Interview: ‘Nickel Boys’ Writer/Director RaMell Ross on Reshaping Visual Language, Transferring Love, and Generational Storytelling

“Honestly, it’s surreal, but it really just makes me so appreciative of people like you who were open enough to see the film and champion it, because you still look at some outlets and they’re not for us. And it’s weird because I feel like our film has so much to offer the world genuinely. It’s a fascinating piece of cinema with so many artist hands in it. And so, every time we get something, I’m like, I really look to those who supported it because that’s how the voice, the words got out.”

When talking to our Editor-in-Chief Erik Anderson recently, writer-director RaMell Ross spoke humbly about the accolades his latest film, Nickel Boys, had received a week prior. The film not only took home two Gotham Awards (Best Director for Ross, Breakthrough Performer for Brandon Wilson) at last week’s ceremony, but Ross went on the next day to win the Best Director prize from the New York Film Critics Circle. The following week, the film was  named one of the ten best films of the year by the American Film Institute (AFI) and nominated for Best Motion Picture – Drama at the Golden Globes. All of the awards are just a fraction of what Ross and his team deserve for Nickel Boys, which is a remarkable cinematic achievement that our Associate Editor Sophia Ciminello perfectly described as “a new American masterpiece” in her review from the Telluride Film Festival.  

Born in Frankfurt, Germany and raised in Fairfax, Virginia, Ross graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in Sociology and English while also playing Men’s Basketball for the Hoyas. His post college career path found him becoming a basketball coach and photography teacher, which then he was able to blend his life experiences and philosophy in his art, as he created multiple collections centering around Black life in the American South. Over the course of a decade, he sharpened his artistic tools and skills to become one of the most promising voices in independent film for his generation. This all led to his monumental, transformative feature debut Hale County This Morning, This Evening, an experimental, intimate documentary centering around Black life in Hale County, Alabama. The film won several awards including a Special Jury Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, a Peabody Award, and an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature. But Ross, the experience of going on the road and promoting Nickel Boys is completely different than when in 2018 with Hale County, as he stated below:

“It feels completely different. The stakes of Hale County to me were obviously aesthetic, and they were more tied to the history of photography and cinema and film in the South. To me, the stakes of this film (Nickel Boys) have more to do with representational integrity and has to do with global camera language and has to do with the idea of it’s possible. As we saw through Glazer’s (The) Zone of Interest last year, you can create experiential monuments. In a time in which these stories are obscenely and publicly being buried, you can create pieces of media that give people an experience of history in a way that you can’t take away. You can’t take away someone’s body, never have been able to. And so, this film can seep in.”

And he isn’t kidding as Nickel Boys is an unforgettable cinematic experience. Based on the acclaimed Colson Whitehead novel, the film follows the story of Elwood and Turner, two African American boys who are sent to an abusive, corrupt, racist reform school named the Nickel Academy in southern Florida during the 1960s. Shot and told in a first-person point-of-view, Nickel Boys is unlike any film you will see this year, and is a vital piece of cinema delivered by an artist who is pushing the form forward in ways we rarely get to see.

During a recent, in-depth conversation, Ross and I spoke about his first impressions of the novel, how he came up with the idea for their film’s visual language, shifting perspectives for Elwood and Turner, the various themes and imagery used to enhance and expanded the story, and his hope for other artist to open their creative minds in how they tell ancestral stories. From the moment I started speaking with him, Ross was as detailed and fascinating as the film he had created, while also willing to enjoy the moment, commenting how he’s taken the film on a journey from the premiere on a late evening on the opening night of the Telluride Film Festival to the opening night selection screening at the New York Film Festival. He joked with me about not knowing what to do in the “spotlight box” during the closing credits, with both of us earnestly laughing about him confused about what to do with his hands (“I’m not a king. I was not born into a family in which people look up and clap. No disrespect to tradition, I understand,  obviously. But it was weird.”) and how long his cast and crew were supposed to stand there before the light turned off on them.

As the interview wrapped, and he was heading to a screening to watch the film with members of his Virginia family, Ross told me one last time how much he enjoyed our conversation and that he hopes one day we can sit down and, in his words, he can “ask you about your life,” reminiscent of the discussion I had with director Celine Song last year, where making a human connection was more important to these artists than just talking about a film. Curious, kind, intuitive, RaMell Ross is just like his new narrative feature; special.  

Ryan McQuade: I just want to go back to the beginning, and talk about getting the book, which I believe you got via a PDF file?

RS: Yeah, it was a PDF.

RM: And what were your first impressions of what Colson [Whitehead] had written on the page and the feeling you had reading this story?

