Speaking with Rachel Morrison let me check another bucket-list filmmaker off my list. As a cinematographer, she shot some of my favorite films, including “Mudbound” (Dee Rees) and “Fruitvale Station” (Ryan Coogler). She was the first woman nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, and she helped pave the way for Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s win earlier this year for Coogler’s “Sinners.” Arkapaw gave Morrison a shout-out as one of the field’s trailblazers, which made the conversation feel even more special.

“Love of Your Life,” her sophomore feature, follows her powerful directorial debut, “The Fire Inside,” and it’s the film we need right now. So many films today focus on action and spectacle rather than inner lives. This one is a deeply moving story of one woman’s resilience in the face of adversity.

“Love of Your Life” follows Maya (Margaret Qualley), a Boston ER nurse who falls in love with an MIT researcher, Charlie (Gabriel Basso). Their relationship is beautiful and deeply felt, and it reminds you of what it’s like to fall in love. When Maya’s world is upended with little warning, a journey to Europe feels like her only hope. Across Lisbon, London, New Orleans, and New England, she tries to free herself from all attachments, but the trip becomes more than an escape. It’s a chance to get to know herself as she never has, and to learn to love who she is, whatever comes next. As much as she tries to live unbound to anyone, she can’t outrun the questions of what her heart wants and who she still has the potential to be. Written by Julia Cox and directed by Morrison with careful and nuanced specificity, the film moved me. The film shows life after COVID and the trauma it left behind, especially for essential workers. Qualley’s performance is full and felt, and she’s joined by a strong supporting cast that includes Catherine Keener, Aaron Pierre, and Patrick Schwarzenegger.

In our conversation, Morrison and I talked about her work with the cast, her role as director, and her collaborations with cinematographer Todd Banhazl and editor Jennifer Vecchiarello (My Old Ass), along with assistant editors Christi Leftwich and Ellie Zarr.

“Love of Your Life” comes to select theaters October 7th and streaming globally on Prime Video on October 14th.

What drew you to this project, and how did you connect with Julia Cox?

Julia drew me to the project, sort of. I met with her because I liked the script, but it wasn’t an immediate “this is going to be my next project.” It was more that this writer seemed really interesting, and I’d heard she was lovely. I’m always looking for more writers in my life. We just hit it off. A one-hour lunch turned into a two-and-a-half-hour hangout.

Then the script started to percolate. It was personal, and I think I was sort of avoiding how personal it was. The layers kept revealing themselves, and I’d think, “Oh, this is incredibly personal.” It kept coming back to me. It also landed at Amazon MGM, where I’d made my first movie, and they’d been wanting to work with me again.

So it was one of those projects that chose me, in some respects. Because it was personal, I saw my way into it. And if you haven’t seen my last film (“The Fire Inside”), it does something similar in subverting expectation. You think you know where things are going, and then it takes a hard right turn. I found that really compelling. I love a chance to break the rules.

In the press notes, you said that profound grief can give way to profound appreciation and gratitude, and I think you brought those subtle, deep emotions to the screen. Tell me about collaborating with Margaret Qualley, who plays an essential worker we don’t see represented enough on screen, and about bringing the emotions of the pandemic and of losing someone so important to the role. How did you find Margaret?

Part of what drew me to Margaret is that she was drawn to the material. I didn’t want to have to convince anybody to make this movie. When a film requires this much of the lead in every scene, you want them to want it, to hope they get it, and to breathe life into it. I knew she’d read the script and really responded to it, which piqued my interest.

Margaret clearly has massive range, but so much of her work is larger than life, and I really wanted to keep a foot on the ground. So my initial conversation with her was about making sure we saw the same version of the film. That was my conversation with everybody, because this film could be interpreted many different ways. There’s a much more by-the-numbers studio-romance version, and that’s not the version I wanted to make. It’s as simple as not beauty-lighting everyone for no reason, so that even in their darkest moments they’re somehow glamorous. I wanted us on the same page about that. And I wanted the film to be relatable. Larger-than-life characters are so cool to watch, but here I wanted everybody to see themselves in it. Those early conversations were really about relatability.

Then, with the emotions, it’s all so nuanced, and she brought so much to it. Collectively, we were figuring out how far to go in each moment. You have a character who is inherently quite avoidant, and, you know, that’s me.

I related to that too. Especially the scene where she’s about to meet the family for the first time, she’s exhausted, and she’s like, “I’m not ready.” I’ve been in that exact situation.

Yes, so the question became how to communicate that. With the exception of when Charlie dies, this is someone who does not cry. She won’t break until the very end. So we crafted that together: how do we show she’s in deep pain through some of these beautiful moments? I found that compelling, and I think it’s also what drew Julia to the project. You can be in some of the most beautiful places and not be able to appreciate them until you finally rest to the point where you can again. And with some of the most beautiful people, too, like Aaron Pierre.

Oh my goodness, yes. And then Catherine Keener. I think this might be my favorite performance of hers in a while. You don’t even need to see her in that window scene. You just hear the emotion in her voice as she yells up to Maya. What was it like working with her?

Incredible. She’s a legend, and she embodies so much. Out of the gate she’s relatable, with something very “every woman” about her, like a mother or a sister. She’s also such a professional. For that scene, I was handheld on the ground with her, and she just wanted to keep going and stay in it. My shoulder was ready to fall off, but we were dancing together for something like 45 minutes.

I don’t know that I’d call her a method actor, and I don’t know if she would call herself that, but she does embody the character. The profound level of grief I watched her experience in those moments was not performative. It was deep and raw. It’s a cool thing to witness in someone, because she was living it, and you feel that on screen.

