It’s one of the oddest and most dismaying of all Academy Awards factoids: The Best Cinematography category was introduced at the first ceremony in 1929, but it took 90 years and 596 nominations before the category had its first female nominee. Rachel Morrison broke that nine-decade male monopoly, the longest stretch for any gender-neutral Oscar category, in 2017 for her work on Dee Rees’ “Mudbound,” and the following year, she became the first female cinematographer to make a Marvel movie with “Black Panther.”
Those two films are among the standouts in a career that has also seen her serve as director of photography on “Fruitvale Station,” “Dope” and “Seberg,” and that has now expanded to include her feature directorial debut, “The Fire Inside.” The Amazon MGM Studios release stars Ryan Destiny as real-lifebOlympic boxer Claressa Shields, the first woman to win a gold medal for the U.S. and the only American boxer to take the gold in successive games. Written and produced by Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight,” “The Underground Railroad”), the film costars Brian Tyree Henry as Shields’ coach, Jason Crutchfield, and is as concerned with Shields’ life outside the ring after the gold as it is with her pugilistic exploits.
A month after the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Morrison served as the filmmaker spotlight conversation at TheWrap’s annual business conference, TheGrill — and offstage, she spoke about her days at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied photography and film, and at the American Film Institute, where she received a Masters of Fine Arts in cinematography.
At what point did you decide you wanted to get into film? And why?
For me, it started in photography, and it was early. I think I was 6, 7, 8 years old. My mom had an old Olympus camera, and half the pictures of the family are from the point of view of a 7-year-old. (Laughs)
As early as high school, I would shut myself up in the darkroom, listen to my brooding teen-angst music and print photographs. So when I was applying to colleges, I applied to all the safe schools — ambitious but safe in terms of not being art schools — but I also applied to RISD and Tisch and some art schools. When I got into Tisch for photo, that was a no-brainer for me. And then, quickly, I got interested in cinematography, but at the time, there wasn’t a cinematography undergrad (program).
But you did study film at NYU.
Yeah, I ended up convincing everybody to let me double major in photo and film, which they said was crazy. (Laughs) They were maybe a little bit right. I managed it, but I was spread really thin.
And did you come out of those four years thinking that your future was in film more than photography?
No. Interestingly, I was taking my photo portfolio around by day and sending out my film reel by night. I loved it all and took any and every job that had anything to do with the camera. And at some point, maybe a few years down the line, the advice I was given was, “You really have to pick a career.” They are incredibly different. The type of photography I was interested in was very much photojournalism, even conflict photography. It was very documentary-style. I loved Robert Capa and Mary Ellen Mark and I was inspired by a lot of the Farm Security Administration photographers.
One of the things that I loved about film was the power of the story to build empathy and to have this entirely transformative experience. I would come out of the movie theater after a potent film and feel like I had lived another life. And as much as I loved photography, it still felt a little bit like I was looking at something, I wasn’t living it.
I think the secondary but maybe even more powerful thing was that I love to collaborate. The type of photography I was interested in was a very individualist and probably lonely career. And by choosing film, I was choosing a life of collaboration. I think, ultimately, I chose film because I wanted to be able to make things with other people.
Between NYU and AFI, you worked as a cinematographer for a while, didn’t you?
Yeah. For a minute, I was doing really interesting documentaries. I shot a documentary about an orphanage in Odessa in Ukraine. I shot in Argentina. I was getting to travel and shoot. I was living the dream. And then that first internet bubble burst, and anybody who wasn’t firmly planted in the space was out of work. To make a living, I started to get pulled into reality television, and I knew that if I didn’t do something drastic, I was gonna end up there. It was so close to the thing I loved, and yet so not what I wanted to do. So I applied to AFI, which was this mecca for cinematography. I figured if I got in, it would shake things up.
Cinematography is a famously male environment. Were there a lot of other women in the program?
No. There were six of us, I think, in a class of 28. That’s still statistically higher than our percentage in (Hollywood), but it’s obviously quite low. Even in photography, women have always been the exception to the rule, which never made any sense to me. Our currency is human emotion. If you think of what women do particularly well, it’s empathy and emotion. And so I think we’re quite predisposed to be good as storytellers and filmmakers and cinematographers.
How did AFI transform your career?
AFI is and was incredibly technical in all the best possible ways. I had some technical know-how going in, but it really bolstered my confidence. Especially as a woman in this industry, you have to be confident. This is a medium that’s entirely subjective. There are no actual rights and wrongs. So you have to let your gut drive the machine, and then people will follow. It’s a sad double standard: The second a woman second-guesses herself even for a millisecond, she’s quick to be labeled indecisive. So for me to come out of AFI with confidence was huge.
