The way Josephine Decker and I have always worked together, especially on our early collaborations, is really through chance. On Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, there was scene design, a point of view, and something specific we wanted to accomplish, but it was made on such a low budget that the level of planning was very minimal. We shot it on a DSLR for, essentially, zero dollars. I had two friends help assist me who don’t normally crew, so it was a lot of running around and pulling my own focus. We were all living together on a farm in Kentucky in the middle of nowhere, and for the whole shoot I slept in a laundry room on a mattress with my best friend, Zia Anger. I always call the set Breakup Island because there were a lot of people who had just gone through breakups or big life changes and were willing to go on this journey for no pay because they wanted to escape their lives.

By this point in the film, the sexual tension between the characters has been growing, and when they go together to look for the missing cow, some of that sexual tension gets burned off. This moment is supposed to be the switch when you realize Sarah does have agency and she’s smarter than we thought; she has a darkness and she’s plotting something. It sets the tone for the rest of the film as to who the voyeur truly is. It was complicated to get right, though, because the scene could have certain rape connotations. But we never thought of the scene that way, because she’s manipulating him into a kind of trap. It’s a power shift, and you realize she can bend him at her will.

When we set out to shoot this scene, our plan was to film the cow looking at the sex scene and then follow its trajectory throughout the day. We had all these grand ideas to work with this one cow named Buttercup and film over her shoulder. But when they threw me into the pen with her, she kept trying to horn me and it became clear that the cow was not going to do anything unless someone was literally pulling her along. Looking back, it makes me laugh to think about what we thought was going to happen versus what actually did—no cow is going to sit there and let you shoot over its shoulder. Then I had this idea, which was to be the cow myself—to put the camera on and start walking like a cow, go up to grass and pretend to eat it, do the cow mooing motion, etc. I filmed this and then played it back for everyone and was like, “Doesn’t it look like a cow’s point of view meandering around?” We all thought it was very funny and really leaned into this perspective-based experience. It’s become one of my favorite parts of the movie because that’s when the pleasure sets in of understanding that the camera is the cow. 

A lot of directors would’ve said, “well that’s not what we wanted to do,” or “that’s not exactly the idea,” but Josephine was so excited by it. That’s what I love about her. And this is where she and I shine, in this small crack that happens in production where you allow for a pivot or for a chance to play a role. A lot of people are afraid to make bold decisions on the run, but she’s so fun to work with because she finds that exciting as well. I have these visual thoughts that I want to create, and others find them a little too aggressive for narrative work, but she’s always been someone who is like, “if you want to throw the whole thing out of focus, go for it.” She’s down for it all, and that’s the best marker of how we work together and of our deep level of trust and the magic that comes from our collaboration. Making the kinds of movies that I do with Josephine is a very fluid and physical experience for me, and my brain buzzes at such a crazy rate, my body belongs to the camera and the actors. I become an open bleeding wound—present to everything.

I first met Michelle Parkerson when she was doing a documentary on Audre Lorde, A Litany for Survival. I was a camera assistant at that time. I was working a lot in Chicago then—on union shows, Home Alone, all kinds of stuff—in the world of narrative, because I needed to know everything and anything about the visual aspect of storytelling. At a very young age, I knew I wanted to use the medium of photography to tell a story.

When I was doing indie work, my job was all over the place. I’d be operating sometimes; I’d be gaffing sometimes. In the indie world you do a little bit of everything. But on union sets, I was an assistant supporting the camera department, working with the DP. At that time, the industry wasn’t very receptive to women, much less African American women, in the role of director of photography. A DP is really in control of working with everyone on a project, from the crew (gaffers, grips, art department) to the production staff (producers, production managers, production coordinators), to above-the-line talent (actors, the director), and making sure that the images come to life. Not many producers or directors trusted women in that position. This was at a time when we were predominantly working with film, so the cost was very high. And the relationships you build with people are very insular. 

A couple of years went by and Michelle called me about Odds and Ends. She had become part of a women directors workshop program for AFI. So when the opportunity came to be the cinematographer for the project, I was thrilled, because that meant I could think more creatively, and not just technically. And Michelle—being a sister, of course I wanted to support her. We were both in a transitional place: she was transitioning from working in documentaries to wanting to do something more scripted. 

I wanted to shoot on film, but we were shooting in video, which back then was either ¾-inch tape or Beta. When Michelle called me, I said, “Listen, I have to have a gaffer, and a key grip. We have to have a dolly. We have to be able to do some camera movement.” Back then even having a dolly was a big deal. Especially in the indie world, because that means you need track, you need a person to move the dolly; that’s more crew. That was also the first time I was exposed to a new lighting instrument, which were tubes called Kino Flos. After a while we started using the individual tubes and adding color; and if you look at the film, you actually see the Kino Flos in some of the shots. Since it was this Dr. Who kind of sci-fi world, we were able to play around with color like that.

One challenge that I had was the scene in which the intergalactic council met. I had six women sitting around this table, and not much time. There was no fourth wall on the set, so we couldn’t show the reverse angle of the room. Everything was done with one camera. We had to get coverage, and make sure to give the editor something. It’s one thing just to go for beautiful shots, but you always have to maintain a certain screen direction and keep track of the sightlines. Each character was in her own head. So when the editor cut to someone, it had to be complementary to what was being said by someone else. You have to show listening. And you need a good script supervisor to help you.

