“It starts as a concept,” RaMell Ross says. “You don’t know on the day until you’re shooting exactly how it’s going to play out. You realize that the actors need certain things to be comfortable, and we just made adjustments for every scene to make sure that we gave them the things that they needed just going down that road.”
That’s Ross referring to his gutsy artistic choice to shoot his celebrated new film, “Nickel Boys,” almost completely from a first-person perspective. In the months since the film debuted at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival, Ross has been rewarded for his daring choice by the Gotham Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics, and the Chicago Film Critics Association, among others. He has seen his creation land on a multitude of top 10 lists and earn Best Picture nominations from the Independent Spirit Awards, the Golden Globes, and the Critics Choice Awards.
Adapted from Colson Whitehead‘s 2019 novel, “Nickel Boys” follows Elwood (Ethan Herisse), an innocent teenage boy sent to a Florida correctional facility for a crime he was not part of during the Jim Crow era of 1962. As his mother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), becomes increasingly concerned she won’t be able to get him out before his 18th Birthday, he befriends a classmate, Turner (Brandon Wilson), who will change his life forever.
During our conversation, Ross, who was previously best known for the Oscar-nominated documentary “Halle County This Morning, This Evening,” discussed his thought process on the film’s unique visual aesthetic, how his cast adapted to it, the incredible “hug” shot in the movie, and much, much more.
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The Playlist: What about the novel made you want to make it your narrative debut?
RaMell Ross: It was like a sort of easy imagination space for myself because Elwood and Turner obviously look like me. Their lives are damn close to people who I’ve known or our family members, and maybe specifically for Elwood. I grew up with the same type of love in my household and have always been terrified of something going wrong and could see how easily I’ve had friends who have had their lives veered in certain paths because of small things that have happened. And it’s f**king devastating. I understand it very well.
How much research did you end up doing regarding the real-life events behind the novel? Was it more than you expected?
I don’t approach research as in terms of depth. I think what I try to do is just follow my intuition in terms of how much time to spend with things. Because the way in which I think about the world, I could come across one image of the Dozier School for Boys or something and imagine within that space for a year. And that could be just as meaningful and powerful as seeing a thousand images in many libraries. It’s more about time and about, grace and openness to the unexpected trains of thought. Still spend time with the images. I think that’s why I have looked at so many staring [at them].
Is there anything particularly you remember learning during your research of it that was maybe not in the book or that you felt was needed to be more relevant in the film?
Honestly, there’s this thing called the Dozier Report that is the actual forensic analysis and research from those who are on the ground and exhuming the bodies and charting the land, and that it’s real is enough because we know it’s not fiction, but that brings everything to an element of terror and factuality that is really difficult to express.
You made a very bold artistic decision to shoot it completely from a first-person perspective, flipping perspectives at one point, but always first-person. What was your inspiration for that?
Kind of just the failures of human vicariousness or something. I don’t know. The way that people are so assured of their reality and the way in which everyone’s assurance breeds the world’s terror? You know? So how do you share subjectivity as much as possible, and how do you let someone live vicariously in a way that makes another person’s reality undeniable? I don’t think it’s by watching that person, because if you watch the person, there’s an element of judgment and there’s an element of otherness that’s fundamental to that process, but there’s something about embodiment that spans human capacity that I think is the key to something.
Maybe fight is the wrong word, but did you have to, I guess, campaign to shoot it that way? I mean, obviously it’s not a $1 million movie, were there discussions with the studio? Did you have to sell your vision?
I didn’t. I thought that I would have to fight for it, but it wasn’t fighting. It was explaining. And fortunately, I mean, I’ve only worked with these producers: David [Levine] from Anonymous Content, Jeremy [Kleiner], Dede [Gardner], Allison [Brandin], and Joslyn [Barnes]. It seems like they’re the smartest people around. I say that respectfully to all the other incredibly smart people. I haven’t worked with them, but the idea of “stress tested,” y’know, that’s one of Jeremy’s words where you’re like, “What about this here? What about this there? What about this there?” And that process actually helps you articulate it better. It helps figure out the essence of why it could work and puts people’s minds at ease. But it never felt like fighting or proof. It was more explanatory. Also, “Hale County” is a pretty good proof of concept, and the treatments and stuff that I’ve made will take images and scenes from there. And it’s like, “It’s going to be literally this scene here,” and then they’re like, “Well, that worked over there. I guess it can work here.”
When I spoke to Aunjanue she said she showed up to set and you was unaware this was how it was going to be shot. Is that true?
This sounds to me like a rewriting of history. [Laughs.] I remember telling Aunjanue, but I didn’t overemphasize it. It’s in the script, but I say it’s respectfully, people hear what they want to hear, but also, how it’s shot is irrelevant to the actors from their perspective hearing about, because I’m not over-emphasizing it. So me saying that it’s POV and let’s talk about your character, they’re just like, “O.K., it’s POV, let’s talk about my character.” That means the camera’s going to be in front of my face, and that means, you know what I mean? I know that that’s the case, but to them, that’s just how it’s shot, and how it’s shot is not necessarily going to challenge them or have them do something specific. Though I know it will, and [cinematographer] Jomo Fray knows it will, and everyone else knows it will. So, I did tell them, but I didn’t emphasize it because it wasn’t necessary. They don’t need to be thinking about the concepts of the character that they’re interacting with. I believed, I think, that they needed to just be themselves and know their characters. And then when we’re shooting the film, as everyone does, you adjust to the circumstances that are there, and they didn’t have time to overthink about it. They just had to do their thing. And with that, you get their performance, and they’re not playing it up. They’re not doing something that they thought about. They’re just acting intuitively as they’ve already planned. And maybe that’s naivete on my part, but it seemed to have worked.
My follow-up question was going to be, did it feel like it was ever a challenge for them to adjust to it on set, or did you just feel like, “Nope, it worked right away. We got what we needed on the first day or second day, and it just worked.“
I think it was definitely a challenge for them, but it was one of those challenges where that you can’t prepare for, so you actually don’t have, you have no crutches. There’s nothing that you can prepare for that will allow it to be easier. And I imagine in some sense that maybe that tension and that lack of crutch pays dividends in ways that one can’t predict and maybe makes them more alive, or that anxiety that they’re feeling makes them feel more of something that would’ve not been there otherwise. But it doesn’t mean that with that preparation, they wouldn’t have done something else that was quality or great, but it had to have played a role.
