSD, trying to get help,” Griffin said.

Failing to address returning soldiers’ medical needs “can hurt all of us,” he said.

“There’s not really a way to deprogram the soldiers when they get back,” he said. “I feel there’s a contract when people sign up that the least we can do is take care of their health.”

Griffin also hopes filmgoers see that Blacks have a legacy of military service, too.

“Sometimes we’re not necessarily associated with being patriots, or serving our country,” he said. “So that was another subcontext that I wanted to share.”

Griffin’s grandfather served in Korea. Multiple other relatives were in the military.

“We’re as ‘American’ as everybody else,” he said. “We’re in the fabric of the country.”

He hopes to have an announcement soon about a Charlotte screening of the film.

“Star Wars” fan landed on dream job

Griffin embarked on full-time film writing and directing after a 12-year career as a visual effects artist and supervisor at Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic , based in San Rafael, California , at the time.

“Lucasfilm was an extreme bonus,” he said. “Every day there was a dream. I was working with incredible filmmakers.”

“When I started there, it was like a family-run company,” he said. “Even though Lucasfilm is a worldwide company, it was pretty much a mom-and-pop shop until Disney took over in 2012. So that exceeded all expectations.”

Griffin has been a “huge” fan of “Star Wars” since childhood.

At Lucasfilm, he worked on at least 50 feature films and television series, including “ Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith ,” Marvel Studios’ “ Avengers ,” and Warner Bros.’ “ Pacific Rim .”

His first screen credit was for “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith,” and he took his father, who lives in Raleigh and also is named Bryant Griffin, to the cast and crew screening in San Francisco.

“That was like a huge, full-circle moment, because my father was the one who would take me to see ‘Empire Strikes Back’ and ‘Return of the Jedi,’“ he said.

Hardest choice he had to make

Griffin’s family moved from New York to Charlotte when he was 13.

In a 1994 Charlotte Observer interview, mom Dorothy Griffin said Bryant was 3 and in day care when he assembled a miniature log cabin. It so impressed the staff, they displayed it for weeks, she said.

By age 5, he drew cartoon characters that appeared to have been traced, but weren’t.

Griffin graduated from Albemarle Junior High and attended Independence High for two years, before being accepted into and graduating from the School of Science and Mathematics.

He was studying industrial design in the College of Design at North Carolina State University when he learned about a recent graduate’s hiring by Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic, he said in the recent Observer interview.

Thanks to the graduate, Industrial Light & Magic recruiters visited N.C. State his junior year. “Normally, Lucasfilm would just recruit from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, or in Detroit,” Griffin said. “They would never come to the East Coast.”

After graduating from N.C. State, Griffin received an offer to apprentice for three months at Industrial Light & Magic, “and that three-month apprenticeship turned into 12 years.”

That all happened after Griffin dropped out of N.C. State, worked in a bank, washed cars and returned to the university and won the Pumpkin King scholarship offered by NCSU grad Jonathan Harb, the Observer reported in 2007. Harb worked at Industrial Light & Magic.

Griffin graduated from N.C. State University with a bachelor’s degree in industrial design in 2003.

When he chose his major, “I was looking at going into engineering or architecture — some way to hopefully make money with art in some tangential way,” he said with a laugh. “Because I was always taught that art would never make money.”

Leaving Lucasfilm 13 years later “ was the hardest thing I had to do,” Griffin told the Observer. He loved the place, but filmmaking beckoned.

Co-directed Emmy-nominated documentary

Griffin resigned from Industrial Light & Magic about the time “The Force Awakens” was released in November 2015. He was 37 and had been accepted into the UCLA Graduate Filmmaking Program.

“I liked that they allowed you to make a feature film for your thesis film,” he said. “I knew I wanted to make a feature film.”

The UCLA program is three to four years, “and it took me five because of the pandemic,” he said. “So I didn’t shoot the film until 2021.”

The film was “Young King.”

Last year, Griffin also co-directed an Emmy-nominated documentary for KCET, the PBS station in Los Angeles. “L.A. Rebellion: A Cinematic Movement” spotlights the first group of filmmakers to integrate the UCLA film school.

He’s finishing a second PBS documentary, to premiere in October, about Brockman Gallery , a long-closed Los Angeles contemporary art gallery that allowed Black artists to exhibit in the late 1960s, in an era when they were banned.

