RaMell Ross Set Out to Make ‘Nickel Boys’ an ‘Experience’ — He Did That and More
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.
Despite his film being an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, director RaMell Ross has found it helpful to come out and give an introduction to any “Nickel Boys” screening that he can. “[I tell] people to not look too hard and to not try to figure it out, just to watch the film,” he said to IndieWire over coffee at a Beverly Hills hotel. “They go in specifically knowing the themes, expecting for it to be this really clear narrative, as opposed to something more experiential.”
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The aspect of his scripted feature debut that has been easy to describe, but really hard to convey, is that it is almost entirely told using first-person POV cinematography. Words fail to really capture the unique, harrowing ride that is seeing the horrors of the 1960s Florida reform school the two young protagonists are trapped in, quite literally through their eyes. But getting away from words was kind of the point.
“It was instinctual, but it also stems from not feeling comfortable, not thinking it’s possible to pay homage to the book illustratively. I can’t just make a play of the book. You can’t translate all of it. The language that literature provides is a very specific type of symbolic and relational ecosystem. And if you try to do that in cinema, the cinema’s a literal slave to the English language,” said Ross, reflecting on the bold artistic choice he made while writing the script with producer Joslyn Barnes. “That’s not good cinema, that’s theater. And so it’s genuinely, how can you use what is experiential? Which is what cinema is to the best.”
The multidisciplinary artist, who will receive the Auteur Award at the Winter 2024 edition of IndieWire Honors on December 5, has broken even more new ground with the way in which he incorporates real life images and documents into “Nickel Boys” as well. “Someone was like, ‘This is such a documentarian’s film.’ I was like, ‘It is.’ But it never crossed my mind,” said Ross, whose directorial debut “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2019 Oscars. “We see these images and we’re like, ‘They have to be in the film. It would be amazing to have them in the film. It would honor the kids. How cool would that be?’”
In addition to primary resources from the infamous Dozier School for Boys, the very same that inspired Whitehead to write the book, Ross includes clips from Sidney Poitier-starrer “The Defiant Ones” and Martin Luther King Jr. speeches, striving to clue in viewers on the gulf between media’s depiction of Black Americans, and their actual lived experience.
“How fascinating would it be to be able to truly show the difference between, even if it’s an accent in the unconscious of the mind of the viewer, the way in which Black people have been captured and been statistically Black in archives with POV, black Sony Venice 6K 4:3 ratio,” said the director, mimicking his early days conceptualizing his take on the daunting material. “It’s going to be obvious what happens when you don’t have the images of cultures in the hands of the people who are in the culture. And that’s one of the thrilling things, is to bring all these images and make a collage that makes evident that Blackness has been a production.”
Given the praise that aspect of the film has received, he added, “I more wonder why drama hasn’t utilized the images of the real for the sake of the drama, for the sake of the fiction to bring a viscerality to the fantasy that makes the fantasy more real.”
Despite new rigs and means of which he, cinematographer Jomo Fray, and camera operator Sam Ellison shot the film through the eyes of Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, who star as the titular pair, Ross says production was a refreshing experience for many of the supporting actors, which include Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, and Luke Tennie. “They had a lot of freedom, but the freedom wasn’t movement because they needed to be dialed in to look at a very specific part on the lens,” the filmmaker said. “But I guess that spontaneous challenge of having to completely drop what you’ve normally done on set and then be present in a way maybe, which is a type of play that only happened earlier in your career or when you were doing improv or when you’re testing things. It’s almost like every time we were shooting it was a test and sometimes the test ended up being the thing that we wanted.”
Ellis-Taylor, in particular, tapped into a different frequency with this grandmother role. “??She’s always acted with a single partner, and she uses that energy and that exchange and that relationality to build her character, but she was completely isolated and alone when she’s filming, and it’s just the camera,” said Ross. “She said that loneliness, because she had to react to it so fast, was something she connected directly to Hattie’s situation, and she used [it] as emotional drive for the character. And I was like ‘Yes!’ That’s good directing by accident.”
Such is an example of the levity Ross still carries around the project. Sure, many of the reactions to “Nickel Boys” have been “people are crying afterwards and squeezing your hand bloodless,” he says the empathic film “never felt tough to me.” Part of that is only having perspective on the project as the creator, but the artist, who has a book of photographic work titled “Spell Time, Practice, American, Body,” also just plain loves images.
“I’m not joking. I can watch ‘Hale County’ every single fucking day because it’s like deep memory. You’re also like, ‘I waited so long for those images inside their lives that they’re shocking to me that it happened,’” said Ross. “In this film, that’s one thing that was important in the edit, was to come to a point where you’re like, ‘Whoa,’ with the next image and with the next image. So I can watch it. I watch it almost every time. It’s weird.”
Touring with the film through Telluride, NYFF, and beyond, “Nickel Boys” has been especially been well-received by fellow directors, who are “able to look at the camera use and not take it literally as something that’s trying to explore reality in a way, but see the decisions and give way to whatever type of looking experience it is,” said the filmmaker.
Though there is still that joy around sharing his film with the world, Ross isn’t feeling any urgency at this crossroads in his filmmaking career around trying to take up the mantle of America’s next great auteur. “I’d love to make another film, but everything has to be right,” he said. “In my head for the projects, I’m not like, ‘I’m going to change cinema. I’m going to do X and Z.’ It’s more like, ‘Well, what an idea to give Dozier boys POV through Colson’s “Nickel Boys.” How else can we make imaging really interesting and expand the drama?’”
“Nickel Boys,” an Orion Pictures release, opens in theaters on Friday, December 13 in NYC and Friday, December 20 in LA.
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