Director and cinematographer RaMell Ross first came onto my radar as the director behind the exquisite Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary feature Hale County This Morning, This Evening. But it’s his latest work, an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys, that has made him one of the most talked about filmmakers of 2024. The movie chronicles the friendship between two young African-American men—Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson)—navigating the harrowing trials of the brutal Nickel Academy reform school in 1960s Florida.
The film is shot in first-person point-of-view, strategically switching perspectives from Elwood to Turner throughout the movie, making the entire experience all the more personal and tragic. Elwood's grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) comes to visit him occasionally, while also attempting to save money to hire a lawyer to get him out, a plan that goes shockingly bad. The surge of the Civil Rights movement at the time factors into how both young men respond to their unfair treatment in this segregated facility. The film also flashes forward to the adult Elwood living in New York City, where he runs his own business and tries hard not to think about his time on the Nickel campus, until new reports surface about the many unmarked graves that have been discovered on the grounds, including evidence that nearly all of the bodies are of Black students who died at the school.
In the end, Nickel Boys is a profoundly moving film about one man trying to honor the legacy of another, as we discover that not everything is as it seems in Elwood’s life. I had the chance recently to talk with Ross about his interest in this material, his decision to swap perspectives during the course of the story, and his history with the source material. The film is now playing in theaters. Please enjoy my conversation with RaMell Ross…
How did you first come into contact with this material, and what do you remember responding to initially?
I was lucky to have a meeting offered by Plan B to have a conversation. I didn’t know what it was about, and at the end of the meeting, they let me know they had the rights to The Nickel Boys, and if I’d like to read it. Joslyn Barnes, my co-writer, was there, and we went from there. It was less “I have to make this” and more about it being the most understandable, worst-case scenario for any person of color; we know the story very well—a young Black boy, talented, wrong place/wrong time. How amazing would it be to tell this story through poetics? The poetics did not exist at that time period because of lack of cameras in the Black community. So it seemed like an unbelievable opportunity to fill out this well-known space with something that is not well visualized.
By taking on the first-person POV for almost the entire film, it’s one of the most literary moves I’ve ever seen.
I love it. And the book is all third person.
So you had to invent that language. How did you and your co-writer come up with the idea not just to tell it from that perspective, but then switch perspectives? I lost my breath when you changed to another character. Walk me through that conversation.
What a wild idea . It’s funny because, at this point Joslyn wasn’t my co-writing partner. She was there and brokered the meeting, but she worked with me on Hale County. I read the book and immediately thought of first person because of the way I use the camera, in a sort of observational logic. That was my natural thrust. I mentioned this to Joslyn before I asked her to co-write, and she thought it was a really good idea. That’s when I asked her to co-write with me, because I thought we’d have a good dialog over the course of writing the script.
And the idea didn’t actually explode into being something that was truly powerful until we problem-solved and thought-experimented through the book, because when you first think of first person, the first question is Who gets it? Not just Elwood. Why doesn’t everyone have first person? Do we give it to other characters? Maybe we just give it to the Black people, but what about his father? And it gets chaotic. But then when we got to Turner, we’re like “What about Turner?” And then it all just made sense.
Speaking of problem solving, then you have to present the idea to your cinematographer, Jomo Fray. What were some of the challenges about doing the whole movie like that?
Jomo was into the idea from the outset. He loved Hale County, so we already had a working sample. We could go back to that film and point to scenes and say “We want it to look exactly like this,” like the scenes we’d already shot. The interesting part became when we had to make really nuanced decisions, which we made in pre-production. For six weeks, we had my DSLR in its room in New Orleans, and we would practice camera moves and talk about all the ways to do this. We don’t want to do POV literally, and so the decisions about when to duck down, or when someone loses focus, do you rack focus out or do you come back into their face? How do you not do POV but do enough so that a person accepts the idea, doesn’t hold us to the standards of vision, but also gets a little bit of it in there. That was the hard part, the logistical aspect of it.
So you had to decide what rules to follow and how tight to hold onto those rules.
Yeah. Head movement, for example. We went with the language of cinema and photography. How do people recognize a person moving through space via the camera? It’s through hand-held, not through Stedicam.
I also love that the Civil Rights movement is in the background of certain scenes, which of course makes us focus on it more. It brings what we’re seeing at this reform school to the forefront by de-emphasizing what’s going on in the world around it. Talk about how you decided to weave that through the story.
We didn’t want the film to be about the Civil Rights movement. I don’t think we have enough of those films; we still need millions of them. Specifically in this story, that’s not the focus, and it forecloses the sensory experience of a person if you’re over-emphasizing the things we already know, which is its time period. We concentrated on the human process, the human as the center, what it felt like to hear and listen in a place that is adjacent to it. When you’re on the inside of a storm, it’s quiet.
