Few features this decade commit more to a formal philosophy than RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys, which adapts Colson Whitehead’s novel almost entirely from the first-person vantage of its two protagonists when it isn’t––just as compellingly––taking an archival approach to build out its social-political context. Watching the film, it’s nearly impossible not to consider the level of collaboration that needed to bring this film forward, to not grow dizzy doing so.
At this year’s EnergaCAMERIMAGE I met with cinematographer Jomo Fray, who made a notable impression with last year’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. We began our conversation on a separate floor of the festival’s CKK Jordanki building, between showroom floor and elevator and conference room discussing the immense influence Ed Lachman (to whom I’d spoken hours prior) had upon Fray when framing Carol as an act of (I paraphrase from memory) “photographing signifiers of the amorous.” By the time I started recording, we were off to the races.
Jomo Fray: …and that was kind of why it became just such a guiding principle for RaMell and I during the process: not photographing sight, but photographing what sight feels like. Again is the same thing with: how do you photograph the signifiers of how the mind creates meaning?
The Film Stage: I saw Nickel Boys eight days ago, which is a little bit of time for a movie to percolate. And it’s funny what images from it have been staying in my mind. It’s fun to have that selective editing and thinking back on it.
Yeah.
There’s these images I think everybody feels. Between scenes with the mother or Hamish Linklater’s tyrant: even though you likely love her more than you love him, it’s not so much about the amorous, but yeah: the signifiers.
The signifiers. And I think that’s where it was, like, trying to find the way to photograph how does the mind create any meaning––amorous or otherwise? Like, what’s our process, and ideally the camera kind of drifting between. Which is why it was also 4:3 and really contained; it’s very claustrophobic. But ideally it’s to mimic––not sight, but to mimic meaning-creation. We look at a few things and then we’re like, three signifiers tell you the socioeconomics of the space that you’re in. And then that, you look at what you’re wearing and then that’s how you create, “How comfortable or uncomfortable am I? How are they gonna probably react to me? How should I react to them?”
Well, the experiential aspect––how you actually see the movie––is always very interesting and very important to me. I saw it at the Digital Arts screening room, which is a very weird space because it’s really only three rows and the screen is quite sizable, but the first row is, like, almost as close as we are now.
Oh, wow.
And I kind of made a point, knowing the film’s visual conceit, of sitting in the front row. Which I think expanded my experience of it. And I’m curious, for you, if there’s an ideal way of how people see the movie. Like, where they sit or if they’re gonna watch it at home, how they make up for those aspects of it.
You know, I think it was a movie designed with scale in mind. And I think a movie theater would probably be ideal, and if not a movie theater, as large an image can be. Because that was honestly one of the interesting things about the movie. Especially when thinking about different ages. You know, it’s easy to say, “Oh when you’re young you’re small.” But it’s not that you’re small; you’re small in relation to the rest of the world around you. So adults are giants because of the perspective of your position and I think that there is something that, in the movie, I really wanted to feel that sense of scale, that sense of wonderment that comes with when you’re small in a large world. Even when Elwood is an adult, kind of the feeling of yourself in space. Because even despite the inhumanity of a lot of the brutality of the system, the beauty of humans is that we still see beauty even when beauty is not all around us. We still see the wind pushing through reeds and why that’s really beautiful and feels human even if you’re hearing screams while it’s happening.
So yeah: I feel like the biggest screen possible. But, you know, I don’t think I’ve seen it on a small screen, but I’m sure something interesting happens there too.
I had been looking through interviews that you and Ross had done, and the both of you talk about these different visual concepts. From a behind-the-scenes angle, what were certain concepts and ideas you had discussed––maybe even tried––that just didn’t work and had to be abandoned? If you don’t mind talking about how the sausage is made, because I’m truly curious.
Of course. That was kind of the most fun aspect of the entire project, sitting down with RaMell and having conversations for upwards of 70 hours on, like, “What does this thing mean? What’s point of view mean?” I think pretty quickly both of us kind of abandoned point of view as a term and we kind of focused in on the size of a sentient perspective, and sentience being an important thing––we wanted an image that had sentience. An image that feels connected to a real human body. An image that feels like it is moving through the world in a present-tense fashion. And so towards that it was like having to almost think at a more quantum level about filmmaking––to break down a shot to its more subatomic components––and then to rebuild it into the image we wanted in this sentient perspective. Because it’s, you know, a crazy thing of: what in this sentient perspective what’s an establishing shot? What’s a cut? What are all of these things, and how do we build that?
