Director

Cinematography speaks to everything that women do inherently well: It's multitasking, it's empathy, and it's channeling visuals into human emotion.

Cinematography speaks to everything that women do inherently well: It's multitasking, it's empathy, and it's channeling visuals into human emotion.

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.

A period film is a gift for a cinematographer.

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.

Half of 'Mudbound' were shots I stole in between other scenes.

I'll never know what happens behind closed doors or why I don't get hired for things.

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 first female DPs that I was aware of were Ellen Kuras, Mandy Walker, Nancy Schreiber, Amy Vincent, Sandi Sissel, Maryse Alberti and Tami Reiker. You look for a role model as somebody who looks like yourself and is doing what you want to do; they were the handful.

For me, I just like new challenges.

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.

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 didn't want 'Mudbound' to feel stylized in any way.

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.

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.

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.

Life is unpredictable, and I feel, to some extent, lighting and cinematography should be a reflection of that.

We really owe it to our world to infuse our entertainment with messaging.

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.

The biggest difference for me was that I operated almost every frame on 'Mudbound,' and I didn't operate on 'Black Panther.'