Julius Onah was 11 and still getting used to life in the United States when he saw a courageous everyman stand up to power.It was the summer of 1994,
Julius Onah was 11 and still getting used to life in the United States when he saw a courageous everyman stand up to power.
It was the summer of 1994, and he was watching Harrison Ford as intelligence officer Jack Ryan in the political thriller Clear and Present Danger. In the finale of the movie, Ford’s loyalty to his country and the rule of law leads him to confront President James Bennett (Donald Moffat) after uncovering the White House’s collusion with an international drug cartel. “Oh my God, when I first moved to America, there were two movies that I saw in theaters, which were my first times seeing a movie,” Onah says. “The Lion King was the first one, and then the second one was Clear and Present Danger, which was huge for me.”
That little boy, who’d just moved from Nigeria to the United States with his family, would not have believed that 30 years later he’d direct his own movie, with Ford playing the president this time, and Anthony Mackie as the heroic American service member who challenges him when he believes things are going awry.
Onah, now 41, is the director of the latest Marvel Studios movie, Captain America: Brave New World, picking up the story of Mackie’s winged superhero as he embraces the mantle of the red, white, and blue do-gooder. “I remember being in New York busing tables and going through all the difficulties, and the limbo at times of the [citizenship] process, and dreaming of making films,” he says. “Never in my wildest imagination did I think it would lead to making a Captain America film.”
This movie is actually the culmination of several of Onah’s dreams. One was to helm a big-budget action adventure after working for years on the indie scene, making scrappy crime dramas like 2015’s The Girl Is in Trouble, which was produced by Spike Lee, or the 2019 Sundance Festival drama Luce, which starred Naomi Watts and Octavia Spencer. In 2018, J.J. Abrams produced Onah’s sci-fi horror film The Cloverfield Paradox, but a Marvel movie stands as a major level-up for the filmmaker. Plus, it stars the actor who, along with an animated Disney lion, introduced him to moviegoing itself—and what it means to be an honorable leader. “To have Harrison be in this film, you can’t make it up,” Onah says. “Then you go to his house, and you’re like, ‘Holy, holy, wow.’”
That’s one of the reasons Onah believes so strongly in his adopted homeland. “I know what it’s like to have to aspire and try to strive for access to the American dream,” he says.
Before their family settled in the US, Onah, his twin brother, Anthony (who also became a filmmaker), and their three older sisters lived at various places around the world. Born in Nigeria, he spent time in the Philippines and the United Kingdom as a child before his father, Adoga Onah, who worked as a diplomat for their home country, brought them to Washington, DC, during Bill Clinton’s presidency.
As his father served for five years in the Nigerian embassy, Julius lived in Arlington, Virginia, and became steeped in the culture of the nearby US capital. Among his most bright memories as a boy were the blossoming cherry trees, which appear throughout Captain America: Brave New World. Asked what they represent to him, Onah answers: “Empathy. When you think back to the history of those cherry blossoms, they were donated by the Japanese ambassador and the Japanese government to the United States. There’s an element of connection, of moving past differences. It roots back to the themes that I think are so essential to this movie.”
When his father later took a up-to-date position, representing Nigeria in North Korea, the twins and their mother stayed in the US. “Obviously, with the support of the Nigerian government when we first came here, there was a certain degree of comfort. When that was gone, there was a certain degree of hardship,” he says. “On one hand I was the son of a deputy-slash-acting-ambassador, and then on the other hand I was a son of a working-class mother who worked at McDonald’s. It was two extremes that I got to live very quickly.”
Julius maintained his obsession with movies, studying theater at Wesleyan University and filmmaking at New York University, where he met Spike Lee, a professor at the school, who hired him as an intern. When he’d completed an array of shorts, Filmmaker magazine named Onah one of its 25 up-to-date faces of 2010. A year later, he became an American citizen, and was scrabbling to get his script for The Girl Is in Trouble made into a feature. That took another four years.
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