When we were shot-listing, RaMell and I would design every scene as a oneer––we knew we would cut, but we wanted the actors to be able to stay in the flow of it. Especially because of the artifice that a lot of the camera system welcomes in. So it was trying to design ways to get these feelings across as a single shot, so when RaMell and I were shot-listing we would sometimes have a small DSLR and just try things as we were talking about shot-listing them. Ideally the movie feels very lyrical and reactive, but, you know, it was meticulously planned to the point that every shot and every oneer in our shot list was: every single time the camera gazes or it changes position was something that we wrote in prep. “The camera moves from this; it then moves to that; it then takes in this other thing; we move forward and we turn around and we see X.” Like, it was really kind of like almost walking you through the actions on a more technical level of the shot.
But again: towards that it was trying things. Like, “Okay, let’s hug with the DSLR. Does this work? No, that doesn’t look good.” “Okay, maybe if we come from above, that works better.” “Oh, that doesn’t work.” “Okay, maybe if we come from above, but we rack the focus to the distance and don’t rack it to the shoulder makes it feel more immersive.” Because again: that was really the thing for RaMell. That was a word we always used: immersion. We wanted this to not feel like a gimmick or a ploy. We wanted to it ideally be something that the audience could disappear into and kind of… live concurrently with these boys. To quite literally be in time together at the same time––both the audience and the character.
But really it was so much camera-testing. Like, it was a ton of camera-testing things like the SnorriCam. I really had to just unlearn everything that I learned to just bring almost every tool to bear that I can think of, and then think of putting it upside-down. “What would it look like if you attached it to a body?” Just all of these kind of crazy apparatuses. Then RaMell and I and our colorist, Alex Bickel, would sit in the theater; we would project all of the tests and we literally would just be like, “Okay, raise your hand when you feel something.” And it kind of was the process.
One example of something that didn’t work is: at first it was while we were still kind of building what this idea of POV or sentience means. One of the first things, we were like, “Okay, well, if our brain stabilizes the information that comes in from our cortex, we don’t actually experience a lot of motion even though our body could be at heavy motion.” Kind of à la birds having, like, a built-in gimbal to themselves. “Okay, knowing that, maybe a Steadicam would be a really great tool for us.” So then we shot the Steadicam and I was like, “Oh, actually this feels really ghostly.” Even if you have signifiers, like arms or different things into it. That wasn’t it, so then it was like, “Okay, let’s try handheld.”
And even though handheld isn’t anything like our experience of movement, it feels like it’s inside a body; it feels really present-tense. Then, you know, the interesting things became the ways in which we then had to make differentiations, even within handheld. The difference between handheld that’s on my shoulder––so it feels like it’s connected to my spine and my body moving through space––versus handheld when we would strip the camera down in the Rialto mode, shooting on the Sony Venice, where I would operate in-between my hands, and the way that I can articulate the camera quickly with my wrists is different than if I was articulating the camera for my spine on my shoulder.
Then it became a thing of, “If the shot is about moving your neck really quickly, how could we build kind of an industrial easy rig to get that motion?” Versus something like handheld and then versus something like Steadicam, that actually does reflect how we experience motion, but wasn’t right for this project because, again, of the grammar of cinema––because of the visual language of cinema––we connect handheld to something that feels more present-tense, more visceral. So yeah: just really trying almost everything we could think of. And when things didn’t work, kind of building either body rigs or building specific tools for certain shots.
I can picture how a Steadicam would sort of float.
Even if it was, like, putting a Steadicam arm on a dolly so it’s heavier in weight, there still feels like something that wasn’t… again, these are all the tests. We would be like, “Oh, but that doesn’t feel like it.” Which is the interesting thing about this perspective from an artistic point of view: every viewer of this movie is hyper-literate in the perspective of seeing the world through a body––because we see our lives only through our bodies––so then it’s an interesting thing where, again, because we’re not trying to show how we see. The lenses aren’t super-wide. We’re not shooting anamorphic; we’re not shooting widescreen. It’s actually super-contained and super-condensed, which gets back to this idea of, “How do we create an image that we haven’t seen before? How do we create an image that feels like sight rather than mimics sight?”
This is one of those movies where I think you’re aware that a lot of coordination is being done. And I was kind of surprised to see the operator, Sam Ellison, hasn’t worked with you or Ross before. Which, to me, is sort of crazy to think about. Because I would assume you need to trust them quite a bit––you need to verify them quite a bit. So how did you establish trust?
