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Nominated for Best Picture by the Golden Globe Awards and Critics Choice Awards, and with more plaudits undoubtedly to come, Nickel Boys stands out for many reasons, not least because it was shot entirely in the first person.
Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ‘The Nickel Boys’ was apparently unfilmable, but director RaMell Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray have pulled off an ambitious cinematic coup.
The novel and film is based on an actual reform school in 1960s Florida which was notorious for abusive treatment of students. To tell the fictional story of Elwood and Turner, two of the boys sent there, Ross - in his feature debut - has shot it all with a first-person camera.
Other films have done this of course, such as the 1947 noir Lady in the Lake, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009) and the video-game inspired action film Hardcore Henry (2015) but arguably none has achieved a marriage of form and narrative quite as successfully as Ross in his feature debut.
First-person singular
“From the very first meeting RaMell said he wanted to explore the idea of a first-person perspective,” Fray says. “He and I were trying to think of an image that feels like it has a real body attached to it. An image that feels like it is seeing through the eyes of somebody navigating a very hostile (i.e. racist) environment.”
In the search for what they called the “sentient image” they realised they would have to pick apart conventional film language.
“The questions we came back to were; ‘What is an establishing shot? What is a cut? What is a transition in the world of a sentient image?” says Fray working with the director for the first time. “It was a really fun process in prep to think about cinema at an almost subatomic level and then rebuild it.”
The traditional establishing shot is typically a wide that might show a character walking into a room to give the audience context. The challenge was how to create that similar understanding of space and place in a first-person perspective.
“Maybe the shot is seeing a room and in seeing that room you've seen the socioeconomic status of that room,” Fray says. “Maybe the camera drifts and you see the edge of our protagonist's shirt and maybe that shirt is patterned and if so what does that mean about that character's comfort inside of this space?”
“It started from a lot of questions like that of just trying not to photograph what it looks like to see but to try to photograph what it feels like to see. What it feels like to move through certain spaces.”
Testing and refining
Testing was essential to arrive at the right approach. Ross and Fray shot listed every beat of the script using a DSLR to experiment with.
“We went line by line trying to visualise the emotion of our characters and trying to think through what the gaze of the camera is doing in each moment. Our shot list for the movie was maybe 35 pages. Every single scene we designed as a ‘oner’. We knew it would be cut up in post but we wanted to give our actors a chance for the scene to flow rather that it be stop and start.
For each scene they meticulously wrote down everywhere the camera’s gaze went. “We wrote down everything it sees, how it connects to other things, the movement and the emotion behind that movement. All so that we could come in every day feeling aggressively prepared and so we actually could be more fluid with what we saw on set.”
They transferred all that knowledge to camera tests to better visualise what Fray calls the feeling of sight.
“If we wanted to just mirror human sight then a Steadicam system would make a lot of sense since our brains stabilise our optical vision,” he says. “But when we tested with Steadicam it felt a bit ghostly and a bit detached. Since we wanted the image to always feel connected to a body in the present tense, oddly using handheld felt more human and present.”
They tested multiple different camera systems, remote heads, body rigs, chest rigs, and an Easyrig to achieve shots where the head movement felt as it came from the neck or from the spine and the full body. The ‘A’ camera was Sony Venice fitted in a variety of different modular setups that Fray was able to select and use quickly. Lenses were Panavision VA large-format spherical primes.
New grammar
Fray, Ross and colorist Alex Bickel evaluated each test in a screening room asking themselves what felt evocative and what felt like human sight.
“We had to unlearn a lot of traditional film grammar because we needed to be able to see this image totally fresh even though you know it was coming from, say, a remote head on wheels. Does this feel like human sight? When it did, we locked on and kept those tools.”
They needed a way to transition in and out of scenes and to bind different types of ‘oner’. For this they shot details such as of a gold bracelet, an ashtray, graffiti in a textbook, a deck of cards.
“Inserts like this didn't totally make sense in our language so we came up with an idea we called ‘thrown gazes’,” Fray explains. “The idea is that it isn't exactly what the character is seeing but almost in a moment of memory or reverie they're able to fixate on things in the space that have a textural component to them.
The film switches timelines between the Sixties and 2010 as the older Elwood looks back on his time in the institution. The first-person perspective is maintained but to illustrate the decades shift forwards the camera is positioned just behind the character’s head showing us the back of his head, instead of letting us see through his eyes.
Fray explains how they arrived at this solution. “After Elwood’s traumatic experience at Nickel we asked how that would change the way he saw the world? How would that change the way that they saw themselves in the world? Again, we tested a lot of systems again to figure out how the perspective changes with age.”
They chose a SnorriCam, a metal chassis worn by the actors with tension rods out of the back holding the Venice in Rialto mode (separating the camera block from the camera brain).
“We put the camera block onto the rig with the lens with an umbilical cord that went to a backpack to a key grip nearby who would run with the actors as they moved into space.
“The effect is what I call a second person perspective which is being able to see yourself in space but with a slight dissociation with yourself that just felt right for how trauma is remembered.”
A sense of perspective
Some scenes with Elwood and Turner in the same scene could leave the audience momentarily confused as to which perspective they’re actually viewing. It’s another deliberate tactic to present a subjective feeling of discomfort and vulnerability.
“Each day, we’d start the scenes with RaMell and the actors rehearsing and often I would be in the room just watching. I’m thinking about my interpretations of the character's emotional state but I’m also observing where the actor’s gaze went and how they held their body so when the takes would start, I’d try to imbue the camera with that emotion and that texture.”
When playing the perspective of a character, Fray or B camera operator Sam Ellison would have the actor playing the role right beside them, so that the actor’s hand or leg or other body part could move into shot.
“There was real intimacy with that relationship,” says Fray. “In the moments when Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (playing Elwood's grandmother) comes to Nickel Academy and she hugs Turner it's me she's physically hugging as the operator in that moment. I am inside of the scene.”
Fray talks of a “cross-pollination” where actors and cinematographer would compose elements of each scene. “I would be in scenes where my gaze would be moving around as if I were the characters but there were also scenes like the SnorriCam where it is attached to the actors. There, I am not composing that frame. It is attached to their body.”
Fray hopes the film will invite audiences to feel the violence of being on the end of racism and a victim of trauma.
“Maybe a person who doesn't know this perspective will immerse themselves into the world and most importantly, think about ‘What would I feel if this happened to me?’” he says. “How would you navigate a world of inhumanity and also the moments of beauty and moments of mundanity that make up someone’s life. I hope it also gives life and a voice by proxy to the actual boys who were killed over the period we are depicting. And for black folks I hope they see themselves in ways they might not have seen themselves on screen traditionally.”
tl;dr
- Innovative Filmmaking Technique: "The Nickel Boys" utilizes a first-person perspective, setting it apart by engaging audiences directly through the eyes of the characters, an approach orchestrated by director RaMell Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray.
- Emphasis on Authenticity: The filmmakers focused on creating a "sentient image," emphasizing what it feels like to perceive and navigate through various environments, particularly highlighting the hostility faced by the characters in a reform school setting.
- Meticulous Preparation: Ross and Fray meticulously shot-listed the entire script to capture the emotional essence of each scene, designing the movie primarily as continuous takes or "oners" to promote fluidity in performances
- Creative Testing and Innovation: Through extensive testing with various camera systems and techniques, they aimed to achieve a visceral and human-like representation of sight, even developing ideas like “thrown gazes” to bind scenes and transitions in a fresh cinematic language.
Tags: Production Sony VENICE
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