My dad, before he passed away, never understood what I did. What I say is that I'm responsible for translating the director's vision, hopefully turning an idea into something people can connect to and relate to.Collection: Dad
I find beauty in imperfection.Collection: Beauty
Cinematography speaks to everything that women do inherently well: It's multitasking, it's empathy, and it's channeling visuals into human emotion.Collection: Women
I believe in naturalistic lighting, which isn't to say natural light.
Part of the reason why I love to operate is because I find that so much of what we do is instinctual. It's dancing with the actors and responding to their body language, and you feel what the right place for the camera is at any given moment.
Authenticity, to me, is something that you feel, and if it doesn't feel authentic, you pick up on it right away.
For me, it's just always about trying to tell stories that I care about.
If there's anything consistent about my work, it's not flat.
I think there's this assumption that everybody would rather be a director, and I don't know that that's the case for me, so we'll see.
For me, I just like new challenges.
I kind of grew up with a camera in my hand.
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.
Having a family is a compromise on some level, but it's so incredibly worth it. It actually informs the work that I do as a DP.
I pour my blood, sweat, and tears into a movie. What I always look for is a message and a social consciousness: a relevance to what's happening in our world.
Photos have the real task of bringing exposure to places that we otherwise don't have much awareness of.
We really owe it to our world to infuse our entertainment with messaging.
The cinematographer's basically translating the director's vision into imagery.
Life is unpredictable, and I feel, to some extent, lighting and cinematography should be a reflection of that.
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.
A period film is a gift for a cinematographer.
Photography was a way for me to freeze time and to capture the moments that were happy and healthy. I saw a photo as a way to go back to a memory if I ever needed to.
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.
I came up in photography, and Dust Bowl-era photography is a lot of the reason that I got behind the camera in the first place.
Success doesn't come overnight, especially for women.
So much of 'Mudbound' is about man's relationship to the land and to the elements. It's about the desire for control and how powerless we are against nature. We always knew we would shoot widescreen as a means to isolate a body in the frame and to highlight our own insignificance.
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 think 'Sound of My Voice' was the first film where suddenly I could point to something I had done that I was proud of and say, 'Look at this piece of work.' And that's probably what led to 'Fruitvale Station,' which was the real break.
I love faces that have freckles. I love faces that have wrinkles. For me, beauty is naturalism, I guess.
Documentaries are inherently instinctual; you're constantly moment to moment, determining what the best place for the camera is to tell the story, usually in service of natural lighting.
I think lighting is a reflection of what is at stake emotionally in a movie.
I really do believe that the experience of having a child is going to actually make me a much better cinematographer.
Surfing is incredible. It's both meditative and physical. I think it was my way into California.
'Fruitvale' set the bar for what I wanted to do with my career, which was to make films that had consciousness and messaging in an entertaining package. Once I hit that mark, I never wanted to go back.
I lived within walking distance of Harvard Square, and that's where I discovered my love of cinema. I saw a lot of foreign and independent films there.
It took me a long time to adapt to the West Coast. I lived eight years in New York before California and might have gone back. Then I discovered surfing. It's the California equivalent of ice hockey, I guess. It gave me a real sense of place.
I'll never know what happens behind closed doors or why I don't get hired for things.
You just sort of get used to being one of the only women on set, so it's really refreshing to start to enter a time when that's not the case anymore.
I gravitate much more toward realism, realism in the work that I do, but magical realism got me hooked on film. I think it was my first time realizing that there was something besides popcorn movies.
I think you can make a gorgeous movie on any piece of equipment. Look at 'Tangerine,' which is a beautiful movie shot on an iPhone. You see so many movies that are impeccably shot but are vapid, and there's no audience for that except for other cinematographers who just like to watch two-hour-long music videos.
My wife jokes that any time I want to take a picture of her, it has nothing to do with her - it's just because the light is really nice. She's usually right. I definitely am somebody who notices the way the light skips off the floor.
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.
For me, it's always been about the work - it wasn't about, 'Let's go break some ceilings.' I just wanted to tell an important story and do the best work I can. Everything else is secondary.
The best kind of entertainment is the kind that also makes you question something or think outside the box or live another life. Those are the stories that I'm drawn to.
You can only shoot small movies and documentaries for so long if you want to have a family that you support; eventually, you need to get let into the big leagues.
As artists, we can't help but infuse our art with our own experience, so your experience becomes informative.
The theatrical experience is also a communal one. When people saw 'Fruitvale' in the theater, there was not a dry eye at the end of the movie, and you would look to your neighbor and have this shared moment together that had a real weight behind it.
I've had something like seven films at Sundance, one of which won the Grand Jury Prize.
Half of 'Mudbound' were shots I stole in between other scenes.
It's hard to go back to shooting contemporary apartment interiors after you shoot something like 'Mudbound.'
Lighting practically whenever I can when shooting period really helps with authenticity.