RR: Yeah, thanks for the question, and the on-ramp from the beginning, which makes me remember how strange it was to read something thinking about adaptation, because I’d never been tasked with that before. But I was actually quite surprised because I hadn’t read anything of Colson’s before. I knew who he was, and I knew he made “The Underground Railroad,” and was really excited to have the opportunity to even consider it. But his writing was so bare, and I like to say explanatory, but not descriptive, not overly descriptive, where you’re allowed to really know what’s happening, but still imagine within your own rights.

And so, yeah, after, it was pretty strange because it didn’t feel, it didn’t elicit images necessarily from the book. It just elicited memories of my own life and of my own experiences, which I realized was a plus because it made point of view come up almost right away.

RM: And so from that, the visual language of the film is such a key component to this. So was it in reading the novel, was it when you came up with, when you started putting together the script, the visuals from your past, or what you wanted to see from this adaptation? When was the decision for you to showcase this film in this unique, beautiful way?

RR: I think the decision, it’s interesting to think about the things in hindsight, which seem like they have definitive moments, when in fact, they’re like these gradients towards being sure. And I think it became, the decision was firm when I had mentioned POV to Jocelyn Barnes, who I would sometime after ask to be my writing partner, and started thinking about it without any barriers. There was nothing that came up that didn’t seem like it was a really good idea and aligned with that, with POV, taking it through the narrative. And so, it was a slow process while happening immediately. Yeah, if that answers your question.

RM: How did the initial script look? Obviously, there’s the dialogue and everything, but because it is so visual, because it is the dance between archival and the subjective view of both of these boys in the film, for yourself, what did it look like on the page in terms of for your memory, and then also for your, then, collecting of it, when you were making the final assemble? Or while you’re shooting the film to have those reference points of what you’re going to see and then the conversations, I guess you’ll have with your collaborators in the work?

RR: Yeah, that’s, I think, the original treatment, the approach treatment in original script, how detailed it was, I think was a huge asset as to how it was capable of moving through the system because it was really rigorous and detailed. The approach that I had written down was I think maybe two or three pages. And then once I asked Jocelyn to write, we got to the treatment. The treatment wasn’t editing of the film, and it was all camera movement because, as you mentioned, the language of the film is visual. And so, it’s how these two see the world, and not us watching them see the world, but looking through their eyes. And so, where the camera moves, how long it sits on something becomes the description of their reality and of their cognitive process. And so, yeah, I’m reflecting on how crazy that was.

I’d seen, George Miller had done Mad Max that way, and I think that was the only way that I knew how to write a script. And taking that process all the way through for this was quite interesting.

And then I think, we, and just because we send in this script that’s incredibly overly-detailed with, “Looks to the left, the camera tilted down.”

And Dee Dee (Gardner) was like, “Hey guys, this is really wonderful. Love it. This is unreadable. No one can read this script and get a sense for what the film’s going to be in a traditional sense.”

So we had to reshape the language to allow it to just be more accessible for the department heads. But yeah, that’s the origin of the script.

RM: Getting into the film and the journey that Elwood and Turner go on, I want to start up at the front and ask about something we rarely see in film which is various perspectives of a similar location in time. But not just from the boys’ perspectives, but from location. This is in Florida, and there’s two locations it’s primarily set, one is home in a different part of the State. And another is where the Nickel Boys Academy is. It feels so relevant for where our country is at, where in one part of a state you live in, you can feel safe, but then in another part of that state, you feel completely vulnerable and dangers come in. So could you talk about showcasing that complexity within an environment?

RR: Yeah. Now that is a question I have not got yet, which, as maybe mentioned in the other ones, takes me back to the process of building the film out. Yeah, that was a huge site of attention. It’s like, “How do we, one, show history in a way that feels like it’s the present?”

One thing that I noticed in cinema in general is that when we reproduce history, we like to use the tropes to give it a time-period sense, which is necessary, but also with the idea in thinking that the people then had just as vivid of a life as we have now and are existing in their present. It’s like, how do you balance reproduction of the past and the feeling of the future?

I’m sorry, and the feeling of the viscerality of the moment is something that was really interesting.

But in terms of the contrast between home, and the outside world, and the institutions across states, I think we fell on, we relied on color, and texture, and trying to really subtly render the vibrancy and the love in the way that the decor exists, in the way that the rugs exist, in the way that the light is falling, in the way that people are in proximity to each other at home for Elwood.

