How ‘Nickel Boys’ cinematographer Jomo Fray developed the film’s ‘sentient perspective’
“Nickel Boys” is unlike any film you’ve ever seen. The RaMell Ross drama is shot in first-person point of view, but the writer-director and cinematographer Jomo Fray had another of way of describing it.
“Pretty early on, we started using the term ‘sentient perspective’ instead of saying ‘POV’ almost as a way to ground us in,” Fray tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: Film Cinematography panel. “What I think RaMell was after was trying to think of an image that always felt like it was connected to a human body. It always felt like it was tied in in a very present tense way — a real person navigating an often hostile environment. It was one of those situations where even on the onset, it was like, ‘OK, well, if we do want to do this sentient perspective, this first-person perspective, how do we find more traditional film grammar? What does that mean in this visual style? What’s an establishing shot? What’s a cut? What’s a transition? How do we move through space? How do we move through time?'”
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Adapted from Colson Whitehead‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Nickel Boys” follows Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a teen in Jim Crow era Tallahassee, Fla., who is sent to a reform school, Nickel Academy, after being falsely accused of stealing a car. With the camera acting as Elwood’s eyes, his face is never seen until he arrives at Nickel Academy. There, he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), and the POV flips and goes back and forth between them for the rest of the film.
While many of the images seen through the boys’ eyes appear free-flowing and natural, Fray and Ross made a meticulous shot list to lay out where the camera would go. That, ironically, allowed room for improvisation as every scene was designed as a oner even though there would be cuts.
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“We still wanted the actors to be able to stay in flow and kind of eliminate some aspects of artifice if we can get around them,” Fray explains. “It was really about trying to have that level of preparation so that on the day and on set, we could actually have a more improvisational feel and a more jazz-like feel. So it was really doing that preparation, so that when we got there, we could find the shot. It was a situation where because of the sentient perspective and the gaze, it’s important to have a sense of wonderment, it’s important to have a sense that the image itself is never in front of any action that’s happening, which sound simple, but weirdly, you kind of have to retrain yourself as an operator moving the camera.”
Unlike traditional cinema, where the action is in the center of the frame, it’s all about catching up in “Nickel Boys.” Just like in real life, if you hear something, you turn and look to see what happened. Or if something is uncomfortable, you might look away. Or if you’re lost in thought, your gaze might drift away.
“In our movie, the shot is you’re looking somewhere, you hear a glass shatter, and then the camera has to swing to where the sound was, but you’re always behind the action happening. We would kind of remind ourselves of that each day to kind of orient ourselves to that,” Fray says. “In the scene, whether it was me or our camera operator, Sam Ellison, it was about imbuing and mimicking the emotions we saw in [Herisse’s and Wilson’s] performances and trying to imbue the camera with that kind of vulnerability, that kind of presentness that the characters have. Something RaMell talked about was he didn’t want the movie to merely capture what we see but to capture how it feels to see. It’s not actually about seeing. It’s about how does the human heart see the world? Where do you look when you hear bad news? Where do you look when you’re looking at a crush for the first time? Where does your gaze go?”
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