A Cinematographer on Her Oscar History-Making Moment

Rachel Morrison, the director of photography for “Mudbound,” broke new ground Tuesday, becoming the first woman to receive an Oscar nomination for best cinematography.

The film — a Dee Rees-directed period piece examining the lives of two Mississippi families, one black and the other white, circa World War II — is filled with gritty visuals brought to life by Morrison. Mud, as the title indicates, is an essential feature along with harsh wide shots that show an unromantic view of the Jim Crow-era South.

Morrison’s big break came with Ryan Coogler’s 2013 drama, “Fruitvale Station.” Her success is a rarity in Hollywood. According to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, women accounted for 4 percent of all cinematographers working on the top 250 films of 2017, a decline of 1 percent from the year before.

Her next project is another collaboration with Coogler: the Marvel film “Black Panther,” due Feb. 16 in the United States. After a flight to Park City, Utah, where she is a member of the dramatic feature jury at the Sundance Film Festival, she spoke by phone about the nomination, her career dreams and the highly anticipated superhero movie.

These are excerpts from the conversation.

A: I am incredibly honored and I’m hoping that it’s just the beginning. I hope that it tells more women that they can get behind the camera. It’s a dream I’ve been chasing my entire career and I never necessarily thought it would happen. It’s also a tremendous honor to be the first.

A: I’ve actually never seen it as a deficit. I think, if anything, I’ve always found it to be an asset because I get to stand out in a crowd. I think it’s an industry that makes a ton of sense for women. It’s all about empathy and handling emotion and visuals. I don’t know that I’ve ever found it to be a challenge. Maybe in jumping the budgets — it’s definitely taken me longer to go from indie movies to studio films than most of my male counterparts. But that would probably be the only thing I’ve experienced as being challenging.

A: Yeah, I think it’s ridiculous. This is a job that’s gender neutral and I can’t wait till the day that we’re just DPs (directors of photography), the way teachers are teachers and doctors are doctors and lawyers are lawyers. I think as soon as we represent more than 2 or 4 percent, and we’re not such a crazy anomaly, then hopefully people will just start referring to us as DPs. Also, I’m excited for the work to speak for itself and not just lumped into “Here’s what the female DPs are doing right now.”

A: I think it’s actually very much in line with my other work. We definitely decided to go bold or go home as far as letting dark scenes be incredibly dark. We wanted to be very careful not to glorify the period. It was showing just enough beauty to understand the hope and why people chase the dream of land ownership, but enough dark and grit to understand what the reality was actually like.

A: I certainly wasn’t going for a washed-out look in (“Mudbound”); it’s incredibly dark. (“Black Panther”) is generally speaking a much brighter, poppier, more saturated film.