PRODUCTION NICKEL BOYS
DOP Jomo Fray takes us behind the scenes of his work on Nickel Boys
WORDS Oliver Webb IMAGES 2024 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved
S hot from both the first- and third- person perspectives, DOP Jomo Fray’s immersive imagery brings to life RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s award-winning 2019 novel. Back in 2018, Fray was at a Sundance screening of RaMell Ross’ first film, Hale County This Morning, This Evening . “I remember sitting there after the movie had finished,” he begins. “I was profoundly moved, and trying to process what I had just seen. Flash forward to four years later and I was hell-bent on getting into the room where RaMell was working on a narrative project. Even just to talk to the person who had made Hale County . When I heard he wasn’t just the director but also the cinematographer, I became
even more interested in understanding how he’d crafted those images. That was my way in, and from that first meeting, it almost feels like RaMell and I have been in an unending conversation.” Fray and Ross stopped using the term ‘point of view’ when it came to their early discussions about the look of Nickel Boys . “We started talking about what we had coined a ‘sentient image’,” explains Fray. “Ideally, we wanted an image that felt inextricably tied to a human body in the present tense, that almost seemed like the camera was an organ inside the body. We were trying to create an image that felt immersive, pulling the audience inside of not only the bodies, but the very consciousness of Elwood and Turner.
“When the camera goes through the space and pans, or looks at certain items or things in the space, that was our attempt to visualise how your mind creates meaning and how you form understanding and associations inside your own space. In the case of this story, these are two Black boys navigating an often-hostile environment and thinking about the American Jim Crow South that they live in.” The film continually shifts between the perspectives of Elwood and Turner throughout. Fray and Ross also decided early on in the process that they wanted to shoot every scene as a oner because it would enable the actors to go through the entirety of that scene’s emotions. “We
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