Yeah. You know, the thing I always look for in an operator, maybe more than anything, is sensitivity. Like, are they sensitive and can they listen? And it isn’t listen to me. It’s like: can they listen to the actors? Can they listen to the cinema that’s happening on-set? Can they listen to the script? Can they listen to the director? Can they listen to the director’s vision, which isn’t even just the director? I think that’s such a quintessential thing for me, and I think that’s something that I try to find ways to ask or look for. But I feel like, usually in an interview, I can kind of get that sense from a person of: what questions they do ask, what questions they don’t ask.
And I think Sam was just such an incredible option as an operator. He had been highly recommended by a very close friend, Jody Lee Lipes, and Jody’s someone who I think is incredibly sensitive. So then when he was saying that this is his ringer, then that, to me, already started the conversation of, “Okay, this is a person who can listen.” Then when I sat down with Sam and kind of just talked about the process of, at that point in prep, what RaMell and I were thinking and how he and I had designed a lot of this language around it, which––again, especially for an operator––was so difficult. Because it’s needing Sam to actually unlearn everything he knows about operating, because we would tell each other this every day, in the morning, to remind ourselves: it’s in every other film, the shot hits the ground and a glass falls into the shot, it shatters. In our language, it is looking at someone, a glass shatters off of screen, you turn immediately, and you see a glass has already been shattered.
That it is reactive but it can’t be reactive where you hear a glass shatter and then you turn; it has to be [Snaps] quite literally on the sound you turn. That there is a natural reaction and wonderment to every take. Especially as a camera operator, for him, even though we are meticulously laying out what the shot is, you have to move the camera as if you are seeing it for the first time––as if there is perfect wonderment. And also perfect fear or perfect indecision or doubt. Those things are also so important in the camera language. So I think that, for this film especially, it was almost like casting an actor, casting an operator––where someone who has a really high emotional spectrum, but also the bravery to not think they know all the answers and to find the scene as it’s being developed. I think that we really found that in Sam.
So, you know, it’s a daunting thing, sitting down with someone like, “Okay, here are all the theoretical philosophies the director and I have. How does this sound?” But Sam was just so like “okay, uh-huh,” and then called back a few days later like, “I’m really still thinking about this and mulling this over. Like, what if we did x y and z.” That was incredible, to have someone like Sam on, who also just is so knowledgeable about camera systems. So he also became a huge asset when it was like, “Okay this is something I want to do. How do you think we could do that? Like, if a person wanted to do this, how might they do it?” And I think he was really great on suggesting a lot of tools that, you know, were strange but then ended up really being such amazing options. But yeah: the whole camera team and the whole grip and electric team, it honestly felt like we were all sitting down in high school around a math problem set and trying to figure out how the hell can we work this out. RaMell has given us an assignment of trying to do the almost-impossible, so how do we use everything we have learned from our careers thus far to really try to give him answers to the impossible?
This festival is the only place I’ve ever been where people clap for the cinematographer and they clap for the operator or camera grip; I guarantee you’ll get a very big applause. I mean, I can’t promise, but…
No promises, but hey: I’ll take it. We were truly so lucky to work with so many capital-A artists: our first AC, Kali Riley, I genuinely believe is one of the best in the world; our gaffer, Bob Bates; Gary Kelso, our key grip. So many people who were truly so brilliant but also so giving of themselves. Especially with… the interesting thing about this movie is, in moments when Aunjanue Ellis, who plays Hattie, hugs the camera, it’s me she’s physically hugging. So there’s a different level of kind of connection with the actors––between me as an operator, between Sam, between our camera team, between our grip team who would oftentimes have to build, you know, custom vests for the actors and, like, having to rig them up in the Snorricam or any other apparatus that we might have been using.
So there was a real way where––I know this gets thrown around a lot––but it truly felt like we were a family on set. Because we just had to be so intimately close, and if I was operating or Sam was operating, Ethan or Brandon––the actors––would have to truly be a few inches from my face with their body so that if we looked down we’d see their hands. Or if we needed anything, that there was just a way that proximity bred a certain level of intimacy that I do see in the images, I do see in the work, because the crew… people would come in when they were on their off day because they wanted to see how it was looking. They wanted to be in the scene for someone else; they wanted to support them if they were doing another scene. A lot of the background extras, the young boys at the at Nickel Academy, would just like on and would just be looking at the monitor. Because there was something about the POV aspect––no one had seen this.