Photo credit: L. Kasimu Harris
With your background in documentary and photography, did you find ways to use the language of those mediums to tell this story?
For sure. Having the camera shoulder-rigged was the first one. We wanted people moving through space. We wanted it to be a little bit jumpy and blurry. Human beings’ heads are the first Steadicams; that’s something that’s learned from docs. Also, it’s fluency with archival. It’s desire to have the film grounded in the journalistic language of truth. That’s something we thought we owed the Dozier School boys.
In those few scenes in which you jump ahead a couple of decades, I don’t know why this one hit me as hard as it did. But the scene in the bar where he runs into the other guy who he knew at the Academy…
That's because Craig Tate is so freaking good in it.
He is. But that scene felt so real. What did you want to say in that moment? It’s such a beautifully uncomfortable scene.
Yeah. For the films that I’ve made, the message is never verbal; it’s always experiential. I wanted someone to experience the type of encounter that brings one back, an authentic encounter with a passing figure from one’s past, in which you two share this huge history that you both experienced differently. You guys aren’t communicating, but you two have the same origin, but you aren’t talking about the same thing.
The only common ground they find is asking “How you heard from this guy?” because they don’t want to talk about what actually happened there, the actual shared experience.
Nor do they really want to exchange what’s going on in their lives. They don’t want to talk to each other.
“How do I get out of this conversation as quick as possible?”
Yeah yeah.
Tell me about your two leads. How tough was it to find exactly the right two actors? What was right about these two fairly new actors?
We wanted two up-and-coming guys, for the sake of general freshness, for lack of a better word. It was hard, and I think the best way I can explain it is, when you’re casting someone, especially for a historical character, people tend to try to use accents or embody that time period. We found Brandon first, among the first batch, he just wasn’t acting; he was just reading as himself, and that separated him from the rest immediately. You can imagine him as anyone; he’s not telling us anything. He’s allowing us to project onto him, and that seemed to be coming from the inside. And then when we came across Ethan, very late in the game, he exuded this strange naivety or optimism that we recognized in the book. And then when he started reading, he just nailed it.
And speaking of casting, having Aunjanue is such a gift to this film. What does the grandmother character represent to Elwood? She’s the only link to the real world.
Aunjanue is Elwood’s everything. Maybe she’s also his link to all of his past. He’s almost a Turner without her. She is the source of his love and opened him up to receiving others’ love, which can never be understated. That allows him to exude to Turner and opens Turner up, and it continues on.
This has played at a few festivals at this point, and you’ve probably heard reactions from audience members. Are Black and white audiences reacting differently to this story? Because I’m guessing one of those audiences have no problem believing a place like this existed, and the other might be stunned that this happened in the late 20th century. Are you noticing different responses?
I am, but I don’t think the differences are disbelief and belief; the differences are incredibly nuanced, and I’d probably have to chart them to start looking at patterns, because the film elicits really personal responses. Some people are taking the story completely different places, which is not what we intended exactly. The film is open for that, but I wonder why you’re reading it that way. Then you have others who are like “This film is the Black woman’s nightmare.” To look through your son’s eyes as they are helpless in this situation is just one step further into the fear of having your kid leave the house. That’s a good question; I’m going to start tracking responses better.
When you make a period film, there’s usually a reason you think that story from the past needs to be told now. What is your reason for wanting to tell this story now?
Usually when someone makes a period film, that is the case. I personally think for this film, whenever the story came out, that’s when it should have been told . It’s interesting, because the second the story came out in 2013, Colson said he had no plan to write this book, but then he saw the material and it was during the Trump presidency, and he said “Well, I guess I have to do this.” And when the opportunity was presented to me, and I couldn’t turn it down, so I think as it’s been exhumed, people were trying to share it in interesting ways
I just saw this documentary about the South African photographer Ernest Cole , and after decades of capturing the reality of life in South Africa and like 20 years living in New York City, he said not long before his death that photography was a lie. Do you get that? Do you know what he meant by that?
Sure. I don’t think photography is a lie, but it is a single-point-perspective truth. The problem is it feels like every perspective. It is a point in time, but from a very narrow perspective on the spectrum of perspectives. Victor Bergin says photography is a psychological event, which I think is more the case; I think it’s something that happens in the mind of the viewer, in which you’re forced to recall everything you’ve ever experienced relative and associated with that and come to narratives that are probably false, because we have no choice but to fill in all of that empty space around it.
Do you have any sense of what you might do next?
I really liked March of the Penguins . No, I’m kidding. I’m unsure.
All right, as long as you have a good narrator. Best of luck with this, RaMell. It’s a truly great film.
Thank you. That’s so cool.
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