“To change everything, she gave everything,” is the tagline for Director Rachel Morrison’s biographical drama, The Fire Inside.
Morrison’s film tells the incredible true story of Claressa ‘T-Rex’ Shields, who trained to become the first woman in America’s history to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing.
On December 8, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Morrison discussed the making of The Fire Inside during a Q&A moderated by Director Elizabeth Banks (Cocaine Bear).
During the conversation, Morrison shared how she handled the prep on the film.
“I always shot list everything. Not necessarily even for the shot list, but sometimes just to look at the days and how they line up. It’s like even the best ADs will sometimes think three pages, is three pages, is three pages. And you’ll know once you look at your list that one three-page day is a million set ups and one three-page day is a ‘oner’ and they’re not netting out the same. We didn’t look at a ton of references. At some point I’ve seen probably all the boxing films, but never with a like ‘I want to do it like this one or like that one.’ It was more just to kind of let it wash over, but then knowing that we had so many fight sequences and they all happen in the first two thirds of the film that we really had to be careful of fight fatigue and how do we make each fight feel very different.”
The Fire Inside is Morrison’s feature directorial debut. Her other directorial credits include episodes of The Mandalorian, American Crime Story, Hightown, The Morning Show, American Crime and Quantico; and an episode of the mini-series Homemade. Morrison was also the first woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Cinematography for her work on Dee Rees’ 2018 feature Mudbound. She has been a DGA member since 2014.