Definitely. Now, you weren’t the DP on this project, but how does your work as a DP guide or inform your work as a director?

I see things visually. I’ve had a lens attached to me since I was seven or eight years old, first with photography and then film. That’s a helpful jumping-off point, because it’s not something I have to look for or seek out. I can just see it and feel it. And I have a shorthand with everybody from all my years on set. When I scout with Todd, we can communicate technically and in terms of lighting, but also in terms of emotion. When we were talking about Portugal, I told him I wanted it to feel like it’s always sunny, but she’s never walking in it. It’s always just missing her. It’s the idea of being in these beautiful places and being almost immune to them.

There’s also an efficiency to how I work from all those years of set experience. I know what we need, and I know when we have it.

As for operating, when I first hired Todd, I said, “If you’re cool with it…” Actually, I didn’t give him that choice. I knew that in the emotional moments, when we’re handheld, I’d want to be the one with the camera. He said great, and he was an amazing collaborator. He stayed behind the monitors and was my eyes in full color while I looked through the eyepiece, where I have almost no peripheral vision. He was my peripheral vision.

That meant I could direct from behind the camera, which is nice because I can keep the actors in it. I don’t have to call cut and then talk to my DP, who talks to the operator, and so on. We can stay in it. I can ask for another take and give my notes, and when it’s Catherine going for 45 minutes, we never have to stop down, walk back out, and ask for a wide shot. It’s very fluid, almost like a documentary. It’s very lit, so it’s not a documentary, but we could move fluidly together.

I love that. And I love how you use the different cities as different stages in Maya’s life. New Orleans at the end felt so refreshing, because she’s become someone different and is in a different space. Can you talk about using the cities to mark those parts of her life?

There’s a lot to that. We wanted each city to feel almost like its own character. And as you say, there’s something profound in this film about getting to traverse a good amount of time. In a lot of movies, grief is handled so that people bounce back from tremendous losses and heartbreaks and have moved on six months later. That’s not how grief works. When it sinks its teeth in, it’s a long time crawling your way out. So what was special about the script is that it takes its time. We see that it’s a process and a journey, and by the end you feel like you’ve lived a real life with her and traveled the world with her.

Part of traveling the world was wanting it to feel cinematic, with different looks and feels. I had the benefit of choosing some of the locations. Some were in the script, and some I got to pick. They’re each quite visual, and each has a “dripping time” quality. Portugal and New Orleans both have a patina to the walls, as if each wall holds a million stories. Boston has history too, and so does London, and then Japan, of course. These are places where you could close your eyes, feel the wall, and know where you are. I think that mattered because it was her journey. She had to go a massive distance to come back and find herself again.

I love that. I’m a traveler, and I love traveling through films, so thank you for that journey. Your editor, Jennifer, how was it working with her?

Jen was amazing. In some ways she was the editor I needed and didn’t know I needed. I loved my editor on my last film, but he wasn’t available for this one, and Jen was perfect for it. I also think there was something necessary about having a female editor on this film. She was thinking about things I wasn’t, like how much we do or don’t emphasize having kids, and not wanting that to feel like either the solution or the failure.

She’s an incredibly sensitive, adept storyteller, and efficient. There’s a version of this that could have become a sprawling three-hour thing, and nobody wants to sit through that, myself included. She was able to do so much with so little. Think about most romantic dramas: the entire runtime, let’s call it a hundred minutes, is dedicated to one person. Here we have three significant relationships, four if you count Catherine, and at the end of the day it’s not about any of them. It’s about her. And all of that fits into a full length feature, which is a real testament to Jen.

We played with different iterations, linear, non-linear, flashbacks, and every version worked, which is a testament to her and maybe to the performances. You could make a fever-dream version of this movie and it would still work. You’d just lose some of the gut punch of the surprise.

She’s really special, and so was our whole team. Our assistant editors, Christi and Ellie, were also really amazing. We had an all-female editing team, which was cool.

Yay! I love that. And did she edit “My Old Ass”?

RM: She did! There are some parallels there, and that was part of what drew me to her. She’s done both big and small, which is what I wanted this movie to be. I wanted it to have an epic quality and also be incredibly intimate. She’s co-edited Marvel movies, but she’s also worked with Miranda July and Mike Mills, and on “My Old Ass,” which plays with the temporal and with time. There’s also humor. This movie is dramatic and sad at times, but it also has some really funny moments, and she was able to deliver on that.

I loved the part where she’s dancing with the women. I was ready for Margaret to go full-on dancer, because that’s in her wheelhouse, but she was restrained.

Part of it was that we were looking for something she didn’t already know. She’s not a pro at bachata. It’s maybe the one dance she doesn’t know.

That’s true.

But she was definitely playing it more amateur than she is.

What do you hope people see in your film?

Good question. I think what you started with is my biggest hope: that people take away the hope and inspiration at the end. We have to be patient with ourselves when we go through major life moments, whether it’s a loss or a relationship that doesn’t work out. We may not transform overnight, but on the other end of it, maybe we can feel things even stronger, brighter, better. There’s so much possibility on the other side.

For me, having survived a good amount of loss early on, I feel a sublime appreciation for my own mortality, for life, and for vitality, and a desire to make the most of every moment. My hope is that people take that away. I hope they take advantage of the people who mean something to them and hug their loved ones closer. And I hope they appreciate even the little moments: time, the day-to-day.

Yes. And you feel that by the end.

“Love of Your Life” comes to select theaters October 7th and streaming globally on Prime Video on October 14th.