When we think about cinematography, we think about light, about composition, about the way a camera moves through space to create a sense of mood or capture a fleeting moment. We don’t necessarily think about character and performance. Usually, those are the responsibilities of actors — and the director who lets them know when they’ve hit the mark.
But on “Nickel Boys,” the acclaimed drama about the inhabitants of a Jim Crow-era boarding school, the line between composition and performance is dissolved. Shot almost entirely from the first-person perspective, nearly everything we see onscreen is through the eyes of an upstanding boarder named Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and his world-wise friend, Turner (Brandon Wilson). When their eyes wander, the image wanders; when they tense up, so do we.
transcript
‘Nickel Boys’ | Anatomy of a Scene
The director RaMell Ross narrates a sequence from his film, which has been nominated for best picture.
My name is RaMell Ross. I am the co-writer and director of “Nickel Boys.” “Young man! Young man. Do — Do you know a student named Elwood Curtis?” Hattie, who’s played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, is visiting her grandson, Elwood, who is played by Ethan Herisse at Nickel Academy, in which he’s unjustly sent. She’s running into Turner, who is Elwood’s friend, and Turner is played by Brandon Wilson, and Turner is the camera as the film is shot in point of view, our camera operator in this instance, Sam Ellison, is acting as the eyes of Turner and allowing you to participate in Turner’s reality by kind of seeing with him, seeing alongside him. And so when she comes to give Turner a hug, which she does because she says she can’t hug Elwood, she is essentially coming in close contact with Sam, and Sam is making a camera move that mimics as best as possible where the head would go and where the gaze, the eyes would go in relationship to being in that proximity. And with that process, Hattie is as Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, is unable to have that intimate connection that happens when you have a scene partner. “What is your name?” “It’s Turner, ma’am.” “Oh, Turner. Well, I’m glad I can rely on somebody around here, Turner. When was the last time you had family to come visit you?” “Oh, um, well.” “You know? I came all this way. And I can’t hug Ellwood, so I guess you will have to do. And it’s interesting for Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who has so much experience, to be put into this process in which he has to look and act directly towards and to the lens. “What are they feeding y’all? You can’t muster up a bigger hug than that. You know, I’m going to remember that next time, Turner. Hug me again.” Which means that she has a sense of loneliness and an inability, again, to have that human touch and that eye contact in which actors so much rely on. And so Aunjanue ends up, she says, in hindsight, kind of converting that loneliness and that isolation into the character Hattie, who is feeling very similarly, being out in the middle of this place without her grandson and having no one to turn to. “Thank you so much.” And I think it really pays dividends in the performance.
Operating the camera — and therefore standing in for both the characters and the audience — were the cinematographer Jomo Fray and the camera operator Sam Ellison. Under the direction of RaMell Ross, Fray and Ellison were the unseen players carrying every moment of the story. On Thursday, the film was nominated for two Oscars — best picture and best adapted screenplay (which Ross and Joslyn Barnes adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead).
In an interview last month in Brooklyn, Fray, whose credits include “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” and Ellison (“Severance,” “Manchester by the Sea”) discussed how they stepped into the literal shoes of the actors, why the film’s visual style matters and which scene was the hardest to pull off. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
How did you get into filmmaking?
JOMO FRAY It was one of those things where, at age 7, I told my parents I wanted to be a filmmaker. In my child brain I thought, “I can have it all. I can live 1,000 lives in one lifetime because I can help tell the story of a scientist and get to know what that life feels like. I could help tell the story of a firefighter and get to know what that life is.” In middle school through college, I worked at the Worcester public-access television station [in Massachusetts], working the cameras at the studio and editing and archiving.