What a Movie Set Looks Like When No One’s Performing
In the summer of 2024, I was contacted by the casting director Jennifer Venditti, who asked if I was interested in auditioning for a small part in “Marty Supreme,” a forthcoming early-fifties period film directed by Josh Safdie. The role that she had in mind was an assistant to Gwyneth Paltrow’s character, Kay Stone, a faded if still beautiful middle-aged actress who, after abandoning her career decades prior to marry a wealthy industrialist, is trying to make a comeback by putting on a vanity Broadway play. In the movie, Kay becomes involved with the young Ping-Pong hustler Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet. If I landed the role, I’d perform in two scenes: in one, I’d minister to Kay’s demands during a break in her play’s rehearsal; in the other, I’d hail Marty outside the theatre, explaining that Kay would like to have lunch with him.
After a couple of recorded auditions at Venditti’s office in SoHo, I was thrilled to learn that I’d got the gig. Still, when I arrived on set, in the fall of 2024, I was nervous. I’d had no prior acting experience, and even though I looked the part of a nineteen-fifties secretary, in my postwar-style curled hair, modest black dress, and conservatively heeled shoes (selected by the film’s costume designer, Miyako Bellizzi), I felt like something of a fraud. Acting in a movie involves a lot of waiting around, too—as the crew repositions cameras and adjusts the lighting, among other things—and those lulls provided me with plenty of time to feel queasy with anxiety.
On my first day, we were shooting outside a Broadway theatre, on a block in midtown that had been made to look like a mid-century streetscape. The set was organized and civil but still hectic, with dozens of people milling around: extras and assistant directors, camera-crew members and production assistants, hair-and-makeup artists and prop specialists, all working in concert, under increasing pressure to get the scene while it was still light out. Standing in a doorway, my heart pounding, I was looking for the cue for my first take—I’d emerge and walk down the street toward Chalamet. As I waited, I noticed a bespectacled middle-aged man with a camera around his neck standing a couple of feet away from me. Catching my eye, he wordlessly lifted the camera toward me and raised his eyebrows slightly, as if to ask if I agreed to have my picture taken. Once I nodded, he clicked the shutter a single time and then bowed his head in thanks. I didn’t know the man, and the exchange was brief, but its relative hush—especially amid the surrounding scrum—stayed with me.
Later, I learned that the man was Atsushi Nishijima, known as Jima—an on-set stills photographer who in the past decade and a half has worked with some of our era’s most important filmmakers, among them Safdie, Yorgos Lanthimos, Ava DuVernay, and Noah Baumbach. Born in Japan in 1977, in the town of Shizuoka, about an hour outside Tokyo, Jima moved to the States to attend college. (“Me and my friend visited his uncle who lived in the D.C. area when I was fifteen, for spring break,” he told me, when we spoke by phone recently. “And I was, like, Wow, America! Everything was so big! I thought, I want to come here.”) His interest in photography was first piqued when he took an undergraduate class in black-and-white darkroom printing, and after he graduated he began to make his way—“slowly, slowly”—as a professional in New York. He fell into his current line of work almost accidentally, in the early two-thousands, after working on a project with Derek Cianfrance, who was making a TV show for Nike and needed some still images to use in the series itself. This led to Jima’s first job on a major movie set, shooting stills for Cianfrance’s 2012 drama, “The Place Beyond the Pines,” starring Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes, and Bradley Cooper. “On the first day of the shoot, Derek took me to a room and there was Ryan Gosling, and he said, ‘Here, you guys take pictures,’ ” he told me. “That was my first time interacting with a big star.”
The fact that stills photographers often find themselves shooting very famous subjects at what might be sensitive, stressful moments on set is only one reason that the job requires a discreet, diplomatic presence. There is also the matter of the role’s essentially secondary position. The stills photographer must hover unobtrusively on the sidelines of moviemaking, taking pictures that will be used to promote a film. And yet what emerges from this elemental minorness is an art form with its own significance. “I’m documenting filmmaking on set, and eventually the photographs can become a kind of history,” Jima said. “I feel that’s my job.”
To look at the images themselves is to see what are, by definition, hybrid moments. There are the performers, who are dressed in the garb of their characters, and positioned in the environment in which those characters move onscreen. But there is also, almost always, the outside frame, which clarifies the artifice of filmmaking, and the labor that goes into it. And, although the pictures don’t replicate the movie itself, their tenor nonetheless ends up reflecting that of the set they were taken on. The director whom Jima has collaborated with most often is Yorgos Lanthimos—Jima has shot the stills for every Lanthimos film since “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” from 2017—and in the pictures presented in this portfolio, from the shooting of the 2025 sci-fi comedy “Bugonia,” Lanthimos’s vocabulary as a filmmaker is clearly refracted through Jima’s lens.
In “Bugonia,” two conspiracy-minded kidnappers suspect a pharma C.E.O., played by Emma Stone, of being an alien sent to Earth on a mission of destruction. Much like the movie itself, the images captured by Jima on set are spare and enigmatic. In one, we see Stone, whose head is shaved, lying on a cot, presumably between takes, while her face is being misted by a makeup artist, the spray forming a mysterious puff of fog; in another, Stone, dressed in a tidy skirt suit, with her flowing reddish hair still intact, stands on a manicured bright-green lawn, facing a cameraman and a boom operator and their respective implements, while a hulking Lanthimos checks out her likeness on the camera’s viewfinder. These images are perplexing, thrilling—visual nuts to crack. The armature around the scenes—cameras and mikes and props, along with the people who operate and manage them—adds to the austere, theatrical atmosphere. “Yorgos’s film sets are like the Acropolis in Athens, but without tourists,” Jima told me.
If “Bugonia” comes across in Jima’s images as an otherworldly puzzle, his pictures of “Marty Supreme” suggest something quite the opposite. “The set was busy chaos,” Jima said, laughing. “It was sometimes loud, speedy. It’s New York filmmaking.” His photographs record this urban tumult: a teeming crowd of crewmembers preparing a shot on a street in the theatre district while Chalamet and Safdie stand gravely at the frame’s forefront, the former in a dark period suit, the latter in a scruffy denim shirt, jeans, and a ball cap; or Safdie raising a large camera lens aloft, his eyes wide and his teeth bared in a rictus grin; or Bellizzi, the costume designer, tending to the clothing of a child extra on a Lower East Side street, the image an odd mix of contemporary and historical elements; or Abel Ferrara, a filmmaker who plays a criminal in the movie, laughing as he reclines on a stained coverlet between takes, gripping a script, his arm fake-bleeding from an accident that befalls him onscreen. Jima’s images depict a beat-taking—the interstitial moments that occur in the course of filmmaking. “On the first day of ‘Poor Things’ ”—a Lanthimos film from 2023—“I was rushing around, trying to take pictures,” he told me. “And Yorgos said, ‘Slow down and be human.’ ”
On my second day on the “Marty Supreme” set, I was seated on a chair inside a theatre where Kay rehearses her play. I was waiting for my cue to step forward and light Paltrow’s cigarette, bring her a chair and a glass of water, and soothe her with murmured, obsequious reassurances. I was, once again, a bit sick with nerves. Then I saw Jima approaching. He raised his eyebrows and held up his camera. Was I ready to have my picture taken? I was. When I look at that photograph now, I see my character, but I also see myself: two anxious women ready to perform the role they’ve committed to. Even in the hall-of-mirrors world of a movie set, Jima managed to capture something real.
