We here at Film Independent are excited about the new film Nickel Boys, and not just because it’s one of the most buzzed about movies of the fall. We have a special connection to the filmmaking team. Cinematographer Jomo Fray is a 2017 Project Involve Fellow.

He worked on the short film Emergency in his year as a cinematography fellow with producing fellow Joenique C. Rose. Joenique now works with us here at Film Independent, and we brought them together to talk about Nickel Boys and Jomo’s journey from Project Involve to where he is today.

Because it’s Thanksgiving week, we thought we’d give you a double serving and share with you this in-depth interview in two parts. Part one is below and look for part two later this week.

Okay, so first of all, I love Nickel Boys. I can’t wait to see it again in theaters. I did want to, of course, talk about the way that you and I met, which was a Film Independent Project Involve, and a now award-winning short, Emergency.

You were the cinematographer, and I was the producer. I always thought it was fascinating. And I don’t think I ever got an opportunity to really delve in with you about it.

But when you were speaking with Carey [Williams, director], initially, I think you sent him a sheet to fill out to really get inside of what it is he was visually trying to do. Could you talk a little bit about what that was, and have you evolved that method? Do you still use it?

Oh, that’s a great question. Yeah, I think when we were prepping that, I had sent Carey almost a script analysis sheet, like the way an actor might use to break down their character more formally.

I think that the sheet went into what was the spine of the character? What is their objective? What are the obstacles? What makes this day or set of days different than any other set of days in their life?

And yeah, initially just to try to build a vocabulary with the director that wasn’t necessarily aesthetic, but was more emotional, and more about the performances and more about the emotional story that they wanted to tell with the hope there that I would take that information, and then translate it over to maybe more visual modes.

I think that these days, I don’t use the sheet exactly, but I still use a lot of the techniques in that analysis. And I think that those are still fundamentally the questions that I ask, and the ways in which I think a lot of directors and I speak. I really love to build the visual language, organically from the soil level.

From the emotion and the drama and the performance, I like to build a camera language from that opposed to maybe coming to a project with aesthetic ideas first, where it’s like, oh, we should shoot this black and white, and I’m seeing it anamorphic. I usually like those ideas of how to visualize the script to come from deep discussions about the character and the emotion scene by scene. And then over the course of those scenes, try to either build visual rules or start to notice some patterns that I keep hearing them speak about in emotional terms.

And then it’s a question of, okay, if we want to feel like longing, well, here are some visual options with camera movement and lenses and camera system that might be able to evoke some of those ideas. Because for me, it’s about the image having a harmony with the drama and the story, rather than necessarily feeling like the images are being grafted onto this story. I really want those two things to really be in harmony.

I think we can see the time and effort that you do put throughout each of your different projects, because I feel like you have a visual language, you have a visual style, but of course, you’re working in collaboration with the director as well.

When it came to Selah and the Spades, and then All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, when you initially are given the script, or even if that’s the process of giving the script first, or if you knew the director, how did that relationship come together?

Is the way that you had engaged with those two directors similar? Did you change it up for Raven versus your Selah and the Spades director?

I think that as a cinematographer, I like to say that fundamentally, the core of my job is to be twofold, is to translate the mood, tone and emotions that a director is after. And secondly, to be the type of collaborator that allows my director to feel strong every day that they come to set. For that second portion, I always  change up a bit of my style and my approach and my approach to the process of filmmaking and try to make that thing a very bespoke relationship that is more based on the director and how they like to work, how they like to feel prepared, and how they like to run their set.

In the case of someone like Tayarisha, the director of Selah and the Spades, and also The Young Wife, it’s for that Tayarisha and I’s process starts in a very similar way. We have a lot of conversations about the emotions and the performance and scene to scene, the almost a subtextual story we’re trying to tell to then find tools to grab onto that. But something that Tayarisha really likes to do is, she and I over the course of prepping usually like to find a phrase or a term that we’ll anchor as the rawest and most condensed version of what we’re after.

And so we’ll always just keep coming back to that word. So for Selah and the Spades, it was the term we had come up with was a term called ‘savage formalism’. And for us, that meant the Rihanna definition of savage in the sense, not an anthropological sense, but almost in the sense of being absolutely deadly and fierce and intense.

Combining that with the idea of formalism, formalism in terms of filmmaking, but also we were really inspired by Brutalist architecture of even though we were shooting a New England boarding school, we really wanted to bring the  density and weight of a lot of Brutalist buildings and also  the duality that is built into  Brutalist history, which I think matched Selah as a character in the movie; this duality that she  always had of her inner self and the self that she projected outside. So then for Tayarisha and I, every decision comes back to, okay, is this savage formalist? And for Young Wife, our second collaboration, the term was ‘acid expressionism’.