How did you get that confidence?
I guess through the process of making things, failing, picking yourself up, making more things, getting better. From a technical perspective, I experimented with every type of camera, every type of lens, every type of process. Really trying to throw all the different techniques at the wall and see what stuck. We would light for each other, we would gaff for each other, we would grip for each other. You have that experience of kind of playing every role on set, which I think is quite helpful later on because you understand what the team is comprised of and what each person is responsible for.
Did you get out and then think, Oh wow, I really have to go to work now to…
To pay for it? Yeah. I mean, that’s the thing. It’s a huge caveat. I came out with a good amount of debt, as did many of my friends. A lot of people fell back into the thing that they were trying to get away from ’cause that’s the quickest way to pay off that debt. I fell back into reality television for two, maybe two-and-a-half years after graduating, because I had to get out from under the crippling debt. The moment I’d paid off the private loans, I said to myself, “I’m never doing this again.” And I picked up a film camera again.
But, you know, when I went to school, that was one of the only ways you could get hands-on experience making movies. And I don’t think that’s true anymore. I think film school is great for some people, especially people who need accountability, like homework assignments. Or people who want to cut out all the other noise and say, “I’m gonna focus on this for two years.” But it’s not a necessity in the same way it used to be.
I mean, look at what Sean Baker did with an iPhone for Tangerine. And a step up from an iPhone, there are $6,000 cam- eras that can make beautiful films now. So there’s a whole other path that wasn’t avail- able to me when I was coming up. That’s to spend the money you were gonna spend on film school and buy yourself a camera and some lights and just go make lots of movies. I don’t think it’s a one-size-fits-all solution, but I think for some people, it’s amazing.
When you left reality TV for good and focused on film, did you have trouble being taken seriously because of your gender?
I mean, on the one hand, you never know why your phone doesn’t ring. I only actually know my own successes, I guess. But I know that I’ve definitely had no short- age of stories like when we were doing the pickups for “Black Panther,” the first AD and I were in a minivan, and the Teamster wasn’t leaving for the set. I looked at him like, “We’ve got to go.” And he’s like, “I’m waiting for the first AD and the DP.” We’re like, “That’s us, dude.” That’s basically still a day in my life, but you have to not take that personally and keep pushing through.
You’ve now directed your first feature. Did you direct at all when you were in school?
No, no. I was very focused on cinematography. I’m an anomaly, I’m sure, but I never set out to direct. I’ve never liked having the attention on me. It took every director I ever shot for telling me that I should be directing to finally let it percolate to where I would consider it for myself.
You turned to directing after you received American Society of Cinematographers and Oscar nominations for “Mudbound” and after you shot “Black Panther.” Was there a reason for that timing?
I spent a year after the nomination and after “Black Panther” reading scripts to shoot that weren’t as good as either “Black Panther” or “Mudbound.” Basically, every script I read felt like a step backwards. And so I figured it was better to start from scratch and try something new than to go backwards.
What was it about the story of “The Fire Inside” that made you think it was the film to launch your feature-directing career?
“The Fire Inside” is the story of an incredible female boxer named Claressa Shields. Nobody knows who she is. She’s one of the greatest female athletes ever and I had no idea who she was, and Barry (Jenkins) didn’t know who she was. I think there was something wrong about that. Also, as a female boxer, she’s by definition the exception to the rule — which, as we were just speaking about, I’m quite used to being as well. The idea that it’s not enough to be good at your craft, you also have to know how to look, how to act, how to fit other people’s perception of you. I’ve had to walk that line, too, so I saw some of myself in that story.
Were there moments making the movie where you thought, Nothing I’ve done or studied has prepared me for this?
To be honest, it wasn’t in the making of the film. When we were making the film, we got caught in a pandemic and some other things, but the making went incredibly smoothly and was really just a joy. There was so much respect and love for one another, and we all had a great time making the film. It was more the idea that directing can be a lonely profession. You’re the one carrying this boulder up a hill for years sometimes — the singular person championing a project from beginning to end. That was new to me.
Are you now thinking about directing more movies, or do you want to go back to being a cinematographer for a bit?
I had such a great first experience making the film, I probably do have the directing bug. Ask me again after the second film — but right now, I think the focus is probably going to be on directing long form. I still love shooting, and so my hope is to keep shooting commercials, because then I can keep playing with gear. It’s still such a part of who I am, but I think I’ll be dipping in and out of it, as opposed to doing longer-form projects that would take me out of directing for too long.
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