Rachel Morrison is getting a lot of press lately due to her nomination and the success of "Black Panther". In addition to being the director of photography on "Mudbound", Morrison operated the camera. In a recent interview, Morrison explains why she prefers to be behind the camera rather than delegate that job to someone else.
"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. Sometimes that’s frontal, sometimes that’s a profile, sometimes that’s a silhouette, and sometimes that’s half-light. I think there’s a real intuition to that.
I operated on this film, as I’ve done on almost every film. Authenticity, to me, is something that you feel, and if it doesn’t feel authentic, you pick up on it right away. Dee was very clear about not wanting it to feel like stage makeup, everybody feeling like they were sort of caked in the dirt and the mud. Really for me, it’s just intuiting where the right place for the camera is in relation to what the emotional journey is."
