When Millicent Shelton boarded “Lessons in Chemistry” to helm the show’s fifth and sixth episodes, its visual style had already been established. But as a veteran TV director with a history of joining series as a guest director, she was no stranger to having to work with a template — and most importantly, she had long learned that the key was not to copy it.
“When I was a young director, I actually thought that I was supposed to hide my personality by imitating what other directors did. And someone mentioned once — they were like, ‘Millicent is a really good director, but I can’t tell her work from anybody else’s,'” Shelton recalls during a recent webchat with Gold Derby (watch the full exclusive video interview above). “So at that moment, I realized that it’s the balance — the balance of being able to use language that’s been established for a project but make it your own. You should always bring yourself and your own personality to it — and your own interpretation of the material and [a specific] moment in a series. So now, whenever I approach something, I always do all of my research, I watch anything I possibly can to understand, like, ‘Oh, this is the type of lenses that they have, this is the type of visual language that they’re using,’ and then I kind of put it in the back, recesses of my mind and visualize it freely just for me.”
Adapted from Bonnie Garmus‘ 2022 bestseller of the same name and set in the 1950s and ’60s, “Lessons in Chemistry” follows Elizabeth Zott (Brie Larson), a brilliant chemist whose career aspirations are stalled by patriarchal norms but later becomes the star of a cooking show, “Supper at Six,” on which she gets to flex her science know-how. Although the eight-part period drama opens with a flash-forward to a live taping of this show, it isn’t until the fifth episode, “CH3COOH,” in which Elizabeth accepts the hosting gig and viewers are thus properly introduced to the world of “Supper at Six.”
For Shelton, who spent three days getting to know the set for the cooking show with the episode’s cinematographer, Zachary Galler, it was important that the “Supper at Six” studio had “character.” “The set was a character in the story,” she highlights. “I thought, ‘Well, if it’s a character, there has to be a story — there has to be a story about how we see it and how it interacts with Elizabeth and the arc of what we’re talking about — [and we have to] always keep it alive.’ I mean, sometimes when you get into a set, it almost feels like when you’re in a courtroom — it kind of feels boring. And so Zach and I would go through — we looked through every crevice… We made sure that we showed every aspect of ‘Supper at Six’ and kept it alive and kept it pertinent and kept it involved in the storytelling of Elizabeth’s journey.”
In the sixth episode, “Poirot,” Elizabeth’s journey is put into perspective as it’s contrasted with that of her friend and neighbor Harriet Sloane (Aja Naomi King), a Black legal aide who tries to prevent the city from running a freeway through her predominantly Black neighborhood of Sugar Hill. As Elizabeth attempts to do damage control after a stunt of hers causes her and the pay for all non-essential “Supper at Six” employees to be suspended for three days, she declines to join a sit-in Harriet has organized. This prompts Harriet to draw Elizabeth’s attention to her ignorance of racial discrimination in the U.S. and remind her friend that she, as a TV star, has the platform to elicit change.
“When I took [on] this project, I was interested in it because I understood Elizabeth’s journey, as a Black female filmmaker in an industry that is primarily white [and] male — I understand her struggle and her fight just to be recognized and heard for who you are and your capabilities, not because of your sexuality or your skin tone,” Shelton says when asked how she went about highlighting the differences between Elizabeth’s and Harriet’s respective fights without trivializing the former. “To me as the director, when I get a storyline like this, I don’t exploit pain just for pain’s sake. I always want to get deeper into, like, ‘Why are we showing Black pain or female pain? What’s the purpose behind this?’ And to me, [you have to] humanize the struggle of these characters so that anyone watching can see that what happened to them and the inequalities are so wrong, from a human level… You know, from a human level, that [Elizabeth] feels like she is capable and is not being able to rise up. And you know, on a human level, that these Black people who are homeowners deserve their property values not to go down, and they deserve a place to live, and they deserve harmony.”
SEE Dear Emmy voters: Please don’t overlook Aja Naomi King’s searing ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ performance
Shelton also applied this approach to filming the actual sit-in scene. As it was based on a real protest but there was no photographic evidence thereof, the director did extensive research to get an idea of what it might have looked like. “I looked at photos of other protests that were similar to it. And so, we kind of just recreated it,” she explains. “And for me, it was [important] to really show how it affected to humans — how it affected [Elizabeth], who’s on the outsides of it, and how it affected Harriet, who’s on the inside, and her family… I think what was special about this is, you weren’t just watching strangers and approaches being brutalized; you’re watching characters that you got to know and love — and you saw the injustice, and you understood why this was so painful to them, and why it was so wrong.”
At the same time, Shelton wanted to ensure that she didn’t water down the characters’ pain. “At one point, I looked over and the whole crew was in tears. And I was like, ‘Okay, but we have to do this. This is our job. We can’t sugarcoat it!’ And it was triggering, but it was supposed to be triggering,” she divulges. “All the stuntmen that were playing the white police officers — when they first went in there, they were gently pulling out the protesters. And I kept going, ‘You can’t be that gentle.’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, but this is rough.’ And I was like, ‘No, at that time, they were not gentle. We’re doing a disservice to the plight and the struggle that real people went through by not showing it authentically.'”
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