“There’s a lot of very tense, heavy scenes with a lot of dialogue,” says cinematographer Natalie Kingston. “A lot of the times, it was about restraint. It was about not moving the camera and just letting the audience sit uncomfortably in this tense, awkward, creepy conversation… Sometimes when you don’t move the camera, you really increase that tension.”
Based on a true story, Apple TV+’s Black Bird stars Taron Egerton as Jimmy Keene, a charismatic young man who has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for dealing drugs and weapons. Federal authorities offered to fully commute his sentence and wipe his record clean if he could get close to Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser) and convince him to admit to killing more than a dozen women.
Kingston is nominated for the third episode of the season, “Hand to Mouth”, where Jimmy and Larry meet for the first time. “I got the opportunity to shoot the whole series,” says Kingston, “and there’s stuff from all of [the episodes] I’m very proud of, but I picked three because I felt that it was the most representative of the look of the whole series. We get to our main prison location, Jimmy and Larry meet for the first time, so I felt that it was symbolic of the whole series.”
Restraint proved to be the most valuable asset for Kingston to bring a chilling tone to the series. “I think sometimes in heavy dialogue scenes, the impulse could be to move the camera because it needs something,” she says. “The idea was to do the opposite, to increase the tension by really sinking into that weird, dark dialogue, and then when we did move the camera… it really meant something and you felt it.”
Click the video above to watch the full interview.