We wanted something that had a psychedelic feel, but was fundamentally expressionistic. It was allowing ourselves the room to make every image fully emotional based, fully expressionistic and connected to that character’s emotion. And again, we would choose the lenses, we’d have conversations with, okay.

The choices of the Cineovision lenses for Young Wife are deeply distorted anamorphic lenses, a lot of bowing, a lot of warping. And for us, that was all about having a capture mechanism that was expressionistic. It felt the way the character feels that their world was feeling distorted around them.

So again, that’s how we would take a term like ‘acid expressionism’ and try to manifest it into a real and practical choice. Whereas someone like Raven Jackson, who directed All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, again, it was that same emotional conversation of what were we trying to capture? And so for Raven, she had said really early on in the process that she wanted to capture the ineffable moments that make up a life.

It became a game of, okay, how do we capture images that feel bleeding and momentary, but beautiful, perhaps mundane, but still evocative and remembered? So towards that, we again started the conversation with what were the emotions that we wanted to visualize in the images? And what were the characters feeling?

Raven was and is a poet and was a poet before coming to filmmaking. She is so brilliant and has such a beautiful way with words.

For us, it was more question of, okay, well, we’ll shot list, we’ll prepare, but also let’s write a visual manifesto. Let’s write a set of 12 laws that we follow in the making of this movie. And every morning we would read those 12 pieces together, we would read those 12 manifesto points together, and we would get ready for our day as a way to reorient ourselves.

“How you design, how you make the movie, gets manifest inside of the movie.”

And I think for Raven, that was really helpful, because even though we had a really focused plan each day, I think it was important for her to feel like we could still be improvisational, we could still find things on set.

And the manifesto was a way to always ground that finding process, because it would always ground and anchor the image in a certain aesthetic, in a certain way, we would go about creating those things, which again, just made the entire process interpretive. And I think for Raven, that imbued every moment on set with a sense of wonderment, because it felt like we were finding something, not merely capturing something. So that was a way where the process was mutated a little bit to really meet both the director, but also the type of product the director was after making, because I really do believe that the process is the product with filmmaking. How you design, how you make the movie, gets manifest inside of the movie.

I want to see how you were brought in on Nickel Boys. I’ve heard RaMell Ross, the director, talk about being brought the book before it even was released and having conversations, with Plan B. And so I want to see where you stepped in on this journey

Yeah, I had watched Hale County This Morning, This Evening, RaMell’s first movie at Sundance the year it came out. And I distinctly remember sitting in the audience and as the lights came up and everyone stood up and filed out of the room, I just sat there. I sat there for 10 minutes.

I sat there when people came in to clear the theaters. I was just completely gobsmacked. Like, I don’t think I had quite seen a documentary like that before.

And there was a way in which I was just so impressed by how evocatively RaMell captured the black community of Hale County. There was just such a deep sensitivity to all of the images. They were just so striking to me.

I became obsessed with wanting to connect with RaMell in one way or another. A few years later, when the opportunity finally came in, when I heard he was working on Nickel Boys, I remember my agent sending me the treatment for it at 11.30 p.m., and 11:35 I called her and was like, we need to take this meeting. And she’s like, you haven’t read the script.And I was like, I don’t care!

RaMell is so interesting that I would jump into lava with him just to see what it would be like. We took the meeting and RaMell and I just really connected immediately in terms of thoughts around filmmaking and thoughts around the process of making images more generally.

And he was and is an image maker that I was profoundly influenced by his still photography work long before he and I met. There are ways in which I had used a lot of his images in different photographic treatments for other movies I had made. So there was a way in which it really felt like a returning to the source of like, okay, now I’m working with one of the people I have admired to try to build bespoke images together.

So that was like just such an exciting place to jump off from. And yeah, I feel grateful to have been brought in on it. I think it was an incredibly fun process for the two of us working together.

I was at the screening for Film Independent and heard RaMell talk a little bit about the process overall. This is his first fiction feature as a director. You could tell like he was excited. He enjoyed it. But also, he was learning and I think continuing to learn about the process that is Hollywood and making a feature like this. 

But he did say when he was writing the story with Joslyn [Barnes, co-writer] that he already knew he wanted to tell it from the POV perspective.

It truly is an immersive experience. I remember you said that at the New York Film Festival at the Q&A. Him already knowing that this is the way visually he wanted to tell it, what was your process with him in making that come to life?

It was spectacular. It really came from a lot of conversations and a lot of testing. Because there was a way in which on our very first meeting, one of the very first things RaMell told me is that he wanted to shoot this movie Point of View.

And quickly into our conversations, we actually stopped using that term. We would use it so that crew members could understand what we were talking about. But really, when he and I were alone and we were talking, how we described the image is that it wasn’t a POV as much as it was what we call the ‘sentient image’.

