This article contains spoilers for the end of the film “Nickel Boys,” directed by RaMell Ross.
Since RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys” premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in August, there’s been a lot of talk about the way the film is shot. When you see it, it’s easy to understand why.
Based on Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel “The Nickel Boys,” the film follows Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), two young Black boys sent to a reform school called Nickel Academy in the 1960s. Nickel stands in for the real life Dozier School for Boys, a horrific institution where boys were beaten, raped, and murdered throughout its 111-year history.
The film is shot in first-person point-of-view, a choice that puts you directly in Elwood and Turner’s heads and allows you face-to-face interaction with everyone from Elwood’s grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) to the school administrator, Spencer (Hamish Linklater). When I saw “Nickel Boys” back in October, it took me a little while to get on the film’s wavelength, to get comfortable with the very vulnerable feeling of literally stepping into someone else’s shoes. But, once you get over that hump, the way Ross plays with perspective and identity culminates in one of the year’s very best films.
I recently got the chance to speak with Ross, who also co-wrote the screenplay, about the making of the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When you read this book, were you looking for something to adapt? I know you’d done the documentary, but were you considering making a feature film at the time, or did this just strike you in a particular way?
RaMell Ross: I was very, very, very fortunate to be asked to adapt the book, so I went into the reading of it with adaptation in mind.
Everyone is talking about the first person point of view aspect of this film. I’ve read interviews where you’ve said that idea came pretty quickly to you. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about why you think that particular kind of visual structure struck you so early on. Was there ever a conversation about doing it another way?
Ross: I think the best part of it is that genuinely, no one ever questioned it throughout the entire process. So I never questioned it, you know. I’m pretty strong-willed, I think, in terms of ideas, but also, if someone questioned it, it has an effect on something. So I wonder what would have happened if someone was like – oh, what if you didn’t do it the whole time?
It’s strange also, because it was such a natural idea. I had thought of making a POV film before, and “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” my first film, it is literally point of view, and I used three of the scenes for proof of concept. My hands aren’t in it, but it’s shot very much like “Nickel Boys” is, in its way. So it just was … not common sense, but you know – what’s common sense to one is not for the other person. It just made sense. It was like, oh – I’ll just shoot it like “Hale County.” What if the two boys had cameras to make their own “Hale Counties?” How would they shoot it?
Speaking of your documentary – like you’ve just discussed, it has this kind of non-traditional narrative as well as structure to it. How did the process for making this feature narrative film compare to the documentary style for you?
Ross: It’s almost a non-comparison. Because I made “Hale County” over the course of five years. I did everything myself. I edited it, I shot it, you know – produced it with two other people, but the producers came on two years before it was finished. I was three years in already, already had 800 hours of footage. It was collaborating more on the tail end. It wasn’t from the inception – actually, you know, there was a cowriter on the documentary, Maya Krinsky, and I had a bunch of conversations with her. But there’s no script, you know? Just me with my guys in Alabama. And this film is the exact opposite, in which it’s collaborative. The idea started with someone else, which was the book. And then you start building the team slowly, and slowly, slowly slowly nudge the idea until it’s completed.
It seems to me just watching it – obviously, film is a collaborative process in most cases, but this feels like there’s an extra step here, just because the actors and the crew are so involved with each other, with the POV shooting style. Did that factor into the rehearsal process for the actors? Was there a learning curve to being so connected with the camera?
Ross: Yeah. Man, it would have been really cool if we had time to rehearse.
That’s crazy, that you didn’t.
Ross: Because of all the conditions that go along with any type of film, one of the things was, we didn’t have a lot of time. So we didn’t have time to rehearse. We did almost everything – locations, finding department heads, casting – in like, two months. In like, weeks, you know? So, it was definitely a learning curve for all of the crew and all the department heads and all of the actors. I’d say, specifically for the actors, because I think they were the most surprised. The film was super visualized – the script was all images. We knew what we were going to shoot before we even met the DP [director of photography]. We had all the images already set out. We had camera movements explored, but not in [relation] to the set that we would get. Obviously, there’s a lot of zhuzhing that needs to happen with how the camera is actually going to move in real time, and of course, that development process with the DP, Jomo [Fray], was incredible, and takes the idea to another level completely.
But the most surprised were the actors, and they – it’s just really funny in hindsight. It all happened so fast. We were just like – well, we need you to look into the camera.
The one thing you’re told not to do.
Ross: They’re like, wait what do you mean? No, like, I’m shooting a POV film, yeah, but – and then we just go from there. We don’t have three hours to shoot a scene. They just do it. I think that surprise is probably why, if you were to say, if it feels maybe slightly different from other films or other POVs, or it has something [different], it’s inextricable from that. From them being put on the spot and having to real time react to their discomfort.
Talking about how the camera moves and working that out with Jomo Fray, what I found kind of incredible is – I mean, even the way we’re talking now, we’ll look over here, and glance over there. You’re not always directly locked into somebody. I thought the camera moved very naturally in that respect. Could you talk a little bit about how you figured out how the camera should move?
