Director Elegance Bratton made his name on intimate, lower-budget work: Pier Kids, his 2019 documentary on queer and trans youth in New York, and The Inspection, his 2022 narrative debut drawn from his own life as a young gay Black man in the Marines. By Any Means moves him into different territory: a Paramount studio release starring Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, with the budget, crew size and star power of a major production behind it.

Bratton frames the jump in scale as continuity, not a departure from his indie roots.

“I see it as an expansion of what I’m already interested in,” Bratton said in an interview with AfroTech Culture. “In The Inspection, I dealt with institutions, masculinity and betrayal, right? The way these institutions kind of leave us as islands upon ourselves. So this was a way to ask those types of questions in a movie that grabs you by the throat, doesn’t take any prisoners, asks no questions and makes no apologies for it.”

“For me, this was an opportunity to understand what an Elegance Bratton movie could be at scale,” he said, a bigger canvas for questions he’d already been posing on indie budgets.

Learning the Machinery of a Bigger Budget

A studio budget brought logistics Bratton hadn’t managed on his indie films, starting with makeup continuity for Wahlberg’s prosthetic look.

“Putting Mark in his prosthetic and making sure he looks the same every time, and how that affects the whole production, right? I’d never been in that situation before,” Bratton said. “So that was something I learned right away. Granted I had Howard Berger and Mark’s team, and they were phenomenal. They held me down and we made our schedule and we came in under.”

“I learned how the mechanisms of having these bigger names in a project can kind of change the calculus of everything around them,” he said.

He describes the pressure of that jump in caliber as productive rather than a burden: “Working with actors…a movie star like Mark Wahlberg, a movie star like Yahya Abdul-Mateen…it forces you to step your game up.” Even with a studio’s resources behind him, he said, his core job hasn’t changed: “My goal as a director is to create an environment for everybody to do their best work.”

What Scaled Up, What Didn’t

Bigger budget or not, Bratton said his process stayed grounded in the same research rigor that built his documentary and indie work. The film centers on the 1966 killing of civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer in Mississippi.

“It was inspired by my collaboration with the Dahmer family for this film,” he said. “I did extensive research with the Dahmers, the Scarpas, the FBI, the Klan, the justice system. Many people advised on this script.”

That research shaped a deliberate choice to keep graphic violence against Black bodies off screen, centering the Dahmer family’s experience instead.

“Vernon Dahmer is the moral center of the film. He died defending democracy, and he didn’t die powerless. He died because he understood the power of Black citizenship,” Bratton said. “So when I depicted that violence, I didn’t want to depict violence showing the Klan doing things we know they did. I wanted to show it from the inside what it’s like to be a good American family who’s done nothing wrong, and to be assaulted by people who are too fearful to show their faces.”

With the budget and stars scaling up, Bratton says that the instincts he built making indie films and documentaries didn’t change at all.