FX’s “Mayans M.C.” is a tough, violent, and unflinching portrait of a Southern California motorcycle club fighting a bloody war to protect its territory. Yet it’s also a show filled with moments of subtlety and tenderness, in which the repercussions of violence for both the victim and the perpetrator are thoughtfully and powerfully considered. The balance between the harsh and the poignant that characterizes the show has been there from the beginning, but since Elgin James took over as sole showrunner in Season 3, the show has grown steadily deeper and more visceral, reaching its artistic peak in its fifth and final season, which ends July 19.
One of the key contributors to the evolution of the series’ tone and visual style is director of photography Vanessa Joy Smith, who was a camera operator on the first two seasons and then stepped into the role of cinematographer for the remainder of the show’s run. With James, she crafted a look that doesn’t shy away from the brutality of the characters’ lives yet also treats those characters with an intimacy that is, in its own way, quite beautiful in spite of the grim subject matter. “For me as a cinematographer, story is always first,” Smith told IndieWire. “How we’re going to move the camera, if we’re going to move the camera, and the lenses that we choose are all driven by story.”
That question of lens choice is key when it comes to the leap in both visual elegance and emotional impact that “Mayans M.C.” took in Season 4. “In Season 4, we changed our lenses and went anamorphic,” Smith said. “It created a new style of camerawork, framing and lighting.” The difference may be subliminal for the viewer, but the anamorphic lenses that Smith has used for the past two seasons have made the audience’s emotional connection to the characters much more intense. Part of it comes from the characteristics of the Cooke anamorphics themselves, which are flattering to the actors’ features, particularly given the longer focal lengths towards which Smith has gravitated. Part of it is the fact that those longer lenses focus the viewer’s eyes on the faces, letting the backgrounds and environments fall out of focus.
And part of it has to do with practical considerations that prompted changes in Smith’s overall approach; the fact that the anamorphic lenses are so much bigger, for example, required some adjustments to the series’ handheld style. “Ergonomically it changed things because the weight of the camera got so much heavier for the operators,” Smith said. Not wanting to wear out her operators meant that some shots switched to the dolly, but with the camera loose in a way that would simulate handheld. The result is a slightly dreamier, more elegant quality to the camera movement than what one saw in the first three seasons of “Mayans.”
Because anamorphic lenses require more light than spherical lenses, Smith found that she had to be more purposeful in her lighting set-ups. “It wasn’t necessarily about adding more light, but just being more intentional in how we shaped the light,” she said, noting that in recent seasons the filmmakers have also “embraced the darkness.” The necessity to sculpt the light and compose the frames more precisely gave the last two seasons of “Mayans, M.C.” a more classical quality that feels appropriate as the characterizations have grown deeper and the complex betrayals have grown more dramatic.
Ultimately, it is Smith’s sensitivity to performance that makes “Mayans, M.C.” such an involving experience, and it’s something that’s been key to her work from the beginning. “I was lucky because I came in as an operator on Season 1, and when you’re an operator you’re so intimate with the cast,” Smith said. “So I already had great relationships with them, and Elgin creates a really collaborative environment that includes the cast with the crew — they’re not separate. The cast was always included; they could talk to the dolly grip, whoever.”
Actor Clayton Cardenas, who plays Angel, says that kind of communication between actor and cinematographer is vital. “I need to know what kind of lens we’re on,” he told IndieWire in an interview conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike. “If we’re on tight shots then as an actor, I know I can’t be moving my head around because of focus or having my eyes darting around everywhere because it will be distracting. Obviously, it’s my job to hit my mark and know where my lighting is, but what as a DP are you trying to capture in this shot? What is the frame you envision that made you want to shoot it like this? Having this type of information is very helpful.”
Cardenas added that one of the pleasures of working on “Mayans M.C.” was seeing Smith come into her own as a cinematographer. “It’s been like watching the kid in art school who has all the potential and talent in the world finding their own unique lane and striving and thriving in it,” he said. As the show comes to its end, Smith feels the open environment she found on “Mayans” is going to be tough to replicate. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get that again,” she said. “Every show has its challenges and its great moments, but there was something unique about ‘Mayans’ in that we really did feel like a family. We really did look after one another. And it just made the work so much better.”
