‘Nickel Boys’ Star & Creatives On How Shooting POV Meant “Unlearning Everything We Thought We Knew About Cinema” – Contenders Los Angeles
Shooting Nickel Boys entirely from the characters’ first-person point of view — literally through their eyes — was a novel way to “center the experience” of the film’s subjects, writer-director RaMell Ross said at Saturday’s Deadline Contenders Film: Los Angeles event. It was also a daunting technical and conceptual challenge.
“It was all about unlearning everything that we thought we knew about traditional cinema and trying to reach for the oddest tools, to try to get something that felt really organic and inside the body,” director of photography Jomo Fray said in a panel discussion with Ross, co-star Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and producer Jeremy Kleiner.
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Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, Nickel Boys, the Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios film follows two Black teen-aged boys imprisoned in a harsh, Jim Crow-era Florida reform school, The Nickel Academy. The setting for Whitehead’s novel is based on the real-life Dozier School, an infamous state reformatory that operated in the Florida Panhandle for more than a century until its abuses — and its dozens of unmarked graves — were discovered and the school was shut down in 2011.
Ethan Herisse plays Elwood, who is preparing to go off to college in the early 1960s when he is instead sent to The Nickel Academy after being falsely accused of involvement in a car theft. There, he meets Turner, played by Brandon Wilson, and the two become friends and allies working together to survive their surroundings.
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Ross said that after reading the novel, he wondered about the young Elwood becoming aware of his race, and then he thought about how to portray that on screen. Through POV camera work, he said, “you got a chance to see not only what he saw, but how he was looked at in the world.”
Ellis-Taylor, an Academy Award nominee for King Richard, plays Elwood’s grandmother, Hattie, and said it was “jarring” to learn — on her first day on the set — that she would be in close quarters with the camera. But she had wanted to work with Ross after seeing his Academy Award-nominated 2018 documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, about Black life in rural Alabama.
Kleiner, who won Oscars for 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight, said that after seeing Hale County he, too, wanted to work with Ross on adapting Nickel Boys. “How could we have known that this unbelievable vision would just emerge from this artist’s mind the way it did to meet the source material and also take it to places we just never could have foreseen?” Kleiner said,
Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios will launch Nickel Boys on December 13 in NYC and December 20 in L.A.
Check out the panel video above.
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The presenting sponsor for this year’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles is United for Business. Sponsors are Eyeptizer Eyewear, Final Draft + ScreenCraft, and partners are Four Seasons Maui, 11 Ravens and Robina Benson Design House.
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