Making the leap to director, Morrison tackles her biggest challenge yet with a film that parallels her own journey in a male-dominated industry.
Rachel Morrison has probably clocked more field time on set than any working director. The cinematographer is responsible for shooting well over 50 individual properties, including Mudbound, Dope, Cake, Seberg, and Black Panther, one of the highest-grossing Marvel movies of all time. (She even shot Fruitvale Station, Ryan Coogler’s directorial debut, which earned the Un Certain Regard Award at the Cannes Film Festival.) Black Panther introduced a massive audience to Morrison’s emotionally charged camera movements, her deft handling of interpersonal relationships onscreen, and her potent visual style. For many audiences, it was a long-form introduction to the director of photography who has quietly become one of the best filmmakers of the decade.
All of those elements are coming together in Morrison’s directorial debut, The Fire Inside. It’s her first time directing a feature film, for which she’s tasked with upholding the legacy of one of the world’s greatest living athletes. Inspired by real events, the film centers on Claressa Shields (Ryan Destiny), a female boxer from Flint, MI, who became a two-time Olympic gold medalist and an advocate for equal pay for women’s sports. In a way, both Morrison and Shields’s stories mirror each other, as they are both tales of resilience, of strength, and of fighting your way to the top, against all odds, through brute determination and sheer willpower.
Despite her talented repertoire, Morrison was initially unsure about making the jump to directing. “It took almost every director I’ve ever shot for telling me that I’m a storyteller, and that I think like a director, and I care and invest like a director,” Morrison tells me as we sit down to talk. “It took people I really respected, like Coogler, who just seemed so convinced that I should direct that I started to let it percolate.” During the course of her life’s journey, Morrison came across several opportunities to switch hats, but she already felt so fulfilled helping others harness their own creative power through the fiery prowess of her lens that she didn’t feel it necessary to change up her line of work. Admittedly, she also feared that if she engaged in a new position, it might mean giving up the career that she had spent so many years building. “Sadly, this industry really does love to pigeonhole you into one thing, for whatever reason,” says Morrison. “You can call yourself a multihyphenate, but the work likes to know what you’re doing. I wasn’t ready to give up shooting.”
Continues Morrison, “It wasn’t until Barry [Jenkins] and Elishia [Holmes] brought me this script that I really saw how I could be additive to it, and I had a vision for it. I thought the story was so tremendous, and Claressa felt worthy of the time and effort, and making myself vulnerable, and all the things that scared me about directing. It felt like if I was gonna do it for anything, this was the one.”
Although the challenge was daunting, Morrison found that she took to directing like a boxer to a ring. “It was actually more instinctive than I thought it would be,” reflects the filmmaker, who admits she was, “terrified of not having studied directing.” Still, Morrison had started in photography, gone to film school, and spent countless hours on myriad sets inadvertently inputting data into her heightened hard drive of a brain. “I had been honing the technical, and I know what every optics does, and I know what every camera does,” she infers. “And I think what I failed to really give myself credit for is osmosis, as a cinematographer, but specifically, as an operating cinematographer. I think I had taken in, sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtextually, what was working with the directors that I respected, and what didn’t work with other directors, and sort of mentally making notes to myself about how I would do things, and how I would do things differently.”
When it came to telling the true story of Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, the first woman in American history to ever win an Olympic gold medal for boxing, Morrison always knew that she wanted to stay loyal to the source material.
“I want it to be as true as possible to events because that’s part of what makes it so inspiring,” states the director. “I think often in the fictionalized version of movies, the protagonist is quite one-note. They’re only well intentioned, and they only do good things, and the antagonist only has bad intent. Reality just doesn’t perform like that.” The director, who aptly suggests that many biopics are treated like static supernatural hero movies, aimed for more nuanced, human characters with her telling of the events. “Claressa is not a perfect human, but overcoming her flaws, or succeeding in spite of them, is so much more relatable. I think the relationship with her mom and her coach is complicated, and to me, that’s so much more interesting, because it feels real and it is real.” Adds Morrison, “I also think because her story is so specific to Flint, and to her family, it was really important to get the details right. There’s some small cinematic conceits to make it fit within the space of the movie, but I really wanted it to mirror her real life.”
