‘Nickel Boys’ Cinematographer Jomo Fray On Performing Behind A Camera

When he first met with Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross, cinematographer Jomo Fray was excited by the challenge of filming from a character’s perspective. “It was a completely different experience to anything I’ve ever shot,” says Fray. “As the cinematographer, you have to be present to the scene in a completely different way.”

Fray’s role became more performance based, and he had to pay close attention to the performances of Elwood and Tanner since he was shooting from their perspective. “I would watch rehearsals of Brandon (Wilson) and Ethan (Herisse), seeing how they were interpreting the characters’ physical motions, emotional movements… I’m inside the scene, so if something happens, I have to react and I have to react as the character whose perspective the camera is attached to.”

In addition to the movements and performances, Fray had to get into the minutiae of how it feels to see something. “The odd thing about this movie is that we weren’t really trying to capture what a person sees, but we wanted to capture how it feels for someone to see,” he says. “That sounds semantic, but if I wanted to capture how a human actually sees the world, I’d probably just shoot it on steady cam, because our brains stabilize the input coming from our eyes and our head. But in reality, when you see a steady cam shot, there’s this almost removed, ghostly feeling to it that RaMell and I didn’t want. So, even though something like a handheld doesn’t actually reflect how we move through space, it looked and felt like how we move through space.”

Fray’s camera performance ended up leading to some unexpected moments with the actors, including one scene with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s Hattie. “There was this moment where Hattie is at a table telling Elwood some pretty hard news,” he says, “and you can feel it as the character that she’s about to say something really hard, so as Elwood with the camera, I look away because I don’t want to look her in the eyes. And there was a pause, and Aunjanue hits the table and says, ‘Elwood, you need to look at me.’ And the camera shifts back. That was a totally unscripted moment, and it’s almost like being welcomed into their world as an actor.”