American Cinematographer - January 2019 - 75

Tish's mother, Sharon (Regina King, center), struggles to come to terms with her daughter's plight after Fonny is
arrested for a crime he didn't commit.

audience in the perspective of the characters, to give them an immersive experience. Sometimes characters look
directly into the lens."
On occasions when Laxton
needed a longer lens, he relied on a
Vantage Film Hawk 150-450mm (T2.8)
zoom. "We used that when we needed a
telephoto perspective, often to isolate a
character within the larger scope of the
film," the cinematographer says. "The
DNAs only go up to 200mm, which was
great for most of our show, but occasionally we needed to go longer. We also
used [the Hawk] lens when we needed
to zoom in on the characters, as in a
scene with Tish and Fonny in the
subway. As they wait for the train to
arrive, we slowly zoom in on them to
bring our attention to the two lovers in a
sea of New Yorkers. There's a romance
to this zoom that fit with our approach
as it pertains to touching on a 1970s
aesthetic."
Laxton was intent on infusing his
lighting and palette with the same sense
of romanticism that he found in
Baldwin's descriptions of Fonny and
Tish's love story. "I love how much
Baldwin cares for these characters, and
loves these characters," Laxton attests.
"I wanted to reflect that with an inviting

lighting style that would provide an
access point for the audience. My feeling was that if we could let them fall in
love with the characters the way the
characters fall in love with each other,
they would be in a good position to
empathize with and be impacted by the
story that James Baldwin wrote."
Laxton points to an example early

in the movie when Fonny and Tish meet
at a restaurant. "They walk down the
stairs into a night where it's raining
quite hard, and they're backlit," he
explains. "The [Louma Crane-mounted]
camera is drifting behind them and
toward them as they walk down, like in
an early 1940s piece of classical
Hollywood cinema. And that was defi-

There are essentially two different time periods represented in the movie - the
flashbacks to Tish and Fonny's budding romance, and the "present-day" in which Fonny
sits in jail while Tish tries to move forward with her life on the outside. Jenkins wanted
the former time period to be a more beautiful and inviting atmosphere, and the latter
a starker reality. "The characters are in purgatory in the present day," the director
explains. "So when Tish remembers better times, those memories are filtered through
a gaze that's hopeful and pure, and almost overly saturated."
In terms of specific techniques, Laxton notes, "We supported the contrast
[between the two time periods] by not moving the camera as much in the present-day
scenes - and in the flashbacks the camera [moved] in romantic ways, primarily from
Tish's perspective. An example of this is the scene in the loft, where Fonny shows Tish
where he plans on putting the furniture in their future loft. Even though we don't always
see the scene in the loft from Tish's [point of view], the camera moves in ways that
allude to her mind's eye. Here, we wanted to move the camera as if we were her imagination walking through Fonny's telling of what he plans for their life.To do this, we had
our Steadicam and A-camera operator, Michael Fuchs, begin with a simple medium shot
of Fonny, and on a cue [he would] drift off of [Fonny] and on to empty spaces in the
room, where we as the audience can imagine and in turn empathize with our characters' future lives. This dreamy camera movement speaks to the past-tense sequences'
need for romance and love to be the approach."
He adds, "We also subtly affected the colors in each of these time periods."
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American Cinematographer - January 2019

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