A year after RaMell Ross finished filming “Nickel Boys,” he learned to fly.
Ross doesn’t know if he became a pilot out of post-big-project depression, his desire to try new things or maybe just ennui. But after adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Black boys sent to a reform school in the Jim Crow South, Ross had found, in the air, the feeling he had hoped his characters could achieve in his film: freedom.
“As Black people, we know that one of the fundamental things we’ve been robbed of is free time — where we’re not worried about poverty or we’re not worried about dying,” Ross told me in early October over lunch at a French restaurant in Lower Manhattan. “Flying to me is an American luxury that offers a unique and singular relationship to society and the world.”
“Nickel Boys” starts with the camera staring at the open blue sky. Then the view appears to turn sideways, lingering on a nearby orange grove, only to return upward. The sky is now captured in a fairly limited frame, as if filtered through the perspective of a person lying on the ground below.
In these first few seconds, Ross establishes a point of view that is as much about seeing our country through the lens of two Black male characters, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), as it is about feeling like we are the boys. This seamless conflating of the art of looking and the act of being challenges how we watch movies and gives us a new way of experiencing Black people’s humanity onscreen.
WHITEHEAD’S NOVEL ITSELF partly informs the experimentation. Told in third-person narration, “Nickel Boys” the book is set in the 1960s at the Nickel Academy, a fictional reform school based on the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida (initially called Florida State Reform School). Known for torturing, sexually assaulting and even burying its Black students in unmarked graves, the state-run school was open for over a century, with more than 81 children dying there between 1913 and 1973. Despite the school having a majority Black population, when Whitehead came across the story in 2014, the newspaper accounts and the survivor website focused mainly on its white students. Moving him to ask, “Who were the black students? What were their stories?”
Whitehead personalizes this tragedy through the friendship between Elwood, an introspective, politically conscious student who was once college bound, and Turner, a charismatic, entrepreneurial figure who initially resents, and then comes to revere, Elwood’s loving relationship with his grandmother. The novel’s unexpected ending is where Ross’s aesthetic begins.
“RaMell told me that he was thinking about doing this movie entirely in point of view,” the cinematographer Jomo Fray said. “But pretty quickly, in our prep process, we stopped using that term and started using the sentient perspective.”
The idea “was to let us as viewers live life concurrently with Elwood and Turner, to be in their same present moment, to be inside their body,” Fray explained.
They approached each scene that featured a person with heightened sensitivity. “It wasn’t that RaMell wanted to show sight,” Fray continued, “we wanted to create an image that felt like seeing, which sounds like it’s the same thing, but I think that there’s a slight difference in trying to create the feeling of sight.”
To prepare, they designed scenes as nonstop shots, compiled in a 35-page, single-spaced list. That approach meant the camera always worked in tight choreography with the actors. The document helped them redefine standard film concepts like a cut or an establishing shot and gave hyper-detailed directions for the camera’s movement. They also used an aspect ratio akin to old television screens. The reason was twofold: to maintain visual coherence between the actors and archival footage of, say, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or clips from the prison escape drama “The Defiant Ones,” and to imbue their images with a sense of confinement.
Telephoto lenses and other devices allowed the camera to convey drift and drop — similar to our eyes sweeping a field or lowering our heads. And cameras worn by Herisse and Wilson, and in some cases by Fray himself as if he were playing their characters, provided complete subjectivity.
“It’s a stunning achievement,” the New York Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, wrote in her review, and awards voters have echoed her praise. The film landed two Gotham Awards, including one for Ross, and is up for the Golden Globe for best drama.
While “Nickel Boys” is Ross’s debut feature, it builds on the success and sensibility of his 2018 experimental documentary, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” about two young African American men, Daniel and Quincy, in Alabama. Filmed over five years while Ross also worked as their G.E.D. teacher, the movie is a quiet, poetic and panoramic exploration of daily lives in the heart of America’s Black Belt. It won a special jury award at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar.
BEFORE ROSS AND I sat down for lunch, we met at the African Burial Ground, a national monument in Lower Manhattan that is dedicated to more than 15,000 free and enslaved Africans in colonial New York whose remains were found during an archaeological dig in 1991. Given the similarity of that discovery to the story line in “Nickel Boys,” I thought our tour might lead to a compelling conversation about history, memory and mourning. And it did.
But this was also my second time interviewing Ross (the first was for “Hale County”), and I had forgotten how lively our exchanges could be. By the time we finished at the restaurant, two and a half hours had passed. He has the fluency of a profound artistic mind and, for me, as a fellow professor, the familiarity of a quick academic one. But he is also naturally warm, mildly sardonic and as interested in listening as he is in sharing his ideas.
Born in Germany, Ross was raised in northern Virginia, and then graduated from Georgetown University, where, at a striking 6-foot-4, he played basketball for the Hoyas. These days, he lives in Providence, R.I., where he teaches filmmaking at Brown University, but he also has a home in Alabama. He not only longs to fly there (“I want to look at all of Alabama, you know what I mean?), but it is also now the only place he photographs. (“I still want to make another Hale County film. No rush,” he said. “It might be in 20 years; I might die before. I don’t know, but I’m still shooting.”)
While working on “Nickel Boys,” he said he asked himself, “What if Turner or Elwood were making ‘Hale County’ and had a camera like an organ attached to their eyes the entire time? How would they move it? What would it look like? What would they see?”
Ross tried to imagine their world the way they would envision it. He then “challenged myself to see better for them.”
After watching his documentary, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who plays Elwood’s grandmother, immediately contacted Ross to let him know how much “Hale County” had affected her. Working with him on “Nickel Boys” was even more transformative. “I am most proud of how RaMell responds to the absence of intimate, complex storytelling about Black life,” she told me. “One answer could simply be we need more in terms of volume and different kinds of stories. Of course, I would raise my hand in agreement, but he’s saying that’s not enough, that the camera and how we do the film also really needs to be interrogated.”
However, upending the formal conventions of cinema is only part of how Ross honors the Dozier School’s Black victims. He also deftly avoids dehumanizing them by gesturing toward the violence they endured rather than foregrounding it.
For example, he doesn’t show the physical abuse inflicted on Black students when the Nickel Academy’s white superintendent (Hamish Linklater) takes them out back. Instead, Ross reveals the devastating brutality by sharing Elwood’s sensory experiences as he sits in the next room waiting for his turn to be beaten. We hear the sounds of the whip and the human cry, we nervously glance at a Bible on the ground and the buttons on the shirt of the boy trembling next to him. By interspersing historical images of Black boys who attended the Dozier school with Elwood’s memories, Ross heightens the reality of racial trauma without compromising the dignity of those who withstood it.
At the same time, Elwood and Turner are even more vibrant and vulnerable onscreen because Ross’s systematic approach captures the intensity and intimacy of Herisse’s and Wilson’s performances.
“There are so many scripts that I’ve read or so many movies that I see that have little nuance or ambiguity to what a human is feeling or what emotion is being expressed,” Herisse said. “It’s very one color, but the atmosphere RaMell creates is a freedom in which we get to express ourselves in the full spectrum of all colors and be completely present, and in that way, our roles breathe life into our characters.”
As a result, “Nickel Boys” can potentially extend the circle from viewers empathizing with its Black characters to now identifying with America’s Black citizens. “For audience members who are watching all of this happen from the perspective of these two, they can’t separate themselves the way they can with other films,” Wilson said. “They cannot be an observer. You are brought into it, and because of that, I think there is a very special experience you feel while watching it where you are connected to, for lack of a better word, the humanness of both Elwood and Turner. You want them to live as long as possible.”
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