Earlier this week we shared part one of our conversation with Nickel Boys cinematographer, Jomo Fray. There, we talked about how he got involved with Nickel Boys, and his path to get there including being a Film Independent Project Involve Fellow. For part two, we get into the nitty gritty of shooting a film in first person POV, and what advice Jomo has for emerging filmmakers.

This interview was conducted by another Project Involve fellow from his cohort, Film Independent’s own Joenique C. Rose.

I was going to ask about the technical part of the film because my mind was just blown. I hear you talk about the use of the body rig and the dolly and the remote head. I don’t know if you can describe it in a way where people who are going to be reading this will understand, but at least for some of those scenes, the body rig, can you describe that and maybe what camera or cameras you had to use in this particular movie?

Absolutely. So one thing that was important to me is I really wanted to stay on a singular camera system. We shot on the Sony Venice and my team would have different builds of the camera, basically different modular designs that it could fit into for different setups.

Like if I wanted to do handheld, that felt more connected to the spine of a body, a full body movement, then maybe shoulder handheld would work. Other times, if I wanted the perspective to feel like it was coming from the neck, so a body was stationary, but a neck can move quickly in a way that holding a camera on the shoulder doesn’t often articulate. So then it would be putting the camera in the Realto mode.

It was separating the camera block from the camera brain with an umbilical cord so that the grip would be holding a backpack with the brain of the camera to an umbilical cord, so I could just hold the camera block and then be able to quickly maneuver the perspective of that because I was holding it and it was moving from my wrist.

It’s a funny thing in this movie where ideally it feels organic. Ideally it feels obvious that it just feels like, ‘oh, well, this is the only way you would see this.’ And it must’ve been somewhat simple to do. But the funny thing is just the level of orchestration any given shot took from my entire team having to be in harmony with each other about what we were about to do with any scene.

We didn’t want to have the actors have more artifice than they needed to. Oftentimes we would try hard to not have lights or stands on set and do a lot of the lighting with reflective sources and mirrors outside of buildings pushing light into the space. You know, it built it into a way where– I remember one shot in particular, as Elwood is sitting on a bus, a young girl crawls between the seats.

He looks down and then he looks under the chair to see her continuing to crawl underneath the chairs of the bus until she goes back to her parents. The shot is literally maybe 40 seconds of the movie. But for that shot, it meant we were on a moving bus, a moving period bus.

That meant that the grip team had to essentially lift every seat that was in the bus to clear it out. We then had to lift a dolly into the bus. We had to bring dolly track into the bus. We had to strap dolly track onto the frame of the bus, put the dolly there, basically have a remote head in mimic mode so I can be in the back of the bus shooting handheld and I can look down on my body and the remote head would match my movement to look down the actor’s body.

For that movement of just looking under your chair, it would involve while the bus is moving, the dolly grip, dollying forward, booming down, and then me in the back with the remote head, inverting the remote head to look underneath my own legs so that the camera looked underneath the chair for this moment and seeing the light play on the young girl’s face because the bus is moving through space.

That took everyone, the focus puller, the dolly grip, everyone had to know their marks, but in a way that the marks all had to just feel totally seamless. It had to feel not like we were getting a clean boom down, but it had to feel the way a neck feels preening over, the way it feels like when a lot of your weight and your center of gravity is low, but your neck is going over your knees. If any one person is off, even by a second in that motion, it seems mechanical and it looks strange, but when everyone is all cued correctly and cued naturally, all of a sudden it feels obvious.

It feels ideally organic, but again, every single scene was like that. Every single scene necessitated a unique camera system and a unique approach, which involved a lot of coordination with everyone. And we didn’t give marks for any of the actors.

We didn’t want them to feel more artifice than they needed to. So again, it was our remarkable first AC, Kali Riley, having to feel every scene, every take. And every take I might do a different maneuver because even in the times when I would be operating, it should feel like a human gaze and it should feel like someone experiencing their life.

The gaze could never be in front of the action. It was always responding to action. When you’re operating the camera as well, and when you’re operating focus it, we had to almost do different maneuvers each take, so that each take had a sense of its own wonderment, a sense of its own lack of design, that it was the gaze finding things anew each time, even though again, those were meticulously laid out.