I remember talking to one of our head teamsters at the end of the day. He’d be like, “Tell me about the shot. And how do you think it’s gonna edit?” There really was this deep curiosity at every level of the production, of people being like, “How’s this gonna work? What are you guys thinking?” And so that would be like standing with the pit boss talking about the camera theory for, like, 30 minutes before I was getting my car and him being like, “That’s really interesting. And it cuts into this?” And showing him the dailies. That was something that was really special on this movie, that I’ve never experienced before in my career: the way that everyone on set was just so tapped in to this thing of trying to build this thing together that they had never really seen in this way.
What are some of the questions that you want them to be asking? What are the questions that get them in the door?
The questions that get them in the door are questions about the script; questions about the emotions; questions about what we’re trying to evoke. To me, it’s one of those things where––for example––our first AC, Kali Riley, we’ve worked on a few movies together and I have never told her where I wanted the focus. I don’t want to have to tell her where the focus is. I want her to read the script, know the scene, know the emotion that we’re going for in the scene, and then when she is on set––when she is racking focus––do not rack focus to keep the bodies in focus. Look at the cinema. I want her to be tied into the cinema that she is seeing on her monitor or she’s seeing with her eyes next to the camera, and I want her to rack focus on where the cinema is in that moment. And if, in that moment, it’s a close-up and the cinema feels like racking the background in-focus and making the foreground out-of-focus, I want her to do that. Because of course we wear comms and of course we’re tied in, but the moment I say “rack to her hands,” we’re already a second too late. So it’s one of those things where I want her to be perfectly reactive.
Same with an operator where it’s like: by the time I say “push in,” they should have already been pushing in. I always really like to give everyone in my team space for their own authorship and, like, sure: if the rack, the director and I don’t like, then we’ll just do another take and we’ll find something else. But I do want them to feel empowered to make decisions on their own autonomously, towards something that feels cinematic. I think it was something that Christopher Doyle once said: as a cinematographer, looking through the eyepiece, we are the first audience. And I extend that responsibility to everyone else I work with. The AC: you are the first audience. The camera operator: you are the first audience. Cinematographer: you are the first audience. And the responsibility of that thing is massive, and I want them to take responsibility of it by finding what’s cinematic and be led by what’s cinematic.
I think that those are the kind of answers, those are the kind of people I like to work with. So the questions I ask and the questions I like them to ask are questions that say, “I am tuned into the cinema of what we’re going to be doing.” Because I want the second AC to read the script and I want the second AC to know what we’re doing. I want to swing, the rigging grip, to know the script and read the script so that they’re making decisions that they can put a little bit of their blood into, a little bit of their understanding of the world. Of course the director and I are curating the ideas and the emotions, but for them to have this space, I just think the work gets more interesting when it isn’t an extension of my cleverness or the director’s cleverness, but actually is an invitation for everyone on the crew to be able to be an artist insofar as they feel comfortable, and on the set at any given moment.
Because I think that’s when shots really become exciting to me and it really becomes one-in-a-million––as if you’re wrangling lightning when you have multiple artists all following the cinema. Those moments that I feel like we all know when the director says “cut” and it’s like: I look at the director and they’re beaming, and the director and I look at the first AC and they, like, shrug and they give a huge thumbs-up because the way that they racked focus, it was just the perfect moment when the actor turned around, and then we look at the actor and the actor’s, like, looking around at us, like the way she stepped into the light in an unexpected way and it created this shadow with the perfect moment of that line. Where it’s all of the things coming together is, to me, the joy of filmmaking and cinematography.
I’m not a very religious person, but it’s in those moments that I feel like I see God: when everything, all of the stars, coordinate for a moment––a brief moment––when we still have the camera rolling, that we captured something that truly is… human. That is: a set of people working together making something much bigger than themselves, and something that would be impossible to recreate, even if we tried. The cloud went in front of the sun, made the room dark for that moment, and opened up right on that line. Those are the things that keep me going back to set. So I think that people who I think are sensitive enough to also be excited about the beauty of a team sport, when everyone on the field is empowered to be the MVP is, you know, what I’m usually looking for: low-ego people who have a high capacity for sensitivity.
Well, the fact that I had a question about focus-pulling and you answered it in that enthusiasm––it speaks to how it’s a coordinated effort between all of you.
