‘The Fire Inside’: Why Rachel Morrison, the First Woman Nominated for the Cinematography Oscar, Moved to Directing
Gritty and authentic was what Rachel Morrison, the first woman cinematographer nominated for an Oscar (“Mudbound”) was seeking for her directing debut, “The Fire Inside.” Released on Christmas Day, the true-life sports drama earned an A Cinemascore and is building word of mouth at the holiday box office. The $12-million Amazon/MGM feature scored strong reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival and earned performer nominations from both the Gothams and the Indie Spirits, as well as a coveted Golden Frog nomination for Morrison from Cameraimage, which she shared with her cinematographer Rina Yang.
Like Steven Soderbergh, Morrison likes to operate her own camera as both cinematographer and director. One popular picture of Morrison shows her at a late stage of pregnancy, shouldering her camera on the set of “Seberg” (2019). “I was eight months pregnant by the end of it,” she said in a Zoom interview. “Shooting 35mm, mostly or entirely, handheld. And it was really fun. I could do everything that I could normally do, but when I would squat down low, I needed people to catch me as I stood back up.”
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She has always operated the movies she shot — with one exception: “Black Panther,” which “was so massive and there was so much that I needed to oversee,” she said. “That’s the only feature I didn’t operate and and then on [‘The Fire Inside’], it actually worked out, because Rina, my DP, likes to be behind the monitor. She has the live demo board operating, so she’s riding the lights in real time, which freed me up to operate without stepping on her toes. So I got to operate a lot of the handheld on this.”
Operating the camera allows the director to get close with their actors. “It is so intimate,” she said. “And so often the person that the actor looks to first when the director is not in the room with them — which is rare, most directors are either by a monitor or they’re close by, but they’re not in the same space — they look at the operator. So then for me to be able to be that person for my actors is special. And it’s intuitive, that dance between knowing I need to creep a little closer, or I need to pull away a little bit in this specific moment. It could be different from take to take, so to be able to intuit that from a place of knowing the film better than anybody else on the set, is a unique advantage. The actors like it too, because they can stay in it, we can do live direction relative to exactly what they’re giving the lens.”
It wasn’t a natural progression from hugely successful ground-breaking cinematographer to director. That was never Morrison’s stated career goal. She had to be persuaded. Partly, it was a matter of timing and taste. The movies she could dream about directing, ambitious $100-million dramas, weren’t being made anymore. She cites “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Road to Perdition” as movies of scale and scope “with all the toys,” she said. “By the time I was even in consideration for a budget at that scale, most of the movies that were being made at that budget were superhero films.”
She was director of photography for her frequent collaborator Ryan Coogler’s big Marvel movie. “I had an amazing time making ‘Black Panther,'” she said. “But ‘Black Panthers’ are special superhero films. The next year, I was reading all these scripts that that didn’t feel like that. Superhero films didn’t feel as special as ‘Black Panther’ and the independent dramas.”
While Morrison is proud of Dee Rees’ 2018 “Mudbound,” “It nearly killed me,” she said. “We made that movie for $9 million. I can’t support a family of four on that budget, but also it’s a miracle that that movie worked out. It took everything, every fiber of all of our beings, to make that movie work at that price point. And the scripts that I was reading at that price point weren’t as make-able, maybe they were as ambitious, but because it was period in LA as opposed to period in the South, you couldn’t make it at that price point. All the scripts I read felt like a step backwards.”
Directing had always intrigued Morrison, but she was “intimidated by it,” she said. “It wasn’t even so much the working with actors and the nuance of the post process, or any of the things I hadn’t done. I was intimidated by being the center of attention, you’re putting so much of yourself out to be critiqued, there’s an incredible amount of vulnerability, directing. A lot of people that I respected, like Ryan Coogler was a prominent voice who kept saying, ‘You have stories to tell. You’re are a storyteller, and you need to be putting your voice in the world in a more fully visualized, fully realized way.’ I was intimidated for it to be my voice. As a DP, no matter how a film was received, you’re a little bit protected. I’ve been fortunate that most of the movies that I shot were well-received, but even the ones that weren’t, it was like, ‘but the cinematography is beautiful!'”
Without that deniability, Morrison would be on the line. “I’m experiencing it now,” she said. “You have to champion your own movie, including the press junkets and public speaking and talking. I’m learning and I’m growing, and honestly, that was my challenge to myself too. I was ready to run towards the danger instead of away from it.”
