Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor Felt ‘Kindred’ to RaMell Ross Even Before Working on ‘Nickel Boys’ Together
On December 5, the IndieWire Honors Winter 2024 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best films. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the filmmakers, artisans, and performers behind films well worth toasting. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles event.
Ahead, “Nickel Boys” star Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor shares with IndieWire why working with RaMell Ross, this year’s Auteur Award recipient, made her feel seen and heard like never before.
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As told to Marcus Jones. The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.
RaMell Ross’s intention is something that I feel personally aligned with because he puts an eye on something that’s personal to me, which is Black Southern life.
Most of the time I have felt that I have been the object in the gaze of someone who saw me as a foreign thing, but I did not feel that with RaMell when I saw his film “Hale County This Morning, This Evening.” I felt like I was in the presence of a filmmaker that felt kindred to me, and I knew that whatever narrative space that he entered, I would be honored in. I didn’t know “Nickel Boys” was even in the ether at all.
RaMell is one of these makers who sees that racism operates on an atomic level in ways that we don’t acknowledge. We don’t recognize that it is in the production of language, it is in the production of images. And because he is so keenly aware of that, he wants to not just change the stories that we are telling, but how we are telling the story — and in doing so, confront the very material that we use to do that storytelling, which is the camera.
I try to grant grace to every director. Every director is going to be different and I try to meet them where they are. All I want is to feel as free as I can to try as much stuff as I can, and I felt that with RaMell. But this is another kind of approach to filmmaking, so the stuff that I try to do when I’m working, I tried to do that, but I also had to do that to a camera. So it was a lot of conferring with him. A lot of, “What do you think?” in a way that I would not probably normally do.
I had to trust what he was doing so far as the camera work is concerned. I don’t like cameras at all. I feel confined by them. It makes me feel like what I’m doing is fraudulent because I have to pretend that I’m having a truthful experience while this big machine is right there. But I had to befriend my enemy, essentially, doing this film.
When you do work with directors who are visually driven, sometimes they see you as a prop. You’re just a set piece. “Can you move here? Because I need to achieve this look when I’m looking through the lens.” RaMell doesn’t do that. He sees a wholeness in creating what he’s trying to create and feels that actors are a part of that. He starts with being a lovely, kind person—and genuinely so. I thought that of him two years ago. I think that more of him now. He endears himself to me evermore.
I’m looking at a bag right now that I got at a film festival that I went to, and it’s from the Criterion Collection, so I’m looking at all of these names, on the bag: Hitchcock, Altman, Cuarón, Lubitsch, Hawks—and I could see Ross being on that bag. Directors who have a boldness in thought and execution, and a way of looking at the human experience as a launching pad to make us greater, to make the world greater. That confronts the idea of human limitation. That confronts the idea that we are limited by skin and bone and our own preconceived notions of who we are. That is why they do what they do — that confrontation — and inviting us into something more beautiful.
“Nickel Boys,” an Orion Pictures release, opens in theaters on Friday, December 13 in NYC and Friday, December 20 in LA.
Read RaMell Ross’s full IndieWire Honors profile.
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