Setting aside her general reticence towards directing for TV, Morano says she had specific reservations about working on The Power because of its obvious overtones with A Handmaid’s Tale. (Naomi Alderman was Atwood’s literary protege and the dystopic, matriarchal world she paints bears clear testament to that).

“I can’t be a one-trick pony. This isn’t all I want to do,” she says.

But in the end, it was too compelling a story to turn down.

“In the way that Margaret Atwood was really pushing the boundaries at that time [with A Handmaid’s Tale]… predicting the future and in many ways telling the story of the present, the same thing is true of Naomi’s book.

“What I love about The Power is that while you expect this world to be a sort of utopia, because women run it… it's really this amazing study on how power is the same no matter who wields it. And that's the interesting thing.”

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as the French philosopher, Voltaire, famously noted.

Morano owes her love of film in large part to her dad, Casey, who one day handed her a film camera when she was 14 and tasked her with becoming the family documentarian. But as an intensely shy child at the time, she had little interest in filmmaking, preferring to spend her spare time writing stories.

“I didn't have any interest in picking up the camera,” she explains, “I knew that having a camera forced you to capture somebody in their personal space, and that seemed to require you to breach other people's boundaries in a weird way.

“It’s a complicated role, being behind the camera. Even now I remain sensitive to that when I’m just using my iPhone to film a friend or even a stranger in the street. I still think ‘Oh, God, is that going to offend them?’”

But then something clicked and soon she was spending hours lying in the grass filming ‘who knows what’ before eventually turning the camera onto her younger-brother-turned-muse

“I would film him doing commercials for various products around the house,” she laughs. “I have this great commercial of him getting out of the shower wrapped in a towel with a bottle of some 80s shampoo saying something like ‘Dermax, for softer hair’. You can hear me behind the camera saying ‘action’ and ‘cut’.

It was Morano’s dad too who later persuaded her to apply to NYU film-school, where she became fascinated by cinematography. She recollects returning from one of her very first film shoots there awed by the role of the DP (director of photography) and with the idea that the audience ultimately sees the film through their eyes.

“I came away from that shoot knowing I wanted to be the person behind the camera.”

That same weekend, in what Morano describes as some ‘strange cosmic thing’, her dad had a heart attack and passed away. “Up until that point, I had been so confused about what I wanted to do with my life. Then after that shoot I knew with absolute certainty that this is where I should go and what I should do. It felt as though he had set that in motion and then moved on.”

And what about when she’s not on set and in action mode?

When it comes to dressing up, Reed smiles, to go ‘out-out’, “I’ll opt for a Mara Hoffman skirt a plain shirt or t-shirt.”

Our time is coming to an end as Morano’s two children are due to arrive back at the apartment any moment. But before we leave what feels to me like our virtual dinner-date I ask what advice she tends to offer the young cinematographers she tells me she’s currently carving out time to mentor.

“When I started out, I was very focused and driven, but I wasn’t in a rush,” she says. “I didn't ever think ‘oh, I'm not at the level I should be right now’. I was always enjoying the level I was at.

“And what I've noticed with a lot of people in this generation is that they think they need to already be at their final destination. I still don't know what my final destination is. But I just enjoy every step of the journey, because even when things are hard, and the job is rough, and maybe things aren't going exactly the way I want them to be, I still pinch myself. I'm like, I still can't believe I can even have this job to complain about, you know? I'm so lucky.”

I bid Morano goodbye, buoyed by her words and vowing to myself to head straight to the cinema to be awed by the magic of the big screen.