For his film adaptation of Colson Whitehead's bestseller The Nickel Boysdirector RaMell Ross tells the story largely using a subjective point of view, with the camera serving as the eyes of main characters Elwood (Ethan Herisse and Daveed Diggs) and Turner (Brandon Wilson).
The immersive experience, Ross said The Hollywood journalist ahead of the 2024 New York Film Festival opening night screening of Nickel boysit is designed to put the viewer in the same position as the character in what he calls a “perception experiment”.
“I wonder what black people will feel seeing their perspective literally in the image, at the same time as the cinematic image, and then I also wonder what everyone else who isn't black will feel about wearing someone else's shoes as much as possible through the image cinematic, Ross explained why he wanted to use the unconventional technique. “It's like a perception experiment that aligns the characters' reality, lived reality and sensory reality with the viewer, which seems like something to pick up on.”
Nickel boys follows Elwood and Turner during their time at the fictional Nickel Academy, inspired by the real-life Dozier School for Boys, a Florida reformatory that operated from 1900 to 2011 where students were allegedly beaten, raped, and murdered before being buried in a secret cemetery .
Cinematographer Jomo Fray says his and Ross's goal in making the film was “immersion”.
“Really what we wanted was an immersive image, an image that would involve us as viewers in the story,” Fray said THR on the Nickel boys'NYFF red carpet. “The main thing for us was that we wanted the image to always feel like it was in danger. Moving through the Jim Crow South as a black man was a dangerous time. The feeling that the image itself could be in danger at any moment would correspond to the experience of those who pass through it.”
The approach, Fray added, also aims to communicate “the beauty and joy and wonder that comes from being alive and being human, despite perhaps the inhumanity of the historical period and the laws that contextualize you.”
The approach also gave Fray more direct interaction with the actors and placed him “inside the emotion,” he said.
“If the camera hugged the actor, it was me hugging him, and there's a fundamentally different relationship you have as an image maker,” Fray said. “It's not just about observing people experience emotions. In many cases I'm inside the scene, and I need to be as vulnerable as the people around me to channel the actor through the camera in a more direct way and also to have the actors interact with me in a much more direct way of me. I have ever experienced in my career. I think this gave me such a deep appreciation for cinema that I could see a scene and a moment from a different angle, an angle within the emotion.
Producer and co-writer Joslyn Barnes said that the film's point of view helped Ross understand “how to handle the twist in the novel”. And Daveed Diggs, who plays the adult Elwood, told it THR that Ross's engaging approach is “why [he] said yes” to the project.
In terms of preparing for the role, Diggs said he “had a lot of conversations” with Ross for what he calls a “pretty technical gig.”
“I was walking into a train that was already moving because of the particular way it was shot,” Diggs said THR. “I asked [Ross] to send me a bunch of footage so I could understand the visual storytelling.
Although the kids at Nickel Academy are abused and, in some cases, killed, the film does not show this violence inflicted on its characters. Ross said not showing too many traumatic images was an intentional decision.
“I don't want to reproduce it. There's enough of it, and a lot of it is really, really beneficial because we get to understand and see, but at a certain point it becomes rote and becomes a little hollow in its sentimentality or its emotional impact and I guess with that you realize that there are countless ways to do it differently,” Ross said. “Once you decide not to do it, you say, 'Oh, wait, there are a thousand things I can think of to get to the same thing. Why don't I try one?'”
Fray added that Ross expressed to him that he didn't want to “see violence” or “hear racial slurs” in the film.
“At the end of the day, we all know it was part of the Jim Crow South. We all know it was part of the Nickel Academy,” he said. “For us it was really about showing images we haven't seen, showing realities we haven't seen, showing them from perspectives we haven't seen, to unpack and dive deeper. I think sometimes, when things are shown in a traumatic way or are explicit in their violence, I think there's a funny way in which it clouds the conversation about what the inhumanity of what's happening here is.
Herisse added that the film's “poetic” images, even the “difficult” ones, “stay with you in a way that leaves you in a place where you've experienced life through someone's eyes, and that doesn't go away. “
“There's no real violence depicted that can be seen in the film, but I think the way they deal with it is in a way that hits you and affects you,” Herisse said.
And it's that personal impact that Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who plays Elwood's grandmother, hopes viewers take away from the film.
“I hope that people feel affected by this and change more than anything,” he said THR. “I hope it broadens and expands our sense of what is possible with the camera, on film.”
Ross comes from the world of documentaries: his impressionistic 2018 doc Hale County this morning, this evening won numerous awards for its portrayal of black lives and injustice in a rural area of Alabama. Nickel boys continues the film's themes as well as its approach of flashing images and fragments of everyday experience to etch a portrait of place. At the film's afterparty at Tavern on the Green in Central Park, Ross greeted groups of well-wishers, many of them from the documentary world, eager to congratulate him and share in his breakthrough.
The film sees Amazon MGM Studios attempt its second Best Picture Oscar nomination in as many years following its rebranding in spring 2023. The company earned both a Best Picture nomination and a win for Adapted Screenplay for the his satire on the publishing world. American fiction at the 2024 Academy Awards.
Nickel boysThe unconventional style and structure may challenge some voters, although the buzz was particularly positive among festival-goers as they mingled in the party.
Ross, for his part, says he's interested in a creation that goes beyond awards season. “Perhaps this film could be the centerpiece or substitute for a collection of memories [of racial inequity],” he told festival-goers before the screening. “A sculpture or cinematic monument that can always be that Rushmore for them.”
Later, during a post-screening Q&A with Ross, Fray and the cast, Ellis-Taylor reflected on how, despite the lack of on-screen violence, some people told her the film is “tough to watch ” and “they come out feeling not hopeful.
Despite feeling “annoyed, disturbed, worried [and] disappointed” by this response, Ellis-Taylor said she thought Ross' film did something brilliant in its portrayal of trauma.
“What I like about what RaMell has done is that she has made black pain, or the pain of these children, communicable, which means that it has been transferred to us and therefore it is communal,” she said. “And it's hard, but I feel like they didn't get something hopeful. They didn't know what it meant to not feel alone and they had no escape. And I feel like maybe we should try some of this. I think what RaMell has done so brilliantly is that we are not observers of what happened to these children. We are complicit, we are part of it, and we feel it. I think for me, who's been in a lot of films about black pain, this has changed things because we're not observers; we are recipients of it.”
Steven Zeitchik contributed to this report.