Also, when I spoke to her, she said that the actor she was working with would often be off-camera doing the lines. Was that also important to you?
No, I didn’t think too much about that part of it. And we realized that they actually needed to have the other actor delivering their lines. And then we realized that we actually needed to have the other actor delivering their lines with the same cadence that they would if they were acting in a scene normally. And then we realized that we needed to have them as close as possible to the camera person who was operating. And then we realized they actually need to be touching the other person. Because it starts as a concept. 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.
Before you began filmming was there one moment you were mot concerned about?,
The film isn’t drama-scene-heavy in a traditional sense. The film kind of lived and died with every one of those scenes because the film is shot in the way it is. I can’t imagine losing one element of it because everything seems to be more contingent. But I will say the best part about the process is because it was fresh and new, regardless of what we had, we always felt like it would be O.K. because we weren’t trying to do something. We didn’t have a mark of what we wanted it to be necessarily. We had an idea of the elements that we wanted it to be composed of, and the way that it came together was something that we only had in our imagination. We didn’t have, “Oh man, it failed. If it doesn’t do this…if it didn’t feel like this.” We were building that in the edit ourselves based on the parts that we wanted to get down that road.
You mentioned your imagination, and when you’re a filmmaker or a screenwriter or an artist, you often have an image of your head of something you’re trying to capture. And when I think about this movie, the one image that always comes back to me, because I haven’t really ever seen it before. It’s the overhead shot of Brandon hugging Aunjanue’s character. Was that an image that was in your head, or was that just something magical you captured that day?
That was written in the first treatment, but the execution of it is a different story. The first treatment Jocelyn and I made was 90% of the images that were in it. 95% were written and scripted, and camera movement was applied. That’s how we sold the film. That’s why Jeremy knew that we knew what we were doing. This is how they see the world. This is what they see. This means X, Y, and Z, but the execution of it is a completely different thing. That’s where the collaboration of Jomo and I really bore its deep value in that with Jomo’s understanding of everything cinematic in all camera languages. We sat in his Airbnb for six weeks before every day shot listing and going through with my little DSLR every one of the movements that you see. So, we practiced the hug for many hours, and the idea of the film was always long lens, shallow focus, right? That’s how we want POV to be. We don’t want it to be GoPro. We don’t want it to be wide. We don’t want to see everything. We want to control attention, but how do you pull off a hug? I’ve written it down, and we know what we don’t want to do, but we don’t know what we want to do. And so we just practiced it. I would do it on Jomo; we’d look at it that feels a little bit like this feels a little bit like this. He would do it on me. And then we got to the exact movement of coming up over the shoulder and tilting it down to where we thought the eyes would kind of rest if someone’s eyes stayed open and then kind of backing off in a very specific way, that’s just trial and error before we got there because we didn’t have time on the day to invent a hug.
That shot will be ingrained in my mind. It may seem like the most simple shot to other people, but that’s so hard to do.
The thing is, also we do it to ourselves, and we’re like, “We think this will work.” And that’s where it ends. It’s not like we have the scene, we have the actors, we have the moment before in which the head ducks down, we have all the elements. And so, in that sense, it’s like the most exciting thing to do to see all those elements come together list.
How hard was the casting for Ethan and Brandon? How long did it take to find your two leads?
Well, I want to say maybe, fortunately, or maybe, unfortunately, we didn’t have many months. Once we decided to make the film, I think we cast department heads and location-scouted everything in nine or eight weeks. It was just crazy. Really fast.
Wow.
And we came across Brandon really soon, and Ethan took a long time because you want someone that feels like Ethan and only Ethan is Ethan, and you don’t know, it’s hard. Most of the boys that we came across were like, “Damn, you’re really good. You would be great for this type of movie if we were looking for this type of character. But it would be something else.” But most of the kids were like 60 to 70 to 80 to 90% there. And so it’s almost like, “Am I undermining [this]? Am I sabotaging the film by looking for 110, 120 of the undeniable, or do we just hold out until the film collapses because we haven’t made a decision yet?” And we held out until we found Ethan, and then we were like, “Thank the Lord, we did perfect.”
Did you know right away?
I mean, we did, and we hoped that we weren’t wrong. We saw his read and immediately, everyone’s like, “This is it, guys. Is it just me?” And everyone’s like, “Oh my God,” I, so I thought it was just me. Isn’t this kid amazing kind of thing. And then every time we did a follow-up, and then we did a chemistry read and everyone further reinforced what we had thought.
Maybe it’s just because of what I’ve seen of his work, but Hamish Linkletter in this role would not have been the traditional casting you would think for this character. Where did that idea even come from?
That was like Plan B. Jeremy and DeDe’s idea. Everyone’s throwing ideas out for people. And I’m not sure if it was Jeremy or DeDe. I think it was DeDd who was like, “I think Ham Linklater would be good.” And everyone’s like, “Really? You think so?” And then I go look at his work, and then she’s telling me he has a theater background. And I’m like, “Whoa.” We wanted a buttoned-up, almost math teacher. We were going for a kind of NASA scientist look. And he had never done anything like this, so it’s not like we could say he was perfect in that sense. But Dede and Jeremy have been doing this so long when they make strong recommendations for a reason they’re not trying to get their friends in. And, I mean, from the second he came in, and it was just like, “Oh, thank the Lord. This guy is everything that we could never have predicted this character. His power is not one that you see coming. You don’t see it coming from Hamish. And then he just is it.
Yeah, I did not think he could be intimidating and scary, and he absolutely can. I have two more questions before I let you go. You’ve been doing the festival circuit. You’ve been going with the film all across the country and parts of Europe. What has struck you the most about the reaction from audiences to the film?
Honestly, this film does not produce similar responses in anyone. As strange or as relatively subjective as the film is attempting to be inside the characters, it produces very subjective responses, which is fascinating because every conversation with someone who watched it, if they enjoyed it after they get past the part of expressing their appreciation for it, every conversation is different. And that’s the most interesting thing ever, where it’s like, “Damn, I actually haven’t thought about things on those terms. That’s the part that you really thought was fascinating. Whoa. Just the part when he was getting out of the car and he was like, ‘You stay,’ that part moved you more than the hug. The hug was just O.K. to you.” You know what I mean?
You’ve been in the middle of a nonstop press tour, but do you know what you want to do next? Will it be a documentary? Will it be another narrative?
I have no clue. I have this project, this commission is permanent, this 900-foot lenticular photography commission in the Atlanta airport between terminals B and C. That’s been on hold for a while because I made “Nickel Boys,” and now the release of it that I’m going to be shooting this summer, which is a pretty big project, but I don’t have anything quite yet. So I’m excited to get back to some of the less grand and million-person processes to make a film like this is so arduous.
“Nickel Boys” is now playing in New York. It opens in Los Angeles on Friday.
