“Hi, my name is Destin Cretton. I’m the director of ‘Just Mercy.’ This is a scene between Walter McMillian. Played by Jamie Foxx, and Herbert Richardson, played by Rob Morgan. And they are in cells on death row in Alabama. They share a wall. They’re directly next to each other. And one of the really interesting things that I learned from speaking with Anthony Ray Hinton, who was on death row in Holman Prison for 30 years for a crime he did not commit, was the camaraderie and relationships that they had between jailmates that were completely based on conversations they were having without being able to see each other. Bryan Stevenson said in his book that you cannot really fully understand a problem unless you allow yourself to get very close to it. And that was something that we were playing with with the camera, was leading up to this very scene. The cameras started off wider on these characters. And this was the scene where we actually bring the camera as close as possible to both Walter McMillian and Herbert Richardson. And I mean, you’ll see how close we are. Their eyes are in focus. Their nose is out of focus. And the camera was literally a couple inches from their faces.” “In and out.” [BREATHING DEEPLY] “Now close your eyes.” “Our DP, Brett Pollock, was really wanting to shoot all of these jail cells scenes as close to reality as possible. So in this scene in particular, there really is just the light source that’s coming in from outside the jail cell, which gives this kind of amber hue. That is really going to be a big contrast to the moment when we go outside through Walter McMillian’s escape vision in his mind that takes him back to the moment in the beginning of the movie when he is out in the forest and looking up at the trees. To capture the performances of this scene, we actually shot with two cameras running simultaneously, with Jamie Foxx in one cell and Rob Morgan in the other— which was very helpful for a scene like this, because it was quite loose. And it allowed the two actors to really be in it and respond to each other. And both sides of the conversation were captured. So we didn’t have to do too many editing tricks for this scene.” “I don’t want you to think about nothing else. Just keep your mind on that. Everything gonna be aight.”