On the beginning of every day, Nora Mendes, the production designer, would take RaMell and I and walk us through the room and she would say, okay, here are 10 hero items in the room. You can interact with any of these. These are really interesting. These are telling aspects of the story. And so over the course of the take, you can hit them in any order. You can hit eight of them. You can hit two of them. You can hit none of them. But here they all are as almost these miniature base camps in any given set.

And almost all the sets had to be 360s because they had to be able to incorporate the camera flowing through them. And they had to be under heavy scrutiny because if there’s a character that isn’t in front of the camera, naturally the gaze just shifts to a table. It shifts to a wall.

A lot of the production design had to be under heavy scrutiny. And the camera also had to have these little base camps around the space that it could still find ways to find a new image each take to maintain, again, that concept of sentience that I think was really important for RaMell.

I felt when I was watching the movie, I was watching it, of course, for the story. But then I would find myself in awe of what the movement of the camera was doing that I would be like, OK, OK, now follow the story, follow the story. But it seemed very seamless.

For something like the bus, right? It’s only 40 seconds in the movie. For your team and for the day, was that half a day? Was that a full day? Did you have opportunities to even block or rehearse, or did you want the actors just to come in and work their way through the scene without having to have a lot of that rehearsal already  embedded in them?

We had a fair bit of rehearsal throughout it, because it was also in rehearsals that I was able to look at the actors and look at how they were playing the scene, where their gaze was going, where their eyes were going, how they emotionally sat with the ideas that were being brought up in the scene.

That was just such a big inspiration for me anytime I would be operating the camera and moving the cameras, basing it off of a lot of Ethan and Brandon’s performance and the ways in which they would rehearse through the scene and how RaMell would direct them.

But, you know, even for seeds that were that small, I was just so incredibly lucky to have such an unbelievable team on the ground in New Orleans. The gaffer, Bob Bates, the key grip, Gary Kelso, both of their rigging teams were exceptional. Our camera team led by Kali Riley.

Everyone knew from the onset that this movie was full of essentially trick shots and trick wonders. Early on in prep, all of our teams were talking about, okay, each scene, what’s the camera system for this scene? Okay, this scene, do we need the body rig? The first ACs, the key grip and the whole team just had an itemized list of everything we needed for each scenes.

I’m thankful to Gary Kelso and his team, the key grip for bringing in so many experiments just during prep. So we were constantly just trying to, even when we didn’t have the full camera system, just trying to engineer a lot of these systems and these setups so that when we came on game day, for the bus scene, for example, despite the orchestration of that, it probably only took a few hours because it was something we had been practicing for weeks and we had been talking about and we’d been thinking about.

But that attention and closeness  came down for every scene where we just had a plan A, a plan B and a plan C for trying to approach any of the perspectives. Because again, it’s that weird thing that even though you test it, even though you talk about it, so many of these things can be uncanny when you put them up.

I think that by the end of the film, it was incredible and magical just the way that we could so quickly, modularly slot into our different looks and our different configurations, because we came meticulously planning out a lot of things and also planning out that we knew that we were doing something that people haven’t shot like this in a long time. And people certainly haven’t shot these communities like this before. And most filmmakers aren’t like RaMell and are looking for the things RaMell is looking for.

So I think that we were just so, so lucky to have such experts. Truly, I feel like we had some of the best people in the world for some of the positions that they were working on. They were so giving of themselves that it really allowed us to do so much more than would ever be believed based on our shooting schedule.

For the moments of the older character, did you shoot in chronological order of the film, or did you have to jump around? And how did that go?

Yeah, we still block shot it and jumped around. Daveed is such an exceptional actor. And that was an instance where it’s like, for all of the older Elwood moments, we shot them on a Snorricam rig.

So it is, it’s essentially a metal chassis that sits in the midsection of the actor. And then there are a set of poles that come out of it that basically hold and attach the camera almost to the body of the actor themselves.

There’s an interesting way that traditionally Snorricam is not used in this way. Traditionally, it’s for either action movies, there are some uses of it in Requiem for a Dream, where they shot Bolex for some of the almost like second person perspectives. But for us, we really wanted to give this– it was always a question of what is the nature of trauma? And how does trauma change our relationship to ourselves from first person to maybe something like second person for Elwood as he gets older.

