When we think about cinematography, we think about light, about composition, about the way a camera moves through space to create a sense of mood or capture a fleeting moment. We don’t necessarily think about character and performance. Usually, those are the responsibilities of actors — and the director who lets them know when they’ve hit the mark.
But on “Nickel Boys,” the acclaimed drama about the inhabitants of a Jim Crow-era boarding school, the line between composition and performance is dissolved. Shot almost entirely from the first-person perspective, nearly everything we see onscreen is through the eyes of an upstanding boarder named Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and his world-wise friend, Turner (Brandon Wilson). When their eyes wander, the image wanders; when they tense up, so do we.
Operating the camera — and therefore standing in for both the characters and the audience — were the cinematographer Jomo Fray and the camera operator Sam Ellison. Under the direction of RaMell Ross, Fray and Ellison were the unseen players carrying every moment of the story. On Thursday, the film was nominated for two Oscars — best picture and best adapted screenplay (which Ross and Joslyn Barnes adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead).
In an interview last month in Brooklyn, Fray, whose credits include “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” and Ellison (“Severance,” “Manchester by the Sea”) discussed how they stepped into the literal shoes of the actors, why the film’s visual style matters and which scene was the hardest to pull off. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
How did you get into filmmaking?
JOMO FRAY It was one of those things where, at age 7, I told my parents I wanted to be a filmmaker. In my child brain I thought, “I can have it all. I can live 1,000 lives in one lifetime because I can help tell the story of a scientist and get to know what that life feels like. I could help tell the story of a firefighter and get to know what that life is.” In middle school through college, I worked at the Worcester public-access television station [in Massachusetts], working the cameras at the studio and editing and archiving.
SAM ELLISON I took one intro to filmmaking course in college with a 16-millimeter camera, then basically came straight to New York. I started as a production assistant and have done pretty much all of the jobs in the camera department over the last 15 years.
What are some of the movies that inspired you, either on this film or in general?
ELLISON There’s this old-school, New York City experimental filmmaker, Nathaniel Dorsky, who made these silent 16-millimeter films that are just sort of light studies, like a shot of a glass sitting on a table and light from a window moving through it. They’re incredible, quiet little prayers, little meditations.
FRAY Lynne Ramsay’s work was incredibly influential to me. The [shorts] “Small Deaths” and “Holy Cow,” which is about girlhood and puberty. There’s just something about it that’s so evocative and pulled me into that emotion. Terrence Malick is wildly influential to me, as well. Movies like “The New World” and “The Thin Red Line.”
How did you get connected with RaMell Ross?
FRAY I had seen “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” [Ross’s first feature, a documentary] in 2018 at Sundance. At the end, everyone walked out of the theater and I just stayed sitting there. People came in, cleaning and getting the theater ready, and I just couldn’t move. I had never seen images like that. I almost think of it now like watching a self-portrait that I didn’t remember painting. So when my agent reached out to me, at like 11:30 p.m., and sent me a breakdown of the “Nickel Boys” project, I called her at 11:35 and was like, “I’ll take the meeting.”
How did he describe the film’s perspective to you? How did he explain what he was going for?
FRAY For RaMell, since these are based on real people, real boys, it was always about, “How do we reconstitute them? How do we allow them to live again for two and a half hours?” I think there’s a way that in maybe more traditional, third-person cinema, there’s a natural membrane that sits between us as viewer and image. Nothing about that is wrong, it’s just an aspect of the process. But, with our movie, the hope was to puncture that membrane. Instead of using a close-up of a character like Elwood and having the audience ask, How does Elwood feel? Let me read his face and figure out his body language, in “Nickel Boys,” you’re forced to ask, What would I feel if this was happening to me? There’s an intimacy that’s created and facilitated with the camera language.
How did it affect the production? What made this shoot different from others you’ve worked on?
FRAY It affected everything. We worked really closely with the actors. If I was doing a scene hand-held, I would be wearing the costume, and they would put their arms underneath my armpit so that I can look down and see their arms, even though it’s my body. Or we’d be cheek-to-cheek while I was operating so that they could be as close as they could be to the other actor for their performance.
Not usually part of the job description.
FRAY It was wild. But we wanted to imbue the image with the character’s energy. Images look different when you are photographing someone you love. When you’re looking at Aunjanue Ellis and it’s your grandmother hugging you, you capture it differently. So we were real scene partners to the actors, not just voyeuristically observing. We watched them rehearse and studied how they moved and where their eyes went and really tried to feel those emotions in our bodies.
There were implications for production design, as well, which was just under a different level of scrutiny. Operating the camera [as Elwood or Turner], I’m going to be focusing on my desk, or my eyes are drifting over to the table.
ELLISON Sometimes you’re just looking down at your own feet for a while.
FRAY Which means the floor all of a sudden is something that needs to be deeply curated. The materiality of someone’s life actually says so much about them, and here it’s doing so much of the storytelling.
How did you approach filming it on a practical level?
FRAY We shot it on the Sony Venice. It has a really large, full-scale image that could be shown on an IMAX-level screen, but it also has this feature called Rialto mode.
ELLISON You can take the sensor off, so you have this tiny camera, effectively, that’s capturing everything. It made it so that we could move with it really easily.
How were you holding the camera?
FRAY On our shoulders.
ELLISON Or sometimes right in front of us.
There’s a shift to a close third-person perspective — behind the actor’s head — for scenes that take place later in the timeline, after the events at Nickel, the boarding school. What was the thinking there?
FRAY I think the question became, after the trauma of Nickel, how would these boys have understood themselves in space? This is my idea, as Jomo, but I imagine that after undergoing that level of trauma, a person would naturally dissociate from themselves a little bit, they would kind of see themselves outside of themselves in the world. We used something called a SnorriCam, which is used a lot in action movies. It’s this rig that is physically attached to the actor.
ELLISON It provides this sensory shift, but the camera still feels embodied because it’s being controlled by the physicality of the actor. It’s literally bound to him.
FRAY It was an interesting experience of coauthorship with Daveed [Diggs, who plays a Nickel survivor]. We would ask him, “OK, what are you feeling in the scene?” And he would say, “Well, I don’t feel connected to” [my scene partner]. So we’d have him shift his right shoulder, which would then cut the other actor out of the image. Then, later in the scene, when he feels more connected, he would open up his right shoulder and bring him back into the composition.
ELLISON That’s my favorite scene in the movie.
What was the hardest scene to shoot?
ELLISON A lot of the scenes that involved an uninterrupted gaze moving around the room, especially the scenes in the dormitory, and a couple in the classroom when we’re first introduced to Hamish [Linklater, who portrays the superintendent at Nickel] as he’s giving his little speech — trying to find the right times to look up at him, vs. when to be looking down at the other boys. If you linger for a couple of fractions of a second too long, you end up missing something critical and everything gets thrown off.
FRAY For me it was the scene [where Elwood is taken to a white shack and flogged by the superintendent]. From the beginning, RaMell said he never wanted to see a moment of violence in the movie.
Why not?
FRAY I think for him, there’s a way in which seeing brutality can trivialize it, counterintuitively. Like, “Oh, oh, that’s what happened.” It quantifies it. I think RaMell wanted to invite the audience to imagine instead. So, when we were shooting, the camera is looking away from this barbaric violence. But I, as the camera operator, am holding that energy in my body. There’s not an actor who’s experiencing it — you have to feel it in the camera. Those kinds of things were hard to hold.
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