Long drawn to filmmaking as an artistic medium cultivating “a radical form of empathy,” cinematographer Jomo Fray took that concept in an immersive new direction with Nickel Boys, the first narrative feature from Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker RaMell Ross.
The drama for Amazon MGM’s Orion Pictures, he explains, was an experiment with the concept of “sentient perspective,” where he and Ross would look to craft first-person images that captured “the feeling of sight and the feeling of memory, the feeling of moving through space.”
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The hope was for the project to stand out from your run-of-the-mill POV film, exchanging that for something that “feels immersive, feels attached to a body and a real person, with not only real stakes, but real loves, real happiness, real joys, and real mundanity.”
Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys chronicles the friendship between Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), a pair of young African American men navigating the horrors of life at an abusive reform school In Jim Crow era Florida.
In conversation with Ross in today’s edition of The Process, Fray explains that he felt compelled to work with the director after taking in his Oscar-nominated 2018 doc Hale County This Morning, This Evening — a film that felt “like a portrait of an inner part of myself,” which he felt had a unique resonance, in its depiction of Black life.
Early conversations on Nickel Boys, Ross recalls, hinged on the ambition to create images “that hadn’t been seen before, specifically from the human eye, or more connected to the human eye.”
“The first few weeks of prep was just you and I, alone in a room, truly talking about films, and images specifically, at an almost subatomic level, in a way that I’ve never done in my career,” remembers Fray. “Really breaking down not only why does a shot work, but what is a shot? What is an establishing shot? What is the nature of an insert? What information does it deliver to us, and what about its shot size and its normal composition kind of creates that set of knowledge as a viewer?”
It was only after taking “traditional film language” and “breaking it down to its most subatomic and component parts” that the pair were able to bring something to the table that felt uniquely their own.
Interestingly, Fray shares on The Process that back in his grad school days, he remembers thinking of POV as a pretty “irrelevant” form of coverage — a mode of filmmaking that was not particularly interesting. But he has to admit that his experience on Nickel Boys changed his own point of view.
Says Fray, “There is something to sharing the eyes of your character. There is something about not just that, but living concurrently with them — not observing them, but truly having to be put in the position inside the theater, when you’re watching. The membrane breaks down. You truly are just living and vibrating at the same wavelength.”
Recently landing a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture – Drama, along with five nominations at the 30th Critics’ Choice Awards, Nickel Boys has also brought plenty of attention to Fray, specifically, with noms at the Critics’ Choice Awards, the Independent Spirit Awards and elsewhere. The film hits theaters December 13 after premiering at Telluride.
For more from our conversation between Fray and Ross, in which the pair further discuss their collaboration on Nickel Boys, as well as “life-changing” images, influential ideas from filmmaker and DP Ellen Kuras, and more, click above. Clips from the film can be viewed below.