And the interesting thing there was that there were these moments where Daveed and I would be looking at the image together. And we’d be again, talking in these emotional ways of talking about what the image means emotionally, and how to convey emotion through that image. And so we’d both be looking at the monitor, and he would have the Snorricam chassis attached to himself.

And he would be like, okay, so maybe I open up the right side of my shoulder to bring the character in. But you know, when I’m feeling a little more internal, maybe I close down the right side of my body and shifts out of the frame. And I’d be like, yeah, you know, go with that. Make that decision. Don’t be afraid to imbue the way you’re moving with the emotions and put that into the camera. But you know, those are just some of the ways where for this movie, there was a real cross-pollination.

There are aspects of co-authoring where an actor would have a body rig. So they would be controlling the composition, and I would never give them marks to tell them how to do it. But we would talk through the emotions of that moment and what they might be able to show and not show with the motion of their body.

And, you know, there were instances where, you know, in scenes where Hattie, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s character comes to Nickel and she hugs Turner, that’s me, she’s physically hugging. That changes how you shoot an image when you are quite literally inside the scene, when you’re responding not only to an actor, but now a scene partner. Because there are ways in which the cameras, meaning to imbue Elwood’s perspective or Turner’s perspective, their emotions, their feelings, where their gaze goes, says a lot about what they’re feeling.

So again, it came back to watching the actors during rehearsal and then inside of the scene, really responding to those things as a camera operator and as a cinematographer, which was, you know, just such an electric experience. There was a moment on one of the first days that Aunjanue came to set, she was shooting a scene that happens at Nickel, where she’s talking with Elwood and she’s about to deliver some pretty hard news to him. And I think, so I was watching the first one, so as I was operating the camera in that moment, for me as Jomo, thinking through Elwood’s feelings, I’m like, when someone is telling me news that I know is devastating them to deliver, it’s difficult for me to look them in the eye.

In that moment that Aunjanue as Hattie is trying to express what happened with the lawyer, my gaze  drifted off. And with my gaze, the camera drifted off of seeing her and looking at the details on the table. And there’s this moment where Aunjanue put her hand out across the table and said, Elwood, look at me, son.

And the camera drifts back and makes eye contact with her in the moment where she knows she has to deliver to her grandson, something that she knows that he knows is devastating, but he has to see her say it. And there was a way in which that was completely improvisational, that didn’t, that was not in the script, that was, you know, Aunjanue’s brilliance in that moment. But I remember after we, after RaMell called cut on that, I remember running back to him at the monitor and he and I were both like, whoa, like this is what the sentient perspective is about.

This is why it’s interesting. It’s not just that it’s inside the scene, it’s not just that it’s immersive, but it’s that the camera itself has to be in response to the actors and the actors can fundamentally change where the gaze of the camera goes. And like the, that connection felt so profound to both of us.

And we  got goosebumps while we were seeing it on set. And I think that that moment changed a lot of our thoughts around operating the camera and what the image really was, where it needed to truly be, the camera needs to be as vulnerable as Elwood or Turner would be in that moment. The camera truly was sharing the scene with the actors.

It wasn’t even capturing the scene from inside, it was inside. We are living life concurrently with Turner and Elwood and that creates a different level of intimacy between audience to character. And that felt profound and special.

And I just feel so grateful that the actors were so giving of themselves to invite me, invite the camera and invite looking down the lens into their process. But they were just so incredibly giving them that way. And, you know, in a lot of ways, we would just be working so closely together.

The actors would be close to me while I would be operating so that their hand is in it, or their foot is in it. They would still have a tight eyeline with the other actor in the scene to still create that connection. It wasn’t falling into artifice if it didn’t have to, that there still was a prioritization of these kinds of emotional bonds between actors.

“That changes how you shoot an image when you are quite literally inside the scene, when you’re responding not only to an actor, but now a scene partner.”

The camera team and the actors are working closely. The key grips are fitting custom bills to some of the actors. They’re working closely. There was a real way that I feel like there was just a real intimacy and kinship shared across the crew at different levels in a way that traditionally doesn’t often happen just because of the technique forced us to  be in a lot closer proximity in all ways.

I hope that that really comes across in the image, just how intimate that connection was and a little bit of that almost like cross-pollination between artists of actor, of cinematographer, performer, of image maker.