And then when we got to the institutional space, we wanted to, not over-index on how horrible, and how much disrepair existed, and how it seemed like it was this raggedy hellhole, but how institutions quite are is that they’re just lacking vitality. They’re just dull, they’re just flat, they’re just removed from everything that we unconsciously know as bespoke. And not to have the ceilings falling apart, and for there to be rats running around, but to have it be quite livable, and quite relatively clean. And, yeah, we thought that that would be something interesting if we could pull it off.

Yeah, so I’m glad you asked that question. There was a lot of thought. Brittany Lohr, who did our costumes, spent, she was hand-scrubbing the jeans just to get the perfect amount of wear and to show that they’re hand-me-downs. And Nora Mendez, who is our Production Designer, I don’t imagine she slept for months trying to figure out how to iterate those ideas. But, yeah.

RM: I wanted to ask you about the mechanics, or choreography of getting these performances, especially getting Elwood’s perspective when he loses his innocence and the acceptance of that. That is at the forefront of the car scene, and I don’t think we’ve seen a moment that is that vulnerable from the perspective of someone who has gone through this travesty, life-changing event who had so much promise.

How did you want to capture these performances and have it connect with audiences when we’re not seeing, mostly hearing Elwood’s story? How much of this decision to shoot this way was purposeful to allow the audience to fully relate to the story?

RR: I must say that your questions are too good and long for me to be able to even remember, because the first one you asked just takes me on a journey to address it. (Laughs)

RM: I’ll shorten them up, RaMell. (Laughs)

RR: No, no, no, no, I appreciate the actual prose of them, of your questions. And of course, they are very, very answerable in, but they’re very rich questions because a lot of this stuff is ephemeral, and a lot of it is genuinely ineffable. And I’m glad you specified mechanics because that’s what we do as filmmakers, is we set up the actors to take it to another level. And sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. Who’s to blame when it doesn’t, who knows? It’s, maybe the universe.

Yeah. I think one thing we wanted to not do was burden the actors with any of the challenges that we know we’re facing. And so, we simply asked them to look at this specific point in the camera on the lens, and to do their best to treat that like the eyes of the characters.

And one thing Fred Hetchinger said, who has an astoundingly subtle performance as Harper, and what a bright guy, he’s like, “Normally when I’m acting, I’m not aware of being looked at in the way in which when I made this film with you all I’m being stared at by the lens. There’s a direct confrontation with the gaze of the audience. Normally, of course, the camera’s not supposed to be present in a traditional sense, and it’s turning around, and rotating, or far away.”

And he said that activation was something fresh and new in him that, I don’t know, brought an aliveness. I like to use aliveness. But I think we needed all of the actors to transmit whatever is transmitted from you and I looking at each other right now, whatever’s transmitted when you’re looking at the person you love, or whatever’s transmitted when you’re looking at the object you hate, or the object that’s annoying, through the lens onto the processor, and somehow through the edit.

But, I think one thing to answer, technically, your question, one thing Jomo (Fray) and I set up in our manifesto in shooting was there are no sets and there’s no direction for the action to face. The idea of making the camera an organ, of bringing it into your body, is that, as in the world, the world exists outside of you, and you perceive it from your position. So, in some sense, it feels like you’re the center of it. Simultaneously, if you look down, the world continues to go.

And so, it was quite confusing, I think, for the extras, and for the rest of the crew in that, everything at all times could possibly be on camera, and it also could not. And so we need to build a world. And all of our sets aren’t always 3D, meaning that we could turn the camera around and there would be not myself, or not producers, but everything that was built out was supposed to be in action, and alive, and we can glimpse it, or we can’t. And that was quite interesting, I think, for the crew.

And in terms of the actors and the way in which they were communicating with the camera, it’s easier when they’re talking directly to it. But when you’re in a scene, like with Hamish in the barn, or with Hamish in the classroom, when he’s onboarding the students, they literally just have to perform like they’re in theater and they have no idea where we are sometimes.

RM: An important scene in the film is the cake scene, that’s where I think Elwood is understanding what he’s about to go through. And getting this final lesson from Aunjanue (Ellis-Taylor), at that moment. But what I noticed is there’s not two slices of cake that are cut. There are multiple slices of cake that are cut. And I think that speaks to the generational loss of his parents and so many more. So could you talk about that scene in the larger context of generational loss and how that happens, and in Elwood’s case, at a younger age. There’s no timetable for when that’s going to happen. It chooses you and it’s quite tragic.

RR: Man, what an observation. Yeah, that little detail is everything. You see that Hattie, despite being put together, clearly intelligent, empathetic, porous, and morally sound, and ethically righteous, has so little control over her life. And it’s quite profoundly devastating that the only way she has control it seems is to bake a cake and then section off portions of pain that represent family members who have fallen victim to larger systematic injustice, or the momentum of the Colonial Project.