Thus Morrison did respond to a story that writer/director Barry Jenkins adapted from the 2015 documentary “T-Rex,” just before “Moonlight” won the Best Picture Oscar in 2016, about Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, a gutsy young boxer (Ryan Destiny) from Flint, Michigan who trained without adequate resources to become the first U.S. woman to win the sport’s first Olympic gold medal in 2012. What’s great about “The Fire Inside” is that the Olympic win isn’t the movie’s finale. We also follow the aftermath: what doesn’t happen to this extraordinary woman, as everyone at home expects her to somehow change not only her own life but theirs as well.
That’s what drew Morrison to the project. “The inspirational sports movie as a construct has been done a million times, and it always ends with the win,” she said. “It just does. And you know what that looks like. Again, that’s not life, and it’s especially not life if you are a Black woman from Flint, Michigan.”
Jenkins was involved throughout and available for a crisis phone call, said Morrison, along with producers Elishia Holmes and Michael De Luca, before he moved on to run first MGM and then Warner Bros. After Ice Cube left the project and Universal put in in turnaround, Amazon/MGM picked up the movie with Destiny starring as Shields and Brian Tyree Henry playing her loyal, self-sacrificing coach.
But what took the movie so long to get made, COVID delays aside? “It’s not an elemental sports movie,” said Morrison. “It totally upends the construct of your typical sports movie. The heart of the movie is actually the reimagined third act. We don’t have household names, and that scares studios in this day and age, especially for a theatrical release. Brian Tyree Henry is one of this generation’s absolute best actors, hands-down, ut that doesn’t mean he’s a popcorn movie household name. The story of this movie, like the story of making this movie, is an absolute mirror reflection of the story: the fight to be seen, the fight to matter, the fight to be valued. It’s trickier when you have a female lead. We all know this historically, and probably extra tricky when it’s a Black female lead, and that’s the reality we live in.”
It also had to do with the woman boxer, “a sport that isn’t what people picture women playing,” said Morrison. “But the heart of this film is not just how resilient she is in the ring, but how resilient she is outside of it, and then ultimately, in choosing to go back to boxing. It’s about choosing the journey over the destination, which is so inspiring and universal, because nobody can stay on top forever. Truly.”
Team “The Fire Inside” had to make the movie twice. One greenlight before the pandemic, “and then we had to get completely re-greenlit, reset, up,” said Morrison. “But there’s a lot of good fortune in the journey that this film has taken. And it is a better movie for the distance it has had to fight.”
After the second greenlight, Morrison had to trim the fat because inflation had forced up costs. The same budget two years later was worth about 20 percent less. So they cut a few big set pieces and scenes and then sewed it back together.
Shooting in Flint, Michigan was the battle Morrison wasn’t going to lose. “The main thing that drives all of my choices, both in cinematography and in direction, is authenticity,” said Morrison. “I have a sensitive palette for what feels real in performance as well, and I spent a lot of time in Flint. It was so important to me to try to get that right, because it’s an incredible place that is built off of resilience and grit, which is what this movie is about. Glossy wouldn’t have been authentic to Flint. It’s beautiful in other ways. I tend to find imperfection more beautiful than perfection, because it feels more real to me. But there’s a sense of place and environment that is a character, and that character is literally the American narrative. It’s the American Dream versus the American reality. Flint is exactly that: It was a city built on a dream that was left to decay. And despite its decaying, things bloom from the decay.”
Barry Jenkins helped out on casting, along with Francine Maisler. They had just finished a round of extensive casting for “Underground Railroad” at the time. “We were also looking for athletes,” said Morrison. “‘Is there any world where we can find a boxer who can act?’ We looked high and low for somebody who would be the right physicality too.”
Then they opened things up, hoping that actresses would be able to learn how to box. “And Ryan Destiny came in and made herself completely undeniable,” said Morrison. “I thought that with all of my experience shooting action, I could help cheat the stunts as we needed to. And in reality, the way that I wanted to shoot it was so intimate and inside the ring that that never would work. So thankfully, I didn’t have to, because Ryan got so good that she did every single one of her own stunts in the movie.”
After this grueling experience, Morrison is looking to direct again. “Aside from the years and years it took, it was such a collaborative, beautiful, enjoyable set,” she said, “And into the edit too. I loved every every part of it. I enjoyed being able to see the vision through from beginning to end. I’m definitely going to stay in this arena.”
She’s reading and wants to change things up, she said: “I want to try a completely different genre. I’m a bit format agnostic, I’m reading both features and long form. Maybe I would do a romance, the grounded version, not a rom com.” And she’d consider a grounded sci-fi with scope, like “Arrival” or “Dune.”
Bring it on.
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