I do remember that scene that you’re talking about with Aunjanue reaching over and just her looking at the camera but looking at us. In the theater, I felt it, you know, in my spirit when she was delivering her news. So you absolutely did capture that moment. 

But I understand what you’re saying about really being vulnerable. It’s for the actor unlearning ‘Don’t look down the barrel, having the emotions to look at a camera, but still as if you’re talking to a human individual.

I would say that from day one to I guess day thirty, I’m sure the cast and the crew became very close, because you’re just in these intimate spaces with each other telling a very vulnerable story. I’m sure the relationships that you all forged are solidified for life because of the nature of the project.

Totally. It was secretly the highest praise to me across the set when I would go to Video Village and I would see the teamsters creeping in and looking around to monitor, where it feels like everyone’s invested.

I remember talking to the pit boss and him being like, ‘So you guys are shooting POV. Like, what is that? Like, how does the cut work?’ And he would ask me deeply technical questions about like, ‘What did you test? How does the film going to look? How is this going to move into that?’ And I remember being like, why don’t you come up to set?

He’d be like, you think this is going to work? And I’m like, we did a lot of testing, and we hope it does, but you know, we’re doing our best.

And there was something again, that felt really exciting about this project where it just felt like every single person at every single level of the project knew we were doing something that people traditionally do not do, knew it was high concept, knew we were after not just something that was high concept, but trying to chase something poetic with this high concept type approach.

And there really was a fun excitement across the entire production and seeing people sneaking into video village who don’t normally care to see monitors, really was exciting and really felt like we were doing something special.

What would you say was your favorite scene to shoot?

And then what, after now seeing it all together, is that still your favorite scene to watch? Or is there something now you’re like, ‘oh man, no, that. That was the one.’

You know, it’s funny. I think that something RaMell had always said from the very first conversation is he said that an image can’t have a singular meaning. We always have to pack every image with almost as, as symbolically dense as possible to create multiple things that were operating inside of the image, multiple things that as a viewer, you could grab on to, to understand the interaction that was at play.

For example, if a shot is walking into a room, there’s a question of the socioeconomics of the space. You see the sleeve of your character, their sleeve is a bit tattered, which tells a socioeconomic story of the person whose gaze you’re inside.

And then the juxtaposition between that space and their sleeve maybe speaks to how comfortable or uncomfortable they are seeing how people interact and make contact or don’t make eye contact with them. Also, it tells you about the comfort of the people inside the place to this person coming into their space.

We always wanted to make it dense so that the eye could really take in a lot of things in the frame. Because we really strive to do that in every shot in the movie, each time I watch it, I think I fundamentally see totally different things or make totally different connections, which is so funny and interesting about it in a way that I have never quite experienced with something I’ve worked on.

I think which really speaks to RaMell’s brilliance as an artist bringing in so many disparate ways of understanding the text that he was building made it so scenes and certain lines that I might not have noticed on my first few watches really stick out to me now.

There’s a scene where adult Elwood is talking to adult Chickie Pete in a bar. There are certain lines of dialogue that now hit me more profoundly having seen the movie a few times because it connects to an image earlier that I just never thought of those two things almost visually rhyming together, but I see that they do now.

And in terms of favorite moment for me now, weirdly, it keeps changing to me because of what I’m saying, just making different connections to pieces, but I think something that always has stood out to me was I loved shooting the boxing scene and when we first talked about the movie, again, the two things RaMell said was that he wanted to be point of view, and he didn’t want to ever see on-screen violence. He was uninterested in fetishizing the aspect of violence on these bodies.

And so even when he was talking about the boxing scene, I remember him explicitly saying, I don’t want to see Big Chet and Griff fight. I don’t care about what’s happening inside the ring. The entirety of this scene is all about the economic ecosystem that is happening outside of the ring.

It became this fun conversation with me and the gaffer, Bob Bates, where it’s like, what’s important is in this scene isn’t the shaft of light that’s hitting the center of the arena, but it’s actually the scene happening between the line between lightness and dark. It’s happening right on the edges of perceivable vision where money’s being exchanged, where people are making bets, where there’s this just fraught moving Jaime, someone who’s half Mexican moving into the white seating. There’s this rich interpersonal dynamic that is happening on the fringes of this fight that reflect why this fight is happening in the first place.