I like that you say that that was a lesson for Elwood because I’ve never thought about it on those terms. But it was. I feel like he almost finally witnessed then how to be strong or how to build up some coping mechanism for the slings and arrows that will be coming.

RM: And the hard shell that he’s going to have to have in order to survive the experience he’s going to go on.

RR: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. He can’t break down. He needs to put on his best clothes. He needs to look the thing in its eye. He needs to use his hands, control his emotion, and be present for it, because Hattie’s very, very, very present in that moment.

And, yeah, I don’t know, that’s such a good, too good of a prompt to talk about it too long. I really love to just think about that, really.

RM: The movie, I think also, is about love, and when others need love. And this is when, I think Turner plays a big factor in that. When Hatti shows up and can’t see Elwood, she gives Turner love and the connection that she was going to give Elwood, as well as emotion and perspective, is transferred.

The boys are not only just sharing a journey through their survival of Nickel, but they’re also sharing a unique perspective on how we can connect with one another and that love is passed from a different source. And so, could you talk about the transfers from Elwood to Turner in terms of love and connection when he needs it the most because it doesn’t seem like, for his life, he’s had that stability that Elwood has had.

RR:  It was interesting for us to think about in the writing process, especially when we’re getting to the point where we’re figuring out what happens when Hattie comes exactly. It’s like, “Wait a second, when’s the last time do we think Turner’s had a visitor? Obviously, never. Whoa, Turner’s,” he was a boxer, and hopefully people get that sense in that boxing scene.

“Maybe the only touch Turner’s had has been violence. What if Turner, whoa, when’s the last time Turner had a hug?”

And how Hattie comes and she has all this love to give to Elwood, and she doesn’t read as a person who saves that up for someone, she gives it. And if she hugs Turner, what would that do for someone who had never, or who just hadn’t had physical touch, or love in that? Man, what a profound thing that small gesture could be.

And it hearkens back to, we think, and this is just Jocelyn and I’s perspective on Colson’s astounding book, the essence of his book, which is love, we think, and as you mentioned, it’s transference between people, and the effects that can have over time. And so, Hattie gives love to Elwood, which opens Elwood up to Martin Luther King’s love, and his love is a Christian love Agape. Which then transfers to Turner a little bit, a very little bit when he first sees him. But then when Hattie gives love to Turner, Turner’s really open to the love to Elwood. And then as their perspectives interchange, you see how the exchange of love opens people up to, just maybe even, themselves and their possibilities. And so that was the one uniting thread we kept going to take us all the way to and through the end.

RM: We talked about this a little bit at Telluride, but I wanted to speak to if it was consciously or subconsciously in the film’s imagery and the perspective that Elwood has when he stares at Turner. Obviously, they feel connected to each other, but there also seems to be longing looks and shots in the film that suggest there might be more there; a queer-coded connection and love there, that’s beyond just the experiences that they’re going through, beyond friendship. And obviously, as the film goes on, they’re going back and forth in terms of perspective and literally handing off identity by the end. Is that something that you also had in mind, as well, too, for their experience of coming of age and coming aware of, potentially, who they are and how their connection extends?

RR: In writing, and I know you’ve seen Hale County This Morning, This Evening. And one thing that I didn’t, it’s like it’s the way that I visualize, it’s the way I use the camera. And Jocelyn (Barnes), early on, asked me, in a very friendly way, what my orientation was if I had to find it, just because a lot of the imagery in the way that I look at men with the camera is very queer, it’s very openly, it’s both formally romantic and practically romantic.

And in writing Nickel Boys and coming to that story, Elwood, we thought that while we wanted the audience to know that Elwood, that their relationship was not romantic, we wanted the audience to know that if a person, we believe, if a person is open to love and they’re open as a person, the lines are as blurry as they can be because what matters less when you’re moved by someone, there’s almost nothing more real than connection. And that transcends all gender, and codes, and all social norms of sexuality. And we wanted them to look at each other in the way in which people who are in love look at each other. And if that has romantic undertones, no, it does have romantic undertones. And whether or not a person wants to act on that, or whether or not that’s something they desire is a completely different conversation. But that love gaze is something that is way bigger than what we understand to be sexuality.

RM: There are images of animals in the film. They usually arrive at moments for Elwood before something bad might happen, as moments of caution for him. Could you talk about the symbolism of choosing those animals, but then also contextualizing those ideas inside the film?

