Everyone thinks I’m an extra.

I’m sitting on a circle couch in a fancy hotel lobby in LA, and most everyone else milling about is dressed for a fictional brunch, extras in a TV show filming in the open dining room just across the lobby.

The screen of one camera is just eight feet away from me and I watch the scene through it, zooming in and out on an actor in a colorful 90’s-style jacket. He looks familiar, but I can’t quite place him.

Then the woman sitting next to him in a gorgeous dusty rose suit comes into view of the screen—just a fourth of her profile, but I know immediately.

That’s Rashida Jones.

And I realize the man next to her must be Kenya Barris. (I remember reading somewhere that they were working on a new Netflix show together.)

I’m here to interview Chloe Weaver, a camera operator on the show. We’re going to meet when the shoot breaks for lunch. (I didn’t know what show I’d be walking into ahead of time, because she couldn’t tell me what it was then; it was still top secret.)

Real hotel guests filter in and out of the lobby as I wait. They all ask the real extras what’s going on as they point to the cameras taller than me and dozens of crew members in the dining room. The extras dutifully reply that they aren’t allowed to say.

Chloe is part of a crew currently outside the lobby, shooting exteriors of the hotel, including the fancy cars parked out front, so clean and perfect that when I first arrived I thought Wow LA really is something else, only to realize later that the flawless cars were props.

It takes more than 100 people and half a day to shoot scenes that—I realize when I watch the pilot months later—appear for just a few seconds in an opening sequence.

Chloe is one of those 100 people.

And it’s finally time for them to break for lunch.

Chloe meets me in the lobby, dressed far differently than the extras meant to look like upscale LA brunch-goers: she’s in a backwards hat, with undyed blonde hair tied loosely in a low bun, jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers. She smiles and says hello and apologizes for the delay (the morning shoot went a bit over).

We make our way across the street where a giant makeshift tent has been erected over a nondescript LA parking lot to feed the 100 crew members and actors. It will be gone by tomorrow.

Once we’re under the tent I don’t feel like I’m in a parking lot at all. It feels like a wedding you’re grateful to be invited to—the food delicious, the company fun. There’s grilled shrimp and baby greens, chicken and yellow rice, soft rolls, even softer butter, all fresh and piled up in serving bowls, placed nicely across the plastic tables draped with white tablecloths. There are also a few specialized food trucks. The cast and crew can choose whatever they want, and have as much as they like.

As Chloe explains, crews like this work 12-15 hour days. Meals are essential.

Under that tent, for however brief a time, I understand fully why actors talk about crews so fondly on awards stages and why people cry when their shows wrap.

The people under this tent eat together and create together.

But what bonds them most of all, I think, is that they’re adults who’ve figured out how to keep playing make believe.

And Chloe’s role as a cinematographer is still relatively revolutionary. The American Society of Cinematographers didn’t let women in until 1980, and it was only two years ago that the first woman was nominated for an Academy Award for Cinematography.

I sit across from Chloe. Forks clink around us, and she tells me how she became a cinematographer.

As soon as young Chloe got her hands on her own camera, she rallied her high school friends together to make films.

Her first was called Cheese Quest.

Chloe laughs as she tells me the dramatic plot: “My cheese was missing.”

She created constantly.“They were terrible movies,” she says of what she made back then, “but they were my movies.”

Those movies were how Chloe began to teach herself craft. “I learned how to edit footage,” she says, “and how putting music against something on-screen can create an emotional response.”

She learned screen direction “just by doing it wrong a few times and then fixing it.”

Chloe continued this pattern—making terrible movies, learning from them—all throughout high school, just for fun.

Then she saw The Tom Green Show. This show, according to Chloe, was filmed in a “ridiculous on-the-street kind of documentary style.” His visuals weren’t fancy or professional, and that’s exactly what inspired her. His show looked like what Chloe and her friends were making. Except his was on TV.

She wondered if maybe she could create something for TV one day.

Chloe went to college to study film at Long Beach State, where she also had the option to apply for an elite production track for even more hands-on experience. To apply, you simply had to submit past work.

But Chloe had never shown her work.

Cheese Quest was made for fun, not for other people to see.

She’d made lots of work since then too, but nothing she wanted to show: “I suffered some real insecurities,” she says. (Hours after our interview, she texts me: “That’s the first time I’ve told anyone about Cheese Quest.”)

She wasn’t ready for criticism, and froze at the thought of showing her work, even though she desperately wanted to be a part of the production track.“That’s what I wanted to do in my heart,” she says, “but I was too nervous.”

She couldn’t do it.

And yet. She couldn’t imagine not being a part of that production track. She wanted to make films. She had to find another way. “I took a back way in,” she says. Instead of formally applying for the production track, she instead made friends with the students in the production track. They saw her passion and snuck her onto their productions and gave her things to do, like hold the boom mic.

She loved being on those sets, and knew, without a doubt, that this was where she wanted to be.

