In the middle of the set, a man stands on a silver ladder. Sneakers, a green work jacket: this is Yorgos Lanthimos. He is trying to catch someone's eye across the busy crew. What he is looking for is a single lens, the camera of Atsushi Nishijima, the photographer everyone calls "Jima."
There, but Not There
"I'm on set, but it's like I'm not there," Jima says of his place. "But I don't disappear completely, either." For years Lanthimos has brought this quiet Japanese photographer onto his sets to record how the films get made: 『The Killing of a Sacred Deer』, 『The Favourite』, 『Poor Things』 and 『Kinds of Kindness』.
Still photography is a strange job. You are inside the film, but the film never captures you. While everyone else builds the world on screen, you alone watch its outer face. What makes Jima's pictures interesting is how he handles that outer face. He goes past publicity stills and records the labor of the people who make the film.
From Shizuoka to New York
Jima was born in a coastal town in Shizuoka, Japan. He first visited the United States as a teenager, fell for its sheer scale, and went on to study photography at Brooklyn College. After graduating he worked at SilverWorks, a photo lab founded by a former assistant to Richard Avedon. Irving Penn, Steven Meisel, Steven Klein, Annie Leibovitz: that was the client list. "That environment is where my fascination with photography grew."
His first professional work was shooting stills for corporate documentaries, including a Nike basketball film. "Sports photography usually relies on telephoto lenses, but I was young and ambitious, so I decided to shoot with a film camera that forced me to get close." Instead of pulling subjects in from a distance, he moved right up to them and shot on film. The method that would become his signature was already taking shape. He later entered film sets shooting Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes on Derek Cianfrance's 『The Place Beyond the Pines』, and his camera has since been on the sets of Iñárritu, Barry Jenkins and Ava DuVernay.
It Started on a Plane
His connection with Lanthimos came about almost by chance. On a plane, Jima watched 『The Lobster』 knowing nothing about it. The very next day, he got a call from the director's producer. Could he come to the set of 『The Killing of a Sacred Deer』?
Several films later, the two are something close to friends. When Lanthimos comes to New York, where Jima lives, he sends messages like "Want to get lunch?" "He's getting busier and busier, but he still makes time. We don't just talk about photos or work. He asks things like, I'm thinking of buying this, what do you think? Have you talked to your family in Japan lately? He's someone who cares about that kind of thing." Even an Oscar-nominated director needs one friend with a good eye for clothes.
Between One Meter and Two
The key to Jima's photographs is distance. It was no exaggeration when an English-language profile of him ran under the title "Three Feet From Stardom."
"I'd rather shoot within one or two meters of my subject than from far away. The hard part is when the director and actors talk quietly between takes. You can't interrupt. Can you get into that space? That's the test. Maybe Japanese culture helped. Growing up in an apartment in Japan, my parents told me to walk quietly so we wouldn't bother the people downstairs."
From that careful distance, he tenderly holds on to the human labor that makes a film. It happened while shooting 『The Favourite』. "Emma Stone was lying on a sofa between takes, resting with her eyes closed. I walked over quietly, she suddenly opened her eyes, and I caught that moment with the shutter. It's one of my favorite photos, because it shows the real Emma." Between cuts, when an actor withdraws into her own thoughts for a moment, the hidden faces of the people making the film come through.
The Material of Film
This sense of distance carries over to the medium. 『Poor Things』 was shot on 35mm film, not digital. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan opened with roughly the first thirty minutes on black-and-white stock, brought color in gradually, and soaked much of it in the unreal, seething color peculiar to Ektachrome reversal. A world that chose grain and texture over smooth digital. The film's surrealism only looks like a dream because it sits on the physical stuff of film.
The camera Jima carried alongside it was film, too. In behind-the-scenes shots he holds a medium-format Plaubel Makina 67 to his eye and presses the shutter. It is a folding rangefinder: 6×7 format, a single 80mm prime, ten frames to a roll. He doesn't use the Makina alone. He switches between several film cameras, choosing to slow down over each frame rather than fire endlessly on digital. While the director made his film on film, the photographer beside him fixed moments onto film as well.
Photographs That Show the Trick
Lanthimos's films look, deadpan, into the desires and fears at the very bottom of human beings. If there is the story on screen, there is also, separately, the labor of the people who make those images. Jima goes after the second.
Take this frame. During the shoot for 『Poor Things』, Lanthimos sits on the deck of an ocean liner, listening to his lead, Emma Stone. She wears a robe and we see her only in profile, a faint smile at her mouth. The director, in work clothes (sneakers again), looks up at her. Cables snake across the wooden deck. It is a photograph that reveals the magician's trick. Yet it doesn't break the illusion. It shows the real collaboration that made the illusion possible.
Maybe the heart of that collaboration lies in something as small as food. In New Orleans, while shooting 『Kinds of Kindness』, Jima and Lanthimos found a Vietnamese restaurant and became regulars. "Yorgos and I would buy banh mi and eat together. Maybe that's what a one-or-two-meter relationship means to me."
More Photos
What Remains
When the film ends, the motion is gone. What remains is memory, and a single photograph. The images that freeze in our minds when we think of 『Poor Things』 come from nearly ten years of shared rhythm between one director's imagination and the eye of one photographer, quietly pressing the shutter one or two meters away from him.
If the director builds the world, the photographer beside him pulls out its most honest frame. Like someone who is there and not there, from a place where he never quite disappears.
Sources
Reconstructed from the interview in SSENSE, "Atsushi Nishijima Is Three Feet From Stardom" (Reiko Suga, 2024). Quotations are translated from that interview.
SSENSE original ↗ · Atsushi Nishijima official site ↗ · Screen Daily, Robbie Ryan interview ↗