That scene was so fun to shoot, and it morphs and breaks some of the rules we had built with the visual language leading up to that place, knowing that we wanted that scene to feel different and to feel special. And ideally, it’s a scene that the audience is understanding what we’re doing with point of view. We can actually bend some of the rules on how those points of views are working. And we can be a little bit more aggressive on making cuts and edits where initially in the film, we ideally want to ease the viewer into the process of learning how to understand the movie. I think that was a fun scene because we got to take all the limiters off and really go buck wild on it.

And particularly there’s a shot that comes up at the end of the movie, almost as a moment of reverie of Griff in the boxing ring with Spencer moving around him. And we shot that at a really low frame rate and step-printed it up. Spencer is almost this blur that’s moving around Griff as Griff is training in the ring. That was a shot that RaMell came up with a few days before and was like, I want this moment of reverie. I want to see almost something of Turner’s imagination of the afterwards of the fight and Griff and Griff’s spirit.

That was just such a fun shot because we came in on the day knowing we wanted to do something slow frame rate and find something that was evocative to all of us. It was a real collaboration between RaMell, Bob [Bates, Chief Lighting Technician], the gaffer, Gary [Kelso, Key Grip], and we all just stood by monitor and kept turning things off, turning things on, redesigning, rebuilding, re-shifting, something like that. And I remember when we fell on the image and we shot a take of it at a low frame rate, there was just this palpable like, ‘Whoa. That’s something really evocative.’ And it was one of the last shots of the day, but it really ended the day strong, and the entire crew was somberly like, okay, that’s the moment.

And I think still has that quality to me that when I see it, I don’t see the things that we did. I just get caught up in the emotion of that shot, which I think continually feels special each time I watch the movie.

This is my last question. For the aspiring, the emerging, the ‘I’ve shot a few things, but like now is my time, I want to get that first feature under my belt’ filmmaker, what does preparedness look like for a cinematographer entering conversations that could potentially land them their first feature?

What advice, what tips would you give them so that they could properly enter that space with confidence and know that they’ve done what they could to visually say, ‘this is how I would approach this project’?

I feel like the most beautiful thing to me about feature filmmaking is what you learn about yourself. Every single project, every single film I’ve done, I learned something new about myself. I learned something that is a place for me to work on, something for me to continue to develop. It’s an aspect to it that I love about feature filmmaking is it’s deeply humbling.

And I think there’s a beauty in always being re-reminded of how much you still are able to learn, and what you still need to learn, and the different ways you can be an artist in the future.

But towards your question, I would say, it is about reading the script, really trying to understand the emotions of the script, really trying to understand the emotional motivations of the characters, and doing your best to push all of the visual preconceptions out of your mind to try to just take in what is the cinema on the page? What is the cinema that the director is expressing to you?

As cinematographers, we often feel like we need to be talking. We need to know all the gear. We need to know how we’re going to do something. We need to know that we’ve tested every lens, and this is the one that we love.

But I think the more I work, the more I realize that actually so much of cinematography is actually just listening. It’s not speaking.

It’s listening to the story from the script. It’s listening to what the script wants to be, not what you want to make it. It’s listening to the performance of the actors.

It’s listening to the interpersonal dynamics on set outside of the character, but what is happening that day. It’s listening to your director. It’s listening not just the story that your director is telling, the story your director wants to want to tell.

And it’s listening and then being daring enough to think that you’re enough, to think that you, whoever you are, have had enough life experiences, that once you’ve listened to all the things that are coming at you, that the things you have to say back are interesting, are evocative, are powerful, are moving. And I think just truly believing that you have something to give to the movie. I think filmmaking is just too grueling to not be a game that anyone plays if they don’t have a love of the game.

So if you’re at the table and if you’re trying to get your feature, you clearly love filmmaking. And I think that trusting both that love and trusting that that love puts you in a position where you have something to also say back to movies is, I think, something that’s so important, especially in those early features where self-doubt feels the most palpable.

But ultimately, I think if you’re at that place, you have something that you want to say. And then I think it comes down to listening to other people to inform what you do say.

Thank you so much. This has been wonderful.