It was an image that felt connected to a real body, a real body that had real stakes, and a body who was navigating a community in a system that was naturally hostile to their existence. We wanted the image to be immersive, to be inside of the scene and to even try to get rid of even the layer of dissociation that the audience is traditionally allowed to have with more traditional third person cinema. We wanted to invite the audience into the body of a young black boy navigating the Jim Crow South.

Towards that, it was really having questions, almost at a subatomic level, like a subatomic conversation about filmmaking, because it really became a question of, okay, if we’re shooting a sentient perspective, what’s an establishing shot? What’s a cut? What’s a transition? How do you move through space? How do you move through time? Is this a memory? Or is this real life that’s happening to a character and we’re just going between the moments that are most important to them?

And so towards that, it was RaMell and I quite literally having no less than 70 hours of conversation in prep, just the two of us just talking through what do these ideas mean? And how do we want to build even the edit from the shot listing phase?

How do we want these images to sit with one another? He and Jocelyn had done a massive amount of work, even by the time I had come on, sourcing a lot of the archival footage. Even reading the initial script, it had links to the archival in the script that you can look at.

And most of the archival that’s in the movie was called and found by them before we even started the process, which took a few years. So yeah, it really became a question of how do we take these traditional film ideas that are important and that do place us in a story, but also rework some of them for the sentient image and the POV perspective that RaMell was interested in.

We would be shotlisting and we designed every scene as a one-er, knowing that we would edit, but knowing that we also were asking the actors to invite in a level of artifice to their work.

And we wanted to have as little other artifice outside of the point of view that we could. So we wanted the scene to just flow as one and to not even be broken up by more traditional coverage. It was he and I needing to essentially test every beat out.

When we were shotlisting, we had a small DSLR with us and we would practice things like a hug and say, okay, how does this one? Like, oh, that doesn’t feel great. Well, maybe if we come a little higher and come down, it’s like, okay, that works a little bit better. Let’s keep playing with that.

So we would test it at that level while we were shot listing together. And our shot list was literally like 34 pages, single spaced, where every single scene was a single shot and every single shot was meticulously detailed.

And where does the gaze go? What does it see? In what order does it see it? How do we push into a space? How do we move? When do we invite seeing something else cross into the camera?

It was incredibly, incredibly detailed. One could sit down with the shotlist and reading the shotlist, you would just be essentially reading the movie fully visually. And the reason we approach it that way is that we wanted to have a meticulous level of preparation so that on the day and on set, we could have a little bit more of an improvisational approach to incorporate new things that we were seeing on set and new things that were interesting to us because we knew we had such a solid and rigid plan that we were going in with.

From there, it was camera testing and a lot of camera testing because we were trying to capture not sight, but more of what it feels like to see. It’s an uncanny thing because as viewers, we are the most visually literate to the idea of being inside our own bodies. Like this perspective is one that every human being fundamentally for the entirety of their life sits within. So it’s a funny thing where even sometimes a centimeter left or right can make an image go from being uncanny and uncomfortable to feeling somewhat natural.

Because we were after the feeling of sight and not just sight itself, if I was thinking about what would be a good camera system to reflect human vision, I might grab something like a Steadicam. Our brains naturally stabilize our motion and our movement. We don’t feel ourselves bounce through space when we’re moving through the world. Steadicam actually does match how we perceive the world.

But then because of the grammar of filmmaking, you put it up and it feels a little ghostly. It feels a little outside of the body. And because the idea of the sentient image, RaMell really wanted it to feel grounded in a real person, all of a sudden things like handheld is the perspective, even though that doesn’t reflect what it’s like to see, it just felt more real, more raw, more inside a body, more present tense.

And I think that that then became a real tool for us. But it’s also things like remote heads, things like dollies, using body rigs, using a Snorricam rig. In many cases, we had to engineer a lot of these systems for the specific shots or the specific trick shots we might have been trying to pull off to maintain a one-er in each scene.

It took me and the camera team having to unlearn everything that we know about camera systems to actually be willing to throw anything at the wall to test something out and see, does this feel like being inside a body? And we did those tests within prep. And then RaMell and I put it up in a theater at Color Collective with our colorist, Alex Bickel.

The three of us just sat in a theater watching all of these different camera movement tests, and then saying, does this feel emotional? Does this feel inside a body or does it not? And then essentially picking a lot of our camera systems from looking at the tests and asking ourselves, does this feel evocative? Does this feel like sight?

And so that was really how we designed a lot of the camera language and where we started in terms of trying to build a visual language and find the different camera systems we needed to get those scenes done.

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In part two, we discuss how the look of Nickel Boys was achieved. Look for it later this week.