'Nickel Boys': How filmmaker RaMell Ross crafted visionary Oscar-nominated movie

Yahoo

16-02-2025

With one of the most affecting and impactful movies released in recent years, RaMell Ross has established himself as a visionary filmmaker with Nickel Boys (now in theatres, available on VOD in the U.S.). Based on the novel by Colson Whitehead, the film has been celebrated as a masterpiece since its premiere.
"It's been rewarding, as that's the aim, and someone being kind of speechless after or not being able to gather their thoughts I think means the intention of having the film be something that feels more ... experiential, it did at least part of its thing," Ross told Yahoo Canada about seeing the response to the film. "Then it's fun to kind of like prod people and ask them to try, and then the fumbling is kind of interesting, because those first initial words are pretty telling."
Nickel Boys is a story told through the perspective of two Black teenage boys Elwood, played by Ethan Herisse, and Turner, played by Brandon Wilson, set in the Jim Crow South. The boys establish a friendship when they're both sent to a reform school in Florida, the Nickel Academy, based on the real-life Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys that closed in 2011. There are still ongoing investigations into more than 100 deaths that happened on the ground at Arthur G. Dozier, many buried in unmarked graves.
Elwood has a more optimistic view, clinging to his dream of going to college, while Turner's focus is on trying to survive the nightmare of the Nickel Academy, dispensing the necessary information to Elwood.
The journey of watching Nickel Boys is incredibly unique, with Ross beginning the film from the perspective of Elwood, with the camera then shifting between Elwood and Turner's points of view. As Ross has described, the filmmaker sees the camera as an organ so that the audience feels like they're both Elwood and Turner through the story. It's something Ross identified that he's been working on since he made his previous film, the brilliant Hale County This Morning, This Evening.
"I think the reason why the book ['Nickel Boys'] could be approached with what some people would call boldness, but what I would call just a type of cogency ... or lucidity is because it's just kind of at the end of an art practice, that's the next kind of step of it," Ross said. "And so having two characters who resembled myself, essentially the two characters that are in Hale County This Morning, This Evening, it's quite natural for me to wonder what they saw, and not seeing them see things, but from inside their heads."
With that perspective also comes unique embodiment of the characters by the actors in Nickel Boys. For example, Daveed Diggs, who plays adult Elwood, what we see from him is a portrayal of the character through the movement of his back and shoulders, not seeing his face.
"I feel very fortunate that the actors were just so deeply talented that they could take on that," Ross said. "And it wasn't just voice and eye contact, ... they had to act with their hands and as Daveed, act with his shoulders, act with his ears and his angles."
"It's interesting because while you can give direction and you can give instruction, you can't persuade or or produce embodiment. ... So whatever that those guys did, it's them, and as a director, as anyone that's there, it's ... a joy to watch people embody something."
With this "camera as an organ" way of shooting the film, that also expended to the approach Ross took to not show and sit in the brutality of what the characters in Nickel Boys experience, but rather provide a sensory experience of the impact of trauma, staying true to each person's experience in that moment.
"The approach, one, comes from feeling like people of colour have been over indexed with those images. The images of people of colour, they're bountiful in terms of that image," Ross explained. "And then ... culture at large is over indexed with the encounter of those images."
"I think immediately, when you question that, and you think about any other method, you realize that there are way more methods to do it otherwise than there are to do it that way. ... What's erased or not explored as thoroughly or viscerally is its effects across time, its ripple effects. I think, maybe even most importantly, literally, if you make the camera an organ and you shoot from the inside of someone, no one's actually seen that happen to them. Very rarely if someone's going through trauma are they looking at the site of the injury while it's occurring. They're either fighting or they're fleeing or they're trying to cope. And with that you realize, again, that what cinema has done, it's producing these images that don't exist typically otherwise."
While the vision Ross had for Nickel Boys is incredibly profound, the execution of this vision, in collaboration with cinematographer Jomo Fray, is particularly moving to watch, both from its technical standpoint and emotional feel.
"I kind of came in with a really, really strong idea and knowing how I wanted to shoot it, ... and with conversations with [Jomo Fray] we were able to develop it," Ross said. "He basically invented a couple rigs and systems to execute some of the movement with a 6K camera. I didn't think it was really possible to get the fidelity, or to get the density of that image in some of the places we wanted."
"He relates to the image really emotionally. I would say one of his deep strength, aside from the technical, is his emotional connection to light, and so he could build the scenes out with the type of touch needed."
But while many films try to get to the action and most dramatic moments of their story, Nickel Boys allows the audience to experience its quieter moments. It's those elements that are often rushed through in many films that makes Ross's work feel even more powerful.
"When you think about yourself and in most moments of your life, if you trace back every single instance, in between the longer sort of milestones or tentpoles of the day, I feel like most of it is looking around, and like staring at something, or daydreaming, or being slightly aloof with the anxiety of the future in the moment," Ross said.
"There is something about the universal experience of perception, and seeing and feeling, that doesn't lend itself to commercial cinema, because of its need to keep someone engaged in a very specific way, and to not lose their attention, and make sure they're satisfied. But I think for a story like this, those in-between moments are more important, because we know the other parts of the story very, very, very, well, and in fact, they're normally filed into a very specific emotional space that I think no longer has that actionable quality it used to have in the '60s, '70s and '80s."