For his film adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s bestseller The Nickel Boys, director RaMell Ross largely tells the story 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 told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the 2024 New York Film Festival opening night screening of Nickel Boys, is designed to place the viewer in the same position as the character in what he calls an “experiment of perception.”
“I wonder what Black people will feel seeing their perspective literally in the image, simultaneous with the cinematic image, and then I also wonder what everyone else who’s not Black will feel to have someone else’s shoes on as much as possible through the cinematic image,” Ross said of why he wanted to use the unconventional technique. “It’s like an experiment of perception that aligns character reality and lived reality and sensory reality with the viewer, which seems to me to be something to be gleaned.”
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 reform school that operated from 1900 to 2011 where students were allegedly beaten, raped and killed before being buried in a secret graveyard.
Cinematographer Jomo Fray says his and Ross’ goal with lensing the movie was “immersion.”
“Really what we wanted was an image that was immersive, an image that pulled us as the audience into the story,” Fray told THR on the Nickel Boys‘ NYFF red carpet. “The thing for us primarily was that we wanted the image to always feel as if the image could be in danger. Moving through the Jim Crow South as a Black man was a dangerous time. Feeling as if the image itself could possibly be in danger at any moment would match the experience of those moving through it.”
The approach, Fray added, also aims to communicate “the beauty, the joy and the wonderment that just happens from being alive and being a human despite maybe the inhumanity of the time period and the laws that contextualize you.”
The approach also gave Fray a more direct interaction with the actors and placed him “inside of the emotion,” he said.
“If the camera hugs the actor, that was me hugging them, and there’s a fundamentally different relationship you have as an image maker,” Fray said. “It isn’t just looking on at people having emotions. In many cases I’m inside the scene, needing to be as vulnerable as the people around me to kind of channel the actor through the camera in a more direct way and also having the actors interact with me in a much more direct way than I’ve ever experienced in my career. I think that just gave me such a deep appreciation for cinema of being able to see a scene and a moment from a different angle, an angle inside of the emotion.”
Producer and co-writer Joslyn Barnes said that the film’s point of view helped Ross figure out “how to handle the twist in the novel.” And Daveed Diggs, who plays the adult Elwood, told THR that Ross’ immersive approach is “why [he] said yes” to the project.
In terms of prepping for the role, Diggs said that he “had a lot of conversations” with Ross for what he calls a “pretty technical gig.”
“I was coming into a train that was already moving because of the particular way it’s shot,” Diggs told THR. “I asked [Ross] to send me a bunch of footage so that I could understand the visual storytelling.”
Though the boys at Nickel Academy are abused and, in some cases, killed, the film doesn’t show this violence being inflicted upon its characters. Ross said that was an intentional decision to not show too many traumatic images.
“I don’t want to reproduce that. There’s enough of it, and a lot of it’s really, really beneficial because we get to understand and see, but at some point it becomes rote and it becomes a bit empty in its sentimentality or in its emotional impact and I guess with that you realize there are innumerable ways to do it otherwise,” Ross said. “Once you decide not to do it, you’re like, ‘Oh, wait, there’s like a thousand things I can think of to get to the same thing. Why don’t I try one of those?’”
Fray added that Ross expressed to him that he didn’t want to “see violence” or “hear racial slurs” in the film.
“Ultimately, we all know that that was part of the Jim Crow South. We all know that that was part of 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 traumatic fashion or they are graphic in their violence, I think there’s a funny way in which it kind of obfuscates the conversation. It gets you around what’s the inhumanity of what’s happening here.”
Herisse added that the film’s “poetic” images, even the “difficult ones,” “stick with you in a way where they leave you in a place where you’ve now experienced life through someone’s eyes, and that doesn’t go away.”
“There’s no real violence depicted that can be seen in the movie, but I think the way that they do kind of deal with it is in a way that still really sits with 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 people will feel affected by it and changed more than anything,” she told THR. “I hope it widens and expands how we feel about what is possible on camera, on film.”
Ross comes from the documentary world — his impressionistic 2018 doc Hale County This Morning, This Evening won a batch of prizes for its portrayal of Black lives and injustice in a rural area of Alabama. Nickel Boys continues that film’s themes as well as its approach of flashing images and snatches of everyday experience to etch a portrait of place. At the movie’s afterparty at Central Park’s Tavern on the Green, Ross greeted packs of well-wishers, many from the documentary world eager to congratulate him and share in his pivot.
The film sees Amazon MGM Studios trying for its second-best picture Oscar nomination in as many years after its rebranding in the spring of 2023. The company scooped up both a best picture nomination and an adapted screenplay win for its publishing-world satire American Fiction at the 2024 Academy Awards.
Nickel Boys‘ unconventional style and structure could challenge some voters, though the buzz was notably positive among festivalgoers as they mingled at the party.
Ross, for his part, says he’s interested in a creation that goes beyond award season. “Maybe this film could be a centerpiece or proxy for a collection of memories [of racial inequity],” he told festivalgoers before the screening. “A cinematic sculpture or 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 onscreen violence, some people have told her the film is a “hard watch” and “they come out of it feeling not hopeful.”
Despite feeling “bothered, disturbed, concerned [and] bummed” about this response, Ellis-Taylor said she thinks Ross’ film has done something brilliant in its depiction of trauma.
“What I love about what RaMell has done is he has made Black pain, or the pain of these children, communicable, meaning it’s transferred to us and so therefore it’s communal,” she said. “And that’s hard, but I feel like they didn’t get something hopeful. They didn’t know what it was like to not feel alone, and they didn’t have any escape. And I feel like maybe we should feel a little bit of that. I think that what RaMell has done so brilliantly is we are not observers to what happened to these children. We are complicit, and we are part of it, and we feel that. I think that for me, who’s been in a whole lot of movies about Black pain, this changed it because we are not observers; we are receivers of it.”
Steven Zeitchik contributed to this report.
