To me, as an audience member, movies always come to a screeching halt when they get to their action scenes. They always feel like they drag on to me.
The biggest difference for me was that I operated almost every frame on 'Mudbound,' and I didn't operate on 'Black Panther.'
Cinematography speaks to everything that women do inherently well: It's multitasking, it's empathy, and it's channeling visuals into human emotion.
There's something so inspiring about being in real locations, where you can feel the tactile qualities from the layer of paint that has been chipping off and the hundreds of years that have been lived in the space.
A period film is a gift for a cinematographer.
The cinematographer's basically translating the director's vision into imagery.
Usually, if you notice good cinematography, then the cinematographer's failing. I try to make light feel like it's always motivated and natural in some way and hope that the lighting goes unnoticed.
When shooting in real spaces, the work of a cinematographer begins where location meets production design meets time of day. No movie light will ever look as real as the sun, so scheduling becomes truly paramount to naturalistic lighting.
I really do believe that the experience of having a child is going to actually make me a much better cinematographer.
I don't love cinematography that's very flashy because I find that it keeps the audience from becoming a part of the film; it becomes sort of self-reflective.
The only consistency in the work I do is that I try to use cinematography to best tell the narrative and do justice to the character arcs, but not to do it in such an overt way that people are distracted by it.
Cinematography is so much about instinct and intuition - you want the same range of experience going into behind the camera as what you see in front of it. Your life experience will come through the lens.
When I was studying photography, I became interested in conflict photojournalism, and that got me interested in lighting. Then I realized there was this amazing thing called cinematography where you could kind of tell more complete stories photographing for film. So I ended up going to AFI grad school for that.
Life is unpredictable, and I feel, to some extent, lighting and cinematography should be a reflection of that.
I love faces that have freckles. I love faces that have wrinkles. For me, beauty is naturalism, I guess.
We shot 'Mudbound' in the South in the summer, which meant we were working in extreme heat and humidity at all times and that it could go from glaring sun to overcast skies to pouring rain in a matter of minutes, often shifting multiple times a day.
I've had something like seven films at Sundance, one of which won the Grand Jury Prize.
Your movie becomes much more narrow-minded when you have like-minded department heads. Whereas if you can surround yourself with people who have been a mother before, been a grandmother before, you get a much broader and wide-reaching swath of human emotions.
I did photography in summer camp; I did it in high school. The only hard decision I've had to make was whether to go towards photo or film. And I ultimately realized that the type of photo I was interested in was actually photojournalism. And it's a very individualist career, whereas film is a very team-driven medium. So that's why I chose film.
As artists, we can't help but infuse our art with our own experience, so your experience becomes informative.