RR:  It’s something I actually, I am unsure exactly where the idea of having metaphor not be foreclosed as just the metaphor, but having it be something that is visceral, something that is experiential, and something that is real world, while also acting as a symbol, and a metaphor.

I think it might be Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence, where he’s teaching, or going to these war criminals, and giving them glasses. And that’s the entire premise of the film. So the film is a metaphor. But yet, it is a practical thing that is deeply rich.

And so in the writing process, Jocelyn and I wanted these animals, these naturally-existing, sentient beings to be integrated into the film in a way in which, yeah, you can’t help but feel like that’s a possibility, and that did happen to them. While also, perhaps, overanalyzing and giving them a larger social linguistic context.

I don’t want to give away exactly why they’re there. But yeah, we’re always looking for meaning. And there’s almost nothing more easily accessible than a creature popping out of nowhere.

RM: I want to talk about the boxcar scene and filming that. I feel like that’s something from an art project you did, and that you talked about that’s something that you had never seen used before in a film like this. And you wanted to use that. Could you just quickly talk about presenting that as an introduction, and then it turns into something else when we reveal what it is later in the film for Turner.

RR: So, yeah, I did this art project called Return to Origin, in which I shipped myself from Rhode Island to Alabama. And, yeah, it was in homage to Henry Box Brown who shipped himself from Virginia to Philadelphia out of slavery, and the adventure of it, the terror of it, not going to express that now, but what a thing to be traveling across time and space, specifically in the dark. But also, if one was to consider what folks did in the Great Migration in groups, and also by themselves, to see the landscape go by at an extremely fast rate as you accelerate towards your future.

Yeah, we wanted to give Turner that it seemed like his entire life, he’d been stuck in place. And to be on this time machine of a railroad car, yeah, what a beautiful, and maybe, in the context of the story, it’s horrible, because Elwood, we know what happens. But in the context of it being something that’s visceral, and something that’s metaphoric, and something that really gives someone a sense of a new future, yeah, I wanted to add that in there.

And so, it took so long to film. It was like five or six days, seven days on the road, driving cross country. We had to do it in the winter when it snowed up in Vermont, and did some in New Orleans, and a little bit in Baltimore. But, yeah, I think that was a specific joy of the project. It was one of the last things we shot. And I think brought home, in the way in which Turner is eventually going home to New York, brought home, yeah, the final piece of the puzzle.

RM: There’s obviously a third perspective in this film that we see later. When it is revealed, what that is, it then takes on a different form in terms of what legacy and what someone’s name can be. It’s more than a piece of paper, it reveals what a responsibility it is to carry one something. So you’re making this film and it’s a heavy responsibility of telling these stories. Could you speak a little bit about, not just for the character, but for yourself, creating authentic lives and the idea to pass on their stories from generation to generation?

RR: Yeah, what another banger of a question. Yeah, what an act is to take, take on someone’s name, I guess, to have a name. And in that, the devastation of not to be named, and to have your name lost to history, which we know is the case for many of the Dozier School for Boys, boys who were exhumed, and are just unable to be nominally accounted for.

One of the most devastating aspects of the Transatlantic Slave Trade is the loss of identity, obviously, and the fact of having to take on the slave masters’ names. And then your essence, as it relates to what people speak out and towards you, being couched into that context.

But, yeah, in terms of naming for the film, sometimes there’s no bigger act of love. There’s a reason why people say, “Keep my name out of your mouth.”

There’s also a reason why people constantly remember by saying a person’s name, yeah, you get to hold them inside of you. Yeah, it’s like their linguistic tombstone, in a way.

RM: Lastly, I’ve listened to Q&As when you talked about, hopefully, that this opens up doors for others to be able to use their creativity to tell stories like Elwood and Turner. Are you hopeful others join you in this journey of showing these documents of life, for not just black perspectives, for all races, all genders, and having that open ability to collaborate with others in the future?

RR: Yeah, I hope so. I hope, in the same way that my work is an amalgamation of the many incredible filmmakers, and visual artists, and writers, and just culture at large. I hope that this plays a part in the way in which people think about telling stories in general, and specifically stories about people of color. There are so many ways to do it.

And I think coming to the visceral realization that form is content, and visual language is just as impactful and psychological as the literal story itself, it’s something I hope people absorb and then find their own ways, yeah, to exploit cinema.

RM: Thank you so much, RaMell. I love the film. And thank you for your time.

RR: No, thank you for your questions. Man, what a good one. You did your research, too. This was fun.

Nickel Boys will be in select New York theaters on December 13, in select Los Angeles theaters on December 20 and expand to additional markets in the subsequent weeks from Amazon MGM and Orion Picture.