Exactly. Like, I think that that’s really the beauty of filmmaking to me, generally. But I think particularly was the beauty in this movie, where––again––I feel like everyone just had to unlearn a lot of what they think they know about cinema and take this anew. So it really was a film where it was inviting people that, although RaMell and I had an incredibly meticulously designed plan, it truly was like a jazz song where it’s still constructed by a song; there’s still a melody, there’s still a structure, but there are these moments where maybe the actor would go off-book and do something.
There maybe would be something where Kali would find something where you’re jumping off and doing a solo, and then you’re jumping back into the construction of the song for everything else that was laid out that needs to happen in the shot. I think that those were the moments that it felt so exciting, but because of the point of view, there was just so much space to have those solos because you’re being asked to do something that is so emotionally present.
I wanted to go back to something you talked about, which is the “raise your hand if you feel something” test with a colorist. It’s an aspect of production I’m really interested in because it’s a thing of being experiential and first-person, but the film also has an opulence to it––it doesn’t look like raw footage. What’s the collaboration with the colorists, and kind of the distinctions between what you captured raw and what I see onscreen?
Hugely important. Hugely important. I think that my colorist, Alex Bickel, is a genius and he’s brilliant. When I got hired for this job, I texted two people immediately––it was Kali Riley, the first AC, and it was Alex Bickel. They were the two people––after my wife––I told that I got the job and I needed them on it. So Alex was someone that, truly, in the first week or two of production, I wanted to shoot tests and I wanted RaMell, Alex, and I to sit in a room and build, essentially, our digital stock. I don’t like to build a lot of LUTs; I like to build one kind of show LUT and I like to build everything around that. Knowing that RaMell is himself a visual artist––RaMell is someone who shoots large-format still-photography works––he is incredibly, incredibly knowledgeable about color, patina, rendition. That was kind of the fun thing of, like, “Let’s all sit together and let’s build.” We shot a bunch of tests of the fabrics, the different swatches for the set, skin tone––like doing a test on the POV itself, different camera systems––and all of us kind of really trying to build, “What does our world look like?”
And I think that that’s something that I love––to get the colorist in really early––and I love to really build out a heavily tested and solid image in prep. Because for me it’s like: when all the monitors have the LUT on it we can be inspired by the image we see on the day, because of course the camera is interpreting color in a different way as it’s coming to its sensor, but if the light looks purplish, that could be inspiring, and if the camera is seeing it as purple, that’s inspiring. I want to be inspired on the day, with the director. So usually what happens is: we spend a lot of time with the colorist in prep, kind of really building that look, so that on production we can be inspired and in which case then, in post, it’s usually not that much work. Like, of course it is a ton of work, but it’s usually that we’ve found the image and we’re 98% of the way there on the first day of color, so then it becomes a real joy of spending however long we have in the color just bringing that 2% to make it even more specific. To really just double- or triple- or quadruple-down on the choices that we already made on-set.
But to me, that’s the kind of cinema I like making––where, on-set, we are making hard choices. Choices we cannot go back from and choices that we are not planning to go back from, because they aren’t random choices. They’re choices that were born off of hours and hours and hours of meticulous discussion about what we’re after. So, you know, that’s why I love the process of color; that’s also why someone like Alex is so brilliant. He brings so much to it and especially it’s also really fun because I think I’m a person who… I like spaces, not really faces. And Alex is a person who, in his past work––Moonlight or Mother of George, Everything Everywhere All at Once––Alex is the person who would probably say he colors faces, not spaces. So then it’s also always this really fun push-and-pull with us of making an image work for both of us. Where it’s an image that works for Alex’s feeling of: I think he senses humanity in skin tone. He senses humanity through how alive our skin is. The look in the eye, the light in the eye, and I think my sense of humanity is usually people as they’re juxtaposed against spaces. So it’s always a really fun push-pull.
That’s why I always know when it works: when Alex is like “I love this” and I’m like “I love this too.” Then the color becomes: we’re working that 2% to keep pushing for the strong choices we made on-set and to, you know, just tweak and design and ideally not over-design anything. Because I think that ultimately––especially for the look of Nickel Boys––it was to see this deep beauty of nature and the opulence of mundanity, but also to never make anything too perfect. Like, I think that there was a way in which, for me personally, I wanted the light to have a certain honesty––to have a certain lack of affect. And of course it has some of that, because it’s filmmaking and even naturalism is itself an affect.
Yes, of course.
But it was really trying to find ways to––again, with the artifice of the camera design––how can every other aspect of the image let you ideally immerse yourself within itself?
Nickel Boys is now in limited release.