Ross: Well, we’re coming in with the sort of proof of concept of the documentary, “Hale County,” and I used a thing that I call observational logic, which is using long lenses and using shallow focus, so that you’re dealing more with attention than you’re dealing more with the actual visual field. Because if you want to do POV, you want to do wide angle – normally, at least. Also, you would probably want to do steadicam. But I learned from making documentaries … the language of head moving in motion in cinema language is handheld. The language in real life is steadicam.
These types of things gave us a really good foundation to start one, testing camera systems, and then also to say, okay – how much do we want to approximate vision? Because when I’m looking and talking to you, I mean, my eyes have darted around at least 30 times. Do we want to do it all 30 times, you know? Or do we find key moments to do it? How much are we asking of the audience? You realize quickly that you should not even further try to approximate it, because it would be too dizzying. One, it wouldn’t work, and two, it would just be too distracting.
There’s no way to explain just testing this stuff with Jomo – testing the hub. [We spent] like two days with my DSLR in his Airbnb just doing versions of it. Do we come up and land here on the back of the neck, or do we do the shoulder? What do you think this feels like? What do you think this feels like? That’s how we kind of got the pacing of how often and the speed to which we’ll be moving around. Like, how many times we’ll duck – we duck twice, at most. Because otherwise, it’s just too much, you know?
At the risk of spoiling things, you spend the early part of the book in school in Elwood’s POV, and then later you’re in Turner’s but you don’t realize it. The film is from both Turner and Elwood’s perspectives – it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe you spend all this time with Elwood at the beginning and then you switch to Turner eventually, but not when you first meet him. Were there conversations about when you should make that switch, or building up the tension to that moment? I think the first time we see Elwood is very effective, because you’ve almost kind of forgotten that you haven’t seen him in full view by that point.
Ross: We see Turner once before we switch to his point of view, in a classroom. He’s throwing a paper airplane. We see Elwood in reflections before they meet at the lunch table. That’s when we officially swap. That came really early in the writing process. We [first] decided that only Elwood gets point of view, because at first you have to ask, if I’m gonna make this from a point of view, and I’m gonna give it to Elwood, why not give it to everyone? Then, you problem solve it. We were just like, maybe this person for this moment, and this – and then it’s just too much. We were like, only Elwood. And then you get to them – you talk about it, get to the moment in the cafeteria, and then you’re like, oh my god – what if we gave it to Turner too? And they only saw each other, but then their perspectives can interchange, just like in Colson [Whitehead’s novel]? Oh my god! That’s kind of when everything gelled in the writing process.
We were trying to organize the film around when we could start to not only fork, that we show different perspectives, but then how to show the perspectives slowly merging back over time. In our heads, we could break it up at the lunch table, and then they would come back together at the boxing match. That just became the two sides of organizing the film.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the final image of the film. It’s pretty different from the way the book ends – it’s this hand grabbing moment between the two of them. I wondered if you could talk about the decision to end the film with that image.
Ross: That’s actually an image that I made up halfway through production. There are a couple of ones, like the marble bouncing down the stairs, the lizard. You know, we get on set and we’re starting to make the film, and you’re starting to see what it’s gonna look like, and starting to edit and organize it, and we needed more. At that point, we didn’t know that would be the last image. In the edit, that became the last image. The last image in the script is Millie saying to Turner, do you think you’re gonna go? Black screen. But there’s something about the moment of Elwood lying down at the beginning, when we find out it’s in point of view – which is a very similar frame, if you remember, to the moment that he’s shot, when Harper comes and stands over him. It’s also left arm, and then he looks up, but instead of oranges and stuff, and the sky, it’s Harper with the gun, and then it fades out.
You think about the idea that Turner – and this is negative or positive, depending on point of view – that he didn’t go back for Elwood. He just ran. As one should, in that situation. But then you’re also like, did he abandon Elwood? You know? And the idea of Elwood’s – not virtuosity …
He’s very optimistic, I guess. But I’m not sure if that’s the word you’re looking for.
Ross: I’m searching for his being – like, his moral character.
Integrity?
Ross: Yeah, integrity. How Elwood pulled up Turner when he’s in that same position. Basically, Elwood is doing what Turner couldn’t do. And of course, Turner honors Elwood by taking his name and living as him to save himself as well. But there’s something beautiful about him lifting him off of the ground, when all those times, no one was there to lift Elwood.
Yeah, and even with something like the shooting scene, there are these moments where you’re sort of confused as to whose POV you’re in, and that’s sort of what you’ve been talking about, as far as melding their different point of views.
Ross: It’s great because, you know, people watch the film – and this is just a question asking default, so I mean no judgment on people – but they’re like, I’m unsure if it’s intentional or not when this happened. We don’t know who it is, and I think it’s intentional. But like, of course. It’s always [intentional]. If we wanted to know who it was, we would have had it that way. But we don’t want you to know who it is, because they’ve been blending point of views the entire time, and it means something for each person to be seeing the world that way. And so what does it mean? That’s one of my favorite parts, was getting to the point where we could play with it being either Elwood or Turner, and we didn’t have to explicitly say. It’s quite nice.