There’s a lot of dialogue in Odds and Ends, so you’re sitting on someone for a long time. In television, it’s all about dialogue, but you’re always cutting to the person talking. But I love master shots. I love for people to know where they are. And because Michelle had such great art directing from Thomas A. Brown, the environment was important too. So you wanted things wide, because you wanted to show the audience where we were in the illusion. When you deal with dialogue in a more visual-cinematic way, it’s almost like theater. You want to be able to move around the person, yet engage the audience. And then on top of that, we were working with video! And in 4:3, a little square box, where you have to keep things in the center.

Because we were shooting on video, there was more depth of field. So even though I tried to have a lot of subject-camera separation, to have things fall off in the background, it was very hard to do in that format. Even if you shot with a wide-open f-stop, you still would get more depth of field than with film, because you needed more light for exposure. But what you saw on the monitor was pretty much what you got, so you could play more, at least with color. It wasn’t going to look like film, but the challenge was: How can I make it interesting in this analog video format?

When I received the call inviting me to work with Lucrecia Martel, whom I consider one of the top contemporary filmmakers, I felt like I had won the lottery. I wasn’t the first choice, and they contacted me about a month before shooting began. So I didn’t have much time to think about the project. I went from Montevideo, where I lived at the time, to Buenos Aires, where I only had a few weeks to discuss the film with Lucrecia and read through the screenplay. Then I headed to the north of Argentina, where the film was being shot.

Because of my admiration for Lucrecia’s work, I felt immense pressure to do well and contribute something special from a photographic point of view. The Headless Woman was the fifth feature I had shot, but it was the first time I was collaborating with a director whom I was truly a fan of. Keeping my nerves in check was a challenge, because all of the previous features I had worked on were directed by friends. I’m also not one of those cinematographers who prepares elaborate visual presentations, nor did I have the time. The work was very intuitive, and it came out of discussions with Lucrecia about her general desires.

The opening sequence was shot in one day, in the spring of 2007, and on the first week of the shoot. No ideas were occurring to me, which was nerve-wracking because this scene contains the film’s most important plot point, and we needed to convey this crucial moment practically in real time, and in a very powerful and explicit way. The protagonist, Verónica, is driving back home after a gathering with friends and family. Her phone, which has fallen into the backseat, rings. She bends down to pick it up, runs over something, recomposes herself, and then drives off again. The scene might seem simple, but it had to be extremely convincing for the rest of the film to work. Eventually I came up with the idea of doing a sequence shot from inside the car, with the camera next to her as she’s driving. Verónica’s experience is our experience, even if we’re not able to see what she sees. Because the camera is so static and intimate, we’re able to watch her gradual transformation from the beginning, when she’s relaxed, until the moment when she really processes the fact that she has hit someone and begins to despair. She drives for a while before finally stopping and getting out of the car to breathe, having realized this terrible thing she’s done and how casually she was able to do it.

My confidence, active participation—everything—improved after I shared this idea with Lucrecia, who then made some modifications. Establishing a collaborative atmosphere is important, and the best directors know how to motivate their crew members and instill a sense of confidence and mutual acceptance.

Sometimes ideas aren’t really generated by a single person; they happen in a specific context where all the forces are conjured to make us think about the best way possible to shoot a scene. And the idea that was already there comes down to one of us as if it were the work of a medium who is speaking for the collective or transmitting what we’re all thinking, but couldn’t up until that point put into words.

This scene was really important to me conceptually, not only for what it represented in the film, but also for the way it let me experiment with visual metaphor. The visuals were a metaphor for the Big Nothing. When one looks into the imagination and the recesses of memory, the edges are fuzzy. It’s not all clear. The night scene lent well to that: it’s creepy; there’s the stranger who’s preying on the girls. So I wanted to make sure that we knew as an audience that it was a step away from reality.

I decided to create this imaginary world with shift-and-tilt lenses, which were new to cinema. These lenses were primarily used in the world of photography. In conjunction with a bellows system, they enabled photographers to correct perspective that would otherwise be distorted by the lens. Think of the first cameras: they always used a bellows system—the accordion-like, expandable part of the camera that allows the photographer to move the focus plane (where the lens is) separately from the film negative plane. This also enables us to alter the distortion of the perspective. When you look up at a building, the lines of the building diverge. They don’t look parallel. Photographers call this “keystoning.” That’s the way our eyes see perspective. We use the bellows system to separately move the front lens mount of the camera so that it matches the angle of the building, thus making it appear parallel. This gives us the ability to throw part of the image into or out of focus. The ability to choose areas of focus on a two-dimensional image provided a painterly way for me to visually create the imaginary world.

The shift-and-tilt lenses first came to my attention in the early nineties through a photographer named Matt Mahurin. He was the first one to adapt cinema lenses onto a bellows system, which enabled him to change the plane of focus on a film camera. His early photographs and music videos were absolutely stunning—like moving paintings.

I wanted to try this out in a dramatic film, even though it was technically tricky to do; there are no focus marks on the shift-and-tilt lenses. The operator, behind the camera, who in this case was me, had to focus while looking through the lens. The difficulty was also compounded by the fact that we were shooting at night. I knew I could use the fastest film possible—film that was most sensitive to exposing in darkness—but I knew that the aperture would have to be as wide open as possible to get as much light in as possible. Not only did I want to use these lenses, but I also wanted to move the camera, which changed one more variable in the configuration. This was very risky when the characters were moving through space, the camera was on a moving dolly, and I was using a lens that was wide open, with no depth of field.

What made all of this risk worthwhile was the ability to make the images look like moving paintings. I could choose to focus on the left- or right-hand side of the frame, effectively making the other side smear into painterly nothingness. I was so determined to get that feeling. To me, the feeling was the most important part: the feeling of disorientation and of being in an ethereal, other world.