But she didn’t tell anyone that.

She knew then that working behind a camera was her dream, but it took her four years to finally say it out loud. And only then it was because for the first time someone asked her directly what she really wanted to do.

Chloe graduated film school and joined a group of students who had decided to dedicate the summer to making their own feature film. Chloe spoke up about what she really wanted to do, and found that saying her dream out loud for the second time was a lot easier than the first.

She was the first assistant camera to the cinematographer, and had a second assistant under her.

They worked 15-hour days and she loved it. The movie, she says, was “not great,” but she also remembers that time as “perfect.”

She had to do this for a living, she decided, and figured the best way to conquer her insecurities once and for all was to dedicate herself to developing highly valued skills, like focus pulling, where a camera assistant (i.e. first AC) turns a knob attached to the lens to bring different objects or actors into focus, depending on their distance and the goals of the scene.

It’s high-pressure work, the kind no one notices when you’re doing it well—but the kind everyone notices when you mess up.

It’s also a highly valuable and specialized skill on set. Even student films paid to hire a focus puller. Chloe dedicated herself to becoming a great 1st AC, and started making money focus pulling for student films at USC, where she met the people who would become her professional community.

Through the jobs she heard about from that community, Chloe made a living as a focus puller for years.

Then, after eight years of diligent work as a 1st AC, she got hired for her biggest job yet, by the prestigious DP Danny Moder, to pull focus for actors like Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, and Chiwetel Ejiofor. It was a dream come true.

But the added pressure was also getting to her.

She loved managing a department and working with cameras, but she didn’t know how long she wanted to be a focus puller. The more she advanced, the higher the technical demand became. One wrong move as a focus puller and she could be wasting the time of actors whose time was literally worth millions.

There’s the pressure that launches and the pressure that buries; focus pulling was becoming the latter for Chloe. She craved a different kind of pressure.

She was just afraid to say it out loud.

What she really wanted to do next was be a cinematographer. “I remember not really knowing how to say that,” she says, “but it’s what I wanted.”

The dream was inspired in part by her first viewing of the Wes Anderson film Rushmore.

It was the first time she realized how the people behind the camera could affect an emotional reaction for the viewer and help tell the story. “He was the first director auteur,” she says, “that made me think, Oh you can really put your stamp on something.”

She wanted to do that too.

She gathered the courage and finally started telling people she trusted that she wanted to be a cinematographer. One of those people was  Adam Bricker, a cinematographer she’d worked with who’d also become a mentor to her.

On another project together, Netflix docu-series Chef’s Table, Adam was the Director of Photography (another title for cinematographer known as the DP) and Chloe was his first assistant camera. Now knowing her dream, Adam sent her out to do shoot the bulk of the B roll by herself for the episode they were shooting about the chef Magnus Nilsson in Sweden (which you can see on Chef’s Table Season 1, Episode 6).

He was impressed with the B roll she was shooting. It not only looked beautiful, but it added to the story. [watch this ep again and add an example] When Adam had to leave the shoot for a few days to attend a wedding, he asked Chloe to take over as the DP of the principle unit, working alongside the director and executive producer Andrew Fried.

This was the kind of pressure she thrived in. She loved the work.

Andrew Fried loved her work, too.

She was then hired to be the DP for an entire episode of Chef’s Table, the one featuring James Beard award-winning chef and founder of La Brea Bakery, Nancy Silverton.

She’ll never forget the first day on location as a DP, at Nancy’s famous restaurant Osteria Mozza in Hollywood.

“The director, and I had lined up a shot of Nancy’s Chopped Salad on the beautiful white marble countertop at Osteria Mozza,” Chloe says. “It was a shot from the diner’s perspective, set at the most special seat in the house, Nancy’s mozzarella bar. I’m operating the camera as a dolly pushes in and booms up, just as the salad is being set down, and we land in a perfect close up as oregano is lightly dusted on top, in slow motion. It turned out just as I hoped and that was the moment I knew I had to keep moving forward. I was living the moment I had strived for and I couldn’t turn back.”

Chloe made an internal declaration that day. “Don’t ever focus pull again,” she told herself. “Just treat this as the day that you stopped.”

There was only one problem.

Focus pulling paid the rent. And she was really good at it after mastering it for almost a decade.

Offers kept coming in for focus pulling jobs. But instead of just turning them down, Chloe decided to use each job offer as an opportunity to get the word out about what she really wanted to do. She declined each offer but explained that it was because she was now focused on camera operating and being a DP.

Soon, Chloe got signed as a Cinematographer by the United Talent Agency.

And she was hired to be the DP of three more episodes of Chef’s Table, featuring Cristina Martinez, Mashama Bailey, and  Tootsie Tomanetz.

When Chloe hears her assistants in her camera department mention that they want to be a camera operator one day, she always turns to them and says, “Never stop saying that. Keep telling people where you want to be. Continually express where you are hoping to go. There’s something about saying it aloud, and saying it to other people.”