Entertainment

Guest column – The Hollywood Reporter

I am grateful for the opportunity to help create the language and visual style for HBO Not safe. From the very beginning, I felt strongly that this show deserved to be seen and felt beyond a traditional comedy. The show is very specific, and its complicated relationships and underlying characters made me a fan in season one, before I even thought about joining the team. During my interview to take on the filming job starting with season two, I thought I would be very frank about what I wanted to do, and then if I didn’t get the job, at least for the sake of it. My thoughts are not like that. ‘ t is the direction they want to go. But then I actually got the job.

Having an idea of ​​what I would bring to the show as a cinematographer, the key elements for me were creating a look where its core DNA, melanin, was seen and respected. honor through light and style, supporting a profound exploration of the show’s relationships. Even the little things like keeping an actor’s eyelids close to the camera are important for you to feel immersed in a performance. The integration of the show’s personality into the visual language must be as specific as the program itself. It takes clumsiness, imbalance, and closeness, and the characters in South Central Los Angeles will shine.

For me, framing is everything. When the balance of the frame is right for this moment, I just feel incredibly happy, both as a viewer and as a creator. In the show, I wanted the frame to add to the viewer’s experience without them realizing it, and to share some of that immersive joy. Story themes revolve around people doing the hard work growing up, relationships falling apart and sometimes getting back together. Creating the frames that get you into these stories comes naturally and it’s become part of the way I think about the show.

When I first came Not safe, director and producer Melina Matsoukas and I talked and explored different ways to frame ideas. We have similar tastes, and the ideas for framing and lighting come together easily.

The two episodes I’ve directed are really different, and I’ve approached them quite differently. Episode 8 of season 4 – titled “Lowkey Happy” – is this delicate, beautiful script about two people who really know and love each other, coming together after causing each other so much pain. It’s an episode that plays out with Lawrence (Jay Ellis) and Issa (Rae) over the course of a night to morning, and the pace is much slower than usual. Not safe episode. I think it’s like a piece of music put together carefully. I just wanted to consider the placement of the bulges and the placement of the releases. So it’s just about finding moments to create images, let them hang in the air and put them together like punctuation in music. The docs in this volume really call for that.

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Cinematographer Ava Berkofsky (left) on set Not safe, ran for five seasons.
Courtesy of Moira Morel / HBO

There’s a seven-minute scene at a restaurant where Issa and Lawrence end up saying all they wanted to say for three seasons. The text and performance are beautiful, and I wanted to shoot it in a way that could, once again, be pieced together to create its own sense of time. We shot it over two nights and I believe there were about 16 different shots, each for a different mood they went through, but only one that actually moved. That’s the Issa push, where she tells Lawrence a very confusing truth about their relationship, and that must be the climax of the scene. I checked with the writer, Natasha Rothwell, and with Prentice Penny, the presenter, about what beat to choose, and breaking it down feels right.

My episode from season five – “Pressure, Okay?!” episode three – very different. Think back to it as a piece of music, it has more to do with discord than with harmony. Throughout the episode, Lawrence and Condola (Christina Elmore) are trying to understand what parenting is like, and it’s tough, to say the least. The script shows off the least polished parts of Lawrence’s character, and I’m happy about that – it makes him less than perfect and all the more relatable. So I decided to let discord lead the way as the story was told.

At the end of the episode, there’s a fight where both Lawrence and Condola say things you wish you couldn’t say. It’s uncomfortably raw and close, and the framing is hand-crafted and raw by the show’s standards. However, at the end of the episode, there is a beautiful moment where Lawrence and Condola finally connect.

We’ve created additional frames for their phone conversation, and I hope that viewers are relieved – both to see Lawrence and Condola find common ground, but also to find joy in landing in additional frames and links.

This story first appeared in the independent November issue of The Hollywood Reporter. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

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