For director Sydney Freeland’s Rez Ball (Netflix), cinematographer Kira Kelly, ASC had to develop a sense of court, culture and community.
The court refers to the basketball hardwood as regular season, tournament and championship round high school games had to ring true in this American sports drama which made its world premiere at last month’s Toronto International Film Festival.
Such authenticity was also essential when it came to capturing the Navajo Indian community as Kelly delved into Native American culture to tell a coming-of-age story following New Mexico’s Chuska Warriors, a high school basketball team that bands together in the face of adversity. She and Freeland developed a visual language to reflect the heart and spirit of everyday life and family in a reservation community. Rez Ball is short for “reservation ball,” a brand of up-tempo basketball which challenges–and puts pressure on–the opposing team to keep up.
And keeping up has its own meaning off the court as reflected in the film’s focus on players who are underdogs–in sports and life. Inspired by Michael Powell’s book “Canyon Dreams,” Freeland and Sterlin Harjo (of Reservation Dogs fame) teamed to write Rez Ball, which opens by introducing us to Jimmy (portrayed by Kauchani Bratt) and Nataanii (Kusem Goodwind), Chuska Warrior teammates who have been friends since childhood. Both are talented basketball players but Nataanii is on the comeback trail, having sat out the prior season due to the loss of his mother and sister who were killed by a drunk driver. Nataanii appears to be coping though in reality he is deeply depressed, resulting in another tragedy early on in the basketball season that threatens the team’s ability and desire to continue. Separately facing adversity are such characters as the team’s coach, Heather, and Jimmy’s mom, Gloria (Julia Jones), who too share a complicated history together.
Along the way we feel the Navajo culture on different fronts–during a funeral ceremony, in a sheep herding adventure which forces the basketball players to work together at a time when they were coming apart at the seams, and through Heather’s hiring of an assistant coach who brings Navajo spiritual traditions to the team at a pivotal time.
Looking to do justice to the story, the culture and the sport of basketball itself, Kelly felt a strong connection with Freeland, herself a Navajo native. The two had earlier developed a creative rapport working on the well-received Disney+/Marvel miniseries Echo, which features a hero protagonist–a Native American Choctaw–who too must come to terms with her past and reconnect with her Native American roots.
The chronology of the director and DP’s two projects together got turned upside down. Freeland had first approached Kelly about Rez Ball but a new variant of COVID impacted the Navajo reservation on the outskirts of Albuquerque where key filming was to have taken place, thus postponing the project in the midst of an intense pre-pro. Undaunted, Freeland later came to Kelly with Echo, a miniseries for which their close-knit working relationship took shape, in some respects paving the way for a stronger collaborative bond on Rez Ball when that production finally got underway.
Kelly described Freeland as “a wonderful director to work with,” possessing “a great collaborative spirit.” On one hand, noted the DP, Freeland is thoroughly organized, mapping out where she wants the camera, her actors, breaking down every shot and scene. Yet at the same time, the director is open to ideas from others, willing to depart from the best laid plans when a better way emerges.
Kelly also felt that she and Freeland closely partnered to advance the narrative, particularly when working within constraints. “If Sydney and I had our way, we would have shot every second of the movie on the reservation,” said Kelly. But with tax incentives and other factors, they couldn’t be on the reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico, as much as they would have liked. Freeland and Kelly mapped out their scheduling to best serve the story, maximizing the amount of time on the reservation–about a four hour drive from Albuquerque, where Netflix maintains a state-of-the-art studio facility–and making the most of that time. “We had to maximize every sunset or every dusk that we could…to make every magic hour sing,” related Kelly.
The basketball games in different gyms–leading to the championship match in a major arena against an arch rival–also posed a challenge. The game action had to be both realistic and a bit cinematic, putting viewers on the court. Kelly devised a lighting package that could adapt to each gym, subtracting illumination for venues as needed, thus saving time and the expense of having to custom light each gym. The quality of the basketball action had to meet a high standard, particularly considering that a producer on the film was none other than superstar LeBron James who is poetry in motion on the court.
For Rez Ball, Kelly opted to shoot with the ARRI Alexa 35 which up to that point she had only used for commercials. The camera was still “fairly new” at the time and she was excited over the prospects of playing with it on a feature. She paired the Alexa 35 with Panavision C-Series anamorphic lenses–mainly for the off-the-basketball court narrative scenes. Kelly was partial to the “gorgeous colors and beautiful falloff” of the C-Series.
For the basketball sequences, the Alexa 35 was coupled with spherical zooms from Panavision. Lightweight lenses were needed to capture the sports action and there were no such anamorphic options, explained Kelly who deployed what she described as a kind of anamorphic filter on the spherical lenses. The filters took a bit of the spherical edge off of the imagery so that it dovetailed better with the narrative scenes in which anamorphic primes were being used.
While she takes pride in the basketball sequences, Kelly observed that her favorite scenes in Rez Ball are “the quiet moments” where we see what the characters are going through and how they respond. Particularly fulfilling for her were scenes depicting Navajo culture, a prime example being at a funeral where the body’s shoes are placed on the wrong foot so that the spirits know that the body is no longer containing a spirit. Rez Ball, she shared, has what she loves about filmmaking–being able to open us up to different cultures, communities, people we aren’t familiar with but who are much more similar to us than we ever expected.
As for what’s next, Kelly is taking on another sports film, Him directed by Justin Tipping. She noted that this movie centers on football but delves into a darker side of sports, including traumatic brain injury caused by concussions.
Kelly’s body of work, though, extends well beyond sports themes. She is a two-time Emmy nominee–in 2017 for Outstanding Cinematography for a Nonfiction Program on the strength of director Ava DuVernay’s 13th (shared with cinematographer Hans Charles), and in 2020 for the “Lowkey Happy” episode of Insecure which earned recognition in the Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series (Half-Hour) category.
