The Making of Nickel Boys

Director RaMell Ross’ feature film Nickel Boys continues to earn accolades, including a Spotlight Award from the American Society of Cinematographers for director of photography Jomo Fray. With the movie, Fray explains, he and Ross “wanted to invite the audience into the body and the eyes of a Black boy during the Jim Crow South. Where someone looks or doesn't look quite literally can be the difference between life and death.” To create that visceral connection with viewers, the filmmakers framed the movie from the first-person perspectives of its two lead characters, Elwood and Turner (portrayed by Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, respectively). In this video interview, Fray speaks to his collaboration with Ross, their choice of Panavision VA prime lenses for the project, his own journey toward cinematography, and the personal philosophy that underpins his work.

Discovering Cinematography

Fray realized at an early age that he wanted to pursue a career behind the camera. “I told my parents at age 7 that I wanted to be a filmmaker,” he reflects. “Bless my two immigrant parents who were both scientists and had done no art. They were like, ‘Okay, cool.’” 

Over the years, Fray’s instinctual draw toward camerawork would be reinforced by some profound cinemagoing experiences. “I remember when I first saw the movie In the Mood for Love,” he shares. “Honestly, 20 minutes in, I stopped reading subtitles because I was so engrossed by the images. There was something almost magical to me, where I came into the theater totally neutral, totally blank, and I left with this deep emotional residue. I was just like, ‘I need to do this. I need to do this.’”

Visual Language

As Fray and Ross began their preproduction collaboration on Nickel Boys, they knew early on that the story would be presented from its two protagonists’ points of view. Fray explains, “It then became a question of, ‘Okay, well, what's an establishing shot? What's a cut? What's a transition? What's an insert shot?’ So all of a sudden, it's like taking traditional film language and breaking it down and then rebuilding it.

“I like to talk to directors almost fully emotionally,” he continues. “‘Tell me what you want this image to feel like. Do they look down at their shoes? Do they look at the couple that's passing you on a sidewalk?’ And although we had a meticulous, meticulous shot list where we wrote down every single way the gaze goes on every single shot, it was still fundamentally asking these more core questions.”

Camera and lens tests were critical to finding the emotional core of their visual language. “I love shooting that camera test and then sitting in a theater with the director and quite literally just look at the screen and raise your hand if you feel an emotion,” the cinematographer explains. “I remember for this one, my Panavision rep there [at Panavision New Orleans], Steve Krul, came in and was like, ‘You should maybe take a look at these VAs. They're still prototypes, but it might be something you like.’ I threw them on, and I just — I had never seen lenses quite like the VAs.

“The VAs gave us a sense of space, the wonderment, for example, at the beginning of the movie, when Elwood is a young boy [played by Ethan Cole Sharp],” Fray muses. “You're shooting a child, so you're short, and you're looking up, but it's not just that. It's that you are small relative to the world around you. So when your grandmother has a bedsheet above you, that sheet should feel so big, it can envelop the world. RaMell is a visual artist and a photographer. I sent him a few stills of the test. I wrote him and was like, ‘What do you think about these?’ And he just wrote back, ‘Oh my god.’ And I was like, ‘All right, great. I guess we're locked in here.’”

Present-Tense Images

With their immersive approach to Nickel Boys’ storytelling, Fray says, “RaMell and I had designed every scene as a oner. We knew that we were going to cut, but we weren't after mimicking sight. We were after trying to create an image that feels like sight. If I was trying to shoot an image that reflects how we as humans see, it's like, okay, a Steadicam becomes a great option. We stabilize images when we walk through the world. Steadicam also does that, but then all of a sudden that image felt ghostly. It felt detached. And it was always an important thing for RaMell and I to have an image that felt present tense, that felt tied into a body, a body with real stakes. All of a sudden, strangely, things like handheld became a little bit more visceral, a little bit more in the body, even though that does not match how we as humans move through space.”

In addition to handheld camerawork, the filmmakers employed a variety of tools to move the camera with an appropriately grounded, “in the body” feeling. “We used the Mini Libra [remote head], and we would do it in mimic mode,” Fray shares. “I could be in another room and be doing handheld, and I could look down on my body, and the camera would look down on the actor's body. And we did body rigs that we had to build and custom-make for the actors. There were helmet rigs. We built an industrial Easyrig for the moments where it had to come from the neck or the head.

“The SnorriCam was one of the things we tested,” Fray adds, “and when we saw it in the theater, we both raised our hands like, ‘We're feeling something.’ Seeing two people hug in a SnorriCam, and seeing the image shake to the vibrations of that hug, that was something we had never really seen before, and it really evoked an emotion in us.”

The fundamental challenge in crafting first-person images is that everyone quite literally has a lifetime’s worth of experience viewing the world through their own eyes. “Every viewer in the audience is hyper-literate in what it feels like to see the world through their bodies,” Fray says. “We do it every day. It can be the difference of a centimeter between a shot feeling uncanny and a shot feeling immersive.”

Bespoke Approach

In the decades since he determined his career path, Fray has developed a rich and abiding philosophy that’s inherent in his approach to image-making. “There are so many ways that language gets in the way between actually communicating, and I don't think that images are perfect, but I think images can sometimes just get to a more honest place,” he reflects. “The more I push myself to be a more compassionate human in the world, the better the images.”

He continues, “I want every image that I make on a movie to be fundamentally bespoke. I'm trying to build an image totally organically and letting it grow out of the soil of the script, rather than me coming to a script saying, ‘Oh, I think we should do this lens or this idea.’ Every image I make should ask a question, and the next image should answer that question by asking another question. And I think the cool thing about images is what they can set you up to think about.

“Any image I make is a finding,” the cinematographer concludes. “It's an unearthing. It's an attempt at an answer, but it's never an answer. What we're searching for isn't something that's pretty, but ideally what we're searching for is something that feels evocative. And I think that if it's evocative, it feels human. And I think if it feels human, it's beautiful.”