In Hollywood, the old saying is often true: what everybody really wants to do is direct. So it comes as a surprise when Rachel Morrison tells me over lunch that actually, directing was never the goal for her. “I was very content playing my role and telling the story visually through the lens,” the cinematographer tells me. “Cameras are an extension of my body. I really love what I do.”
Morrison cemented herself as a force with her work on films including Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station and the 2015 dark comedy Dope. She became the first woman ever nominated for the best-cinematography Oscar for Dee Rees’s 2017 film Mudbound, before reuniting with Coogler for Marvel’s Black Panther the next year.
But after all that success, Morrison realized the type of film she loved was going extinct in Hollywood. “I got to the target too late. The movies I’d always wanted to make as a cinematographer when I was growing up were the $100 million dramas like The Shawshank Redemption, The Road to Perdition,” she says. “The scripts I was reading for a full year after [the Oscar nomination]—not every Marvel movie is Black Panther, and not every indie film is Mudbound.”
Then the script for a film called Flint Strong caught her attention. The true story follows boxer Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, a Flint native, as she trains to compete at the 2012 Summer Olympics. A moving tale of determination and resilience, Morrison happily would have served as its DP if the script’s writer—Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins—wanted to direct it. But Jenkins, who also produced th e film, had always envisioned a female director at the helm. “If I had written it and then directed it, that still would’ve been something that I felt like wouldn’t allow the story to reach its full potential,” Jenkins says.
The film, which would eventually be retitled The Fire Inside, spoke to Morrison on many levels. “I was drawn to the idea that it’s not a biopic about somebody famous, but a biopic about somebody who nobody knows and deserves more,” says Morrison. Like the film’s subject, she has an affinity for sports; Morrison grew up playing ice hockey. But Claressa’s journey in the male-dominated sport of boxing also paralleled Morrison’s own path. “I saw there were things that were personal to me, being the exception to the rule as a DP,” she says. “It’s never enough to just be good at what you do. It always becomes about being the female version of what you do, and about how you carry yourself—how you present, how you look, all of these things.”
Making the movie would come with incredible hurdles, thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown, a studio shuffle, and casting changes that would result in a years-long delay. But with The Fire Inside finally hitting theaters this Christmas, Morrison feels like she’s already won, no matter how the project does at the box office. “This movie has been an uphill battle,” she says. “But a wide theatrical release on Christmas is the film version of a fairy tale ending.”
Morrison’s 2017 Oscar nomination, which broke a 90-year-old barrier in one of the industry’s most male-dominated fields, got her plenty of attention. She was already dabbling in television directing at the time, working on the anthology series American Crime—but she says her work as a cinematographer opened up doors that may remain closed to other women. “I’m going to be honest: I think that people feel safe,” she says. “A cinematographer is very active in leadership—sometimes it’s the loudest voice on set. So I think that [background] also gives people a certain level of confidence that other women don’t get. It’s not fair—that bias is awful.”
But before she could make The Fire Inside, she’d have to find the right actor to play Claressa. She began by looking for either an athlete who could act, or an actor with athletic experience. “Most people who go into the arts and drama school are not athletes, and I basically wasn’t finding that person,” she says. At first, she didn’t even consider Ryan Destiny because she wasn’t as tall as the real Claressa. But when Morrison eased up on that restriction, she knew she’d found the right actor. “Her audition was undeniable,” she says—even though Destiny, who is best known for starring in the soapy Fox TV musical drama Star, would have to train hard to accurately portray a boxer at the top of her game. “I told her on multiple occasions, ‘You’re going to have to really do the work—Christian Bale–level do the work,” says Morrison.
Destiny did train for months—as did Morrison, aiming to get into the mind of a boxer. “I wanted to understand it from the inside out, what it felt like to hit and be hit,” she says. “It was helpful for me to have sort of been in her shoes, even sparring a little.”