Raised by a single mother struggling to make ends meet while her father served time in prison, rising athlete Shields felt the societal pressures of capitalism from an early age. Forced to grow up quickly, Shields had a lot of love in her home, but familial strife as well, as the financial burden of raising her siblings often fell on her young and impressionable shoulders. Like a second lifeline, she turned to boxing for reprieve, which Morrison highlights as a source of agency as much as it was a way for Shields to tune out the world.
“I think that’s absolutely true that boxing was an escape,” muses Morrison. “She got to lead her own charge there, and really is the best at it. So it’s akin to almost being the superhero in her own story in that world.”
An immersive visionary, Morrison herself enrolled in boxing classes prior to filming The Fire Inside as a way to connect with the real-life legend, and also as a method to help create a more authentic and personal experience for viewers. “I started boxing for the movie and I’ve kept it up,” the director smiles. “I really wanted to understand the language, but also what it felt like to hit and to be hit. I think it’s so important to know what that experience is in order to then try to do justice to it onscreen, and to help put the audience in that position. Then I just fell in love with it.” The filmmaker emphatically recommends the sport for everyone, no matter their age. “I think in the same way that surfing is kind of both spiritual and physical, boxing is similar. It really gets you outside of your head and into this other space.”
Not only did the director find her new hobby advantageous to her mental well-being, but she also noticed the ways in which it influenced how she chose to maneuver the camera in certain scenes, which arises most notably during Claressa’s time spent in the ring.
“Boxing is kinetic,” Morrison says. “Movement begets movement. For instance, when two characters are sitting across the table from each other in a dinner scene, if you’re moving the camera, it feels very self-aware. Why are you moving the camera? Like, maybe a slight push in on an emotional moment, but you can’t just circle around people who are sitting still. But the second the person that you’re focused on is moving, or in this case, boxing, it gives an energy to the scene that then lets the camera be free. I’m always trying to tell these stories subjectively, so the camera’s mirroring her experience, and if her experience is kinetic, then the camera will be kinetic.”
In order to achieve the desired depiction of the iconic boxer, leading lady Destiny trained like she was going for gold. “I think the challenge was finding performers who could be both athletic and act,” Morrison recalls about the casting process. “Ryan was so good in the audition that I had to take a massive leap of faith that she was going to be able to transform herself physically into the role.” Much to the delight and relief of director Morrison, she found exactly what she was looking for in Destiny, who proved to be an exceptionally dedicated and multifaceted actress.“The boxing is close proximity, the camera is moving. I actually don’t think we could have covered it with stunt work if we had to, but we didn’t have to. Every single stunt in that movie is her. She trained massively, she put in the time, she changed her body. She did all the work to become a really legitimate boxer, and even Claressa, I think, was blown away by her transformation.”
At the start of the film, a tiny Claressa jogs to her local boxing gym in hopes of securing a trainer, but a stereotype stands in her way. Girls can’t be boxers, as she is repeatedly informed by her male peers. Ignoring the status quo, the small up-and-comer boldly went on to prove that playing sports and practicing femininity are not mutually exclusive.
“We have to walk such a fine line to manage other people’s perception, and we shouldn’t have to, and I think it’s a chance to really speak to that,” says Morrison. “It’s been a year where, thankfully, people like Caitlin Clark have started to really highlight some of the issues that we face in women’s sports, pay disparity being a big one. That was one of the biggest things that Claressa was up against, and still is. Women’s boxing is not a great way to make a living. She’s actually picking up some MMA fights because MMA somehow pays better. Regardless, I just think it’s time to have conversations around letting being good at the job be enough.”
Finding the fire inside her own heart to finally, officially direct her first film with tenacity and vigor was not an easy road, but for Morrison, it’s well worth the ways in which she’s grown as an artist. “It was something that really scared me actually. I think I was intimidated,” she admits. “I always got to be the wingman. I was always the support. I never had to be center stage with a spotlight pointed at me, and suddenly, that’s part of my role, championing this film. It’s been nice to challenge myself and rise above. It’s sort of running toward the danger, facing my fears, and conquering them. We’re never too old to take on some new challenges.”
Top Image: Gareth Cattermole Getty Images for IMDb
