Earlier this year, news that tennis star Naomi Osaka was pulling out of the 2021 French Open shocked tennis officials, commentators, and even fans. She had already refused to attend post-match press interviews, citing mental health concerns, and been fined as a result. But to those who have trouble making sense of the soft-spoken four-time Grand Slam Champion’s recent moves—including pulling out of Wimbledon—a new docuseries may provide a path to understanding.
When Netflix approached Garrett Bradley to direct a project about the world’s number 2 tennis player, the filmmaker already had a significant body of work under her belt, including a feature and several short documentaries. But she had never shot a sports docuseries, or anything about the sports world at all. Conceptually, though, Bradley was well equipped for the project. Her habit of getting to know her subjects intimately before even picking up a camera informed the rapport she built with Osaka. The resulting series, Naomi Osaka, out July 16 on Netflix, is stunning in its attentiveness to and harmony with the Japanese player’s somewhat mysterious inner world.
Vanity Fair previously covered episode one of the series, which premiered at AFI DOCS this summer. The following two 40-minute episodes continue Bradley’s approach, with warm gray color correction, dutch angles, and swelling orchestral music. Osaka speaks about her struggles to keep winning matches, the loss of her mentor Kobe Bryant in a tragic helicopter crash, and her thoughts about Black and Japanese identity and American racial politics. We also see Osaka surrounded by agents and cameras, apprehensive about being front and center at New York Fashion week, playfully wondering if a glass of celebratory champagne is going to get her drunk. There’s also Osaka’s uncanny resemblance to her Japanese mother, Tamaki Osaka; the determined calm she shares with her Haitian father, Leonard Francois; and the close and irreplicable connection she has with her older sister Mari, who used to be a professional tennis player herself.
To understand how Bradley managed to render a sensitive and arresting portrait that’s neither exploitative nor promotional, Vanity Fair spoke to her about collaborating with Osaka, her formal approach to both backstage and on-court scenes, and the utility of breaking away from sports documentary conventions.
Vanity Fair: People tend to see Naomi Osaka as quiet, but she can be outspoken in press conferences—and her voice is so prominent in this series. How did you begin developing your relationship with Naomi, and figuring out what kind of story she wanted to tell?
Garrett Bradley: It was a bit of a learning curve for me actually, because it was my first time making something with a person that I didn’t have a prior relationship with. So, that was part of what was exciting about this project. I also had to learn how to think episodically. A person’s life obviously is linear. It’s not actually cut up into sections.
I think that with documentaries—especially sports documentaries, and about public figures—there’s sometimes an inclination, formally, to have it be this chronology of events that have happened in the public sphere. And I really wanted it to feel like we were journeying with her. It wasn’t a recap of things that we’d already read in the press, or something that you could read in Wikipedia. But, how do we really understand Naomi? And how can I make sure that viewers walk away from this actually feeling a deep human connection?
That’s also what motivates my work, trying to bring people together. Trying to create a more just and transparent and loving world. And that means actually trying to dissolve a lot of the barriers that we think exist there. Naomi was in this place of contemplation, and I think she’s always in a place of contemplation. She’s an incredibly deep, observant person. And she chooses when she wants to speak. And I think that’s actually coming from a place of power than it is anything else. And so I really just leaned into where she was, and coupled that as much as possible with understanding the environment that she was in.
That environment was very different from the ones you encountered in your previous work, right? Even as you were filming her, you were surrounded by other people who are constantly paying a lot of attention to her. What was that like?
I didn’t want the series itself to be the fishbowl. We needed to be in the places where the other cameras weren’t. We needed to be able to step outside the fishbowl. And again, lean into her own humanity, as an individual, in the sense that we saw what she was being forced to contend with. What does it mean to be 22, 23 years old, and be in a room filled with people twice your age, with a bunch of cameras, asking you a ton of questions? She says herself that there are certain elements of becoming a public figure that nobody can prepare you for.
The questions that these things prompted for her internally, and on a personal level, also then started to radiate into the world. And the world has been asking itself, in the course of our filming, these same questions about value systems. About what it means to have a voice. What it means to work within, and outside of, certain systems that we forget are actually totally malleable, and totally changeable, and totally able to evolve with us.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but your own life changed while you were making this film: you were nominated for an Oscar for your feature documentary, Time. Did that shift your perspective at all, in regards to Naomi’s growing fame as a tennis player?
It’s interesting, because I’ve always been so much more interested in what other people think than I am in myself. And maybe that’s just an intrinsic part of being a documentary filmmaker, on some level. I don’t know if it was so much about my own journey, as much as I could just understand as a person, as a woman, as a Black woman, what it would be like to make sure that your ideals and your value systems are reflected in your work, and vice versa. I think that it’s something that all of us, regardless of whether we’re in the public eye or not, can relate to: how do you hold onto yourself, and make choices, and take risks when you think it’s impossible? When you think that you have so much that’s working against you? That’s a human experience. And I’m constantly in pursuit of unification, for all of us, in that way.
As you said, sports documentaries often follow an external chronology very closely. Was it easy, once you started shooting, to get outside of that? Because Naomi herself is not conventional. You can’t really compare her to other players, in terms of personality, or even the way she plays. So did that divergent path seem to present itself to you?
I think that there’s a connection between tennis being a mental sport, where one’s mental state really informs their play, on any given day. That’s for any tennis player. And so I was really interested in, what does that mean for Naomi? What is her process as a brilliant tennis player? And somebody who’s naturally really contemplative, and really internal, what does that mean cinematically? So for me, it was the challenge of visualizing headspace.
And Naomi was incredibly generous. Maybe she doesn’t speak a lot, but when she does speak, it’s very meaningful. It’s to the point and it’s expansive. So there was actually a lot for me to be able to work off from a visual standpoint. I really wanted her and her headspace to guide us, so that we understood how her environment was affecting her and the game that she was playing on any given day.
The series shows so much of the power in tennis, as well as the choreography of it. When you’re watching tennis live, you don’t necessarily get this level of detail; you don’t see the degree to which a player is adjusting and working. But in series, there’s an angular attention to players moving that makes it look so much more intense. How did you land on that?
A lot of these matches, tennis fans, at least, will have already seen. But I wanted to offer something to both tennis fans, and non tennis fans, that maybe is less apparent when you are watching it live—which is, again, the human factor. What does it feel like to go out on the stage, to not be able to ask for help, and to have a thousand eyes on you? In silence? That to me, was really important. And I tried as much as possible to add that element of the experience, again, to preexisting material.
There’s a point in the second or third episode where Naomi’s talking about her relationship to her sister, and how they’re similar and different. She says she’s seen as the mean sister. Which is funny, because it goes against the wider public perception of her. How did you understand some of the ways that she thought about herself?
I wanted to create as much of a safe space as possible for that to be laid out, without any judgment, at all. And she is young. I think that when you’re younger, the changes that happen in our life can feel really traumatic. And things change very quickly, which is also something we were thinking a lot about. It was really important that the series not attempt to be definitive of her in any way, because she is a constantly evolving being. We all are.
This year is going to look completely different for her than it did last year, and so on, and so forth. And she’s going to continue to grow, and there are going to continue to be many documentaries made about her, and with her, that are going to be different snapshots of different moments in her life. I just tried to honor that as much as possible. This is one moment in your life—it is not the moment. And Naomi Osaka, as a public figure, is going to constantly shift, and change, and evolve by her own dictation, as she continues to grow. And I wanted, more than anything, for the show to honor that, and also create space for her continued growth.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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