“Almost had tears in my eyes”

Explaining his mid-career switch to movie making, Griffin said he’d always had a passion for film. “I wanted to write and direct, because I was always into fantasy and science fiction,” he said.

“During that time, a lot of the protagonists tended to be white men, for the most part,” he said. “That didn’t stop my love of it, but I always dreamed of seeing a person of color in the protagonist role, which has become kind of trendy since 2016, 2017.

“I almost had tears in my eyes when I watched the first screening of ‘ Black Panther ,’” the 2018 Marvel Studios action/sci-fi film.

“I see diversity as doing a couple of things,” he said. “It does something creatively. When you tell the same story with the same variables, it does get stale. When you diversify the characters, it gives you more to play with.”

“And subtext comes into that as well,” he said. “I think it just adds variations into the stories you can tell and adds creativity.”

Financing from family and friends

Filming “Young King” took several weeks on a budget “way, way below a million dollars,” Griffin said. “All private financing.”

Younger brother Sherard Griffin is senior director of AI engineering at Red Hat , the Raleigh-based software giant. Their father also lives in Raleigh.

Friends of the Griffin brothers who work in tech “believed in me as a person,” Bryant Griffin said. “And they were willing to give me sizable sums of cash to embark on this journey and hopefully start a career as a director.”

“Some are in Charlotte, some in Raleigh, but all are North Carolina-bred,” he said about his financial supporters.

Griffin used 15 to 20 industry professionals from the Charlotte area and 10 from out of town to make “Young King.”

Charlotte-based Cinelease provided the lighting gear. Camera and lenses came from Illumination Dynamics, also of Charlotte.

“Our film would not have been possible without the local Charlotte community,” he said. “This film was made as a love letter to North Carolina.”

He shot most of the movie in and around the home of his grandparents, Bishop Evert and Ann Moore in the Idlewild Farms neighborhood in east Charlotte, he said.

“With incredible support from my mother, Dorothy Griffin, of course,” he said.

He filmed driving scenes at the former Eastland Mall site before new construction there. Church scenes were shot at Pleasant Grove AME Zion Church in the University area. “Minister Brown was so gracious in allowing us to film there,” he said.

“The journey to being writer-director is a tough one,” he said. “It’s very tough. It’s extreme highs followed by extreme lows. And you just try to navigate that.”

“Again, the community coming together for the film was incredible,” he said. “That kind of love is hard to explain.”

Trips home

Griffin most recently visited Charlotte for his grandfather’s funeral. His grandfather died on May 1 at age 89.

On trips home, Bryant Griffin usually hangs out for a month, visiting cousins, aunts and uncles as well, he said.

His favorite “restaurant” is his mom’s south Charlotte kitchen.

“It’s my mom’s cooking and my grandmother’s cooking that I come back for: Southern cooking, mac and cheese, greens, baked chicken. Southern-style cuisine is hard to find in LA,” he said.

“My mom will explore and try to cook some Asian, too.”

What’s next for Bryant Griffin?

Griffin said he is working on a film that’s “a real labor of love”: A coming-of-age story about growing up in the ‘90s, geared “specifically for Charlotte, North Carolina.”

“It’s a real fun and sweet piece,” he said. “I’m hoping to start shooting that next year, if we can get financing lined up. It will be a real fun one.”

He’s also working on the script of a short film he’s calling “Birthright.”

The plot involves a family able to genetically modify their child to be more successful in life. “So they start to change its identity,” he said.

The film “kind of questions what is identity, and if you change certain aspects of yourself, what do you identify as? It’s a little sci-fi.”

He plans a second sci-fi film, about AI in the trucking industry, self-driving trucks “and how this would displace truck drivers.”

“I wanted to follow the story of a person in the middle of this, saying goodbye to their way of life,” he said. “And that being a sort of metaphor for us as a society in general — how we chase modernization, and what that’s going to do for people.”

AI concerns him.

“As you know, this AI stuff, it’s weird,” he said. “When you watch ‘Star Trek,’ you think AI is going to take over in other ways, but it’s taken over the creative spaces. Who would have thought?”

“It’s going to be problematic,” Griffin said. “… AI is going to give 90% of the people in the creative industry trouble. If you tell AI to write about something, it would compete with probably 60% of the people that want to break into the business.”

He worries about film executives thinking, “AI could find those stories or scripts.”

“And after one or two (business) cycles, they say, ‘Oh, that was a mistake,’ after laying all of these people off.”

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