RaMell Ross is the co-writer and director of Nickel Boys a story spanning decades from the segregation era, the emergence of the Civil Rights movement, through to the early part of the new millennium. It focuses primarily on two characters who meet in a Florida Reformatory School called The Nickel Academy. Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herrise) and Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson).
Elwood grew up with his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in Tallahassee and due to an inspiring teacher was just about to go to college on a scholarship before he was found hitchhiking in a stolen car. Turner grew up in Houston fighting for survival in poverty. Once they become Nickel Boys they challenge, inspire, and educate each other while also protecting one another from State sponsored and enabled racially motivated abuse.
RaMell Ross’ debut fictional feature is profound and monumentally important filmmaking. Nadine Whitney had the honor of speaking to RaMell from Naarm, Melbourne, Australia about his work and the creation of a visual language.
Nadine Whitney: Nickel Boys is an extraordinary gift. One of the most empathetic, tactile, beautiful, horrifying, and hopeful experiences in cinema this year and perhaps, for me, in a
lifetime. Humanistic and devastating. I felt I was there with Elwood and Turner. I felt the absence, I felt the presence. I was not just observing I was part of it.
Great cinema transports you into not only the world of the characters and the narrative and thematic setting of a film, but also completely into their very essence and being. Audiences around the world live inside, and by the side, of the Nickel Boys. We have you, Joslyn Barnes, and Jomo Fray to thank for that.
RaMell Ross: Thank you. It’s such a gift to be able to be given permission to even pursue this type of film.
We felt like the whole time that it was unprecedented and almost at every stage never believed that we would get to the next. Not even in a cynical way, just like, there’s no way that they’re going to go for this treatment. There’s no way they’re going to go for the script. There’s no way that we’re only going to have two versions of the script and now they want to go into production and in two months. No way!
I appreciate when someone expresses their connection to it. And expresses it as eloquently you did. To call it tactile. Because it does it reminds us of the awe of the process. The awe of the film existing.
Nadine Whitney: Nickel Boys is a film which inspires awe in the audience. I have spoken to people who said they could not breathe at times they were so immersed.
Jomo Fray is a cinematographer of tactile poetics. He has constructed a unique rendering of the personal point of view. With Raven Jackson in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, and with Barry Jenkins in another Colson Whitehead adaptation The Underground Railway. Can you talk to me about your collaborative process?
RaMell Ross: Working with Jomo was pretty astounding. I know what the film should look like. I know how to frame. I shot my last film (the award-winning documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening) and I’m a working photographer. But I don’t know how to light anything. I don’t know the language of these machines. I also don’t know camera rigs. I don’t know a lot, but I have a strong sense. Jomo has both. He knows everything about cinema and cinema techniques. But he also has this emotional relationship with how to make images feel a certain way.
Jomo knows what lighting techniques are the simplest and most out of the way in order to make a film that matched my large format photography. A film that is as dense as this really expensive and old-school slide film that I use (Fuji). He very much shapes the emotional volume and density of the image.
It’s not something that’s easy to consider. It’s a very specific understanding of media. It was a thrill to build the language with him. We were filling in each other’s gaps. I can’t imagine shooting another film without Jomo.
Nadine Whitney: Jomo should be hired for everything, ever, forever.
RaMell Ross: (Laughing) Every film? I would love to see what a rom-com looks like with Jomo’s
images. I may actually be deeply moved by them for the first time ever!
Nadine Whitney: Adaptation is something that happens on several levels. A lot of people will have read Colson’s novel, but they will be stunned at the way you have delivered the work. Can you tell me about your process with Joslyn and any work you might have done with Colson?
RaMell Ross: I think to our benefit Colson did not play any role. I think he selected me with
producers Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner. Once we were moving into production, I wrote him a really long email thanking him for being himself and giving me giving me this opportunity, et cera, et cetera. He wrote back, “Thanks, good luck.”
At first, I’m like, oh, man, he doesn’t want to be my friend, you know? But then I realized it’s kind of him allowing me and Jos to imagine in his material. I can’t imagine a kinder gift than to let us let us do our thing. So, we set out to do that.
Almost immediately we realized that the best way to pay homage to the book was to not translate it. It was to distil, not illustrate it, to distil, from our opinion what we thought was the essence of the of the book. And then use that essence as through lines and then lean into all the things we know that cinema is capable of. Which is being visceral, being temporal in ways that are ineffable of being super sensorial. To shape the way that we see the world, and with that process, I realized after reading the book point-of-view was the first thing I thought of so that’s my starting point.
Joslyn and I began to take the same approach as we’d done with Hale County This Morning, This Evening which has these roving poetic images of life that have both narrative thrusts but more the feeling of this sort of epic banal. Adding that to the characters’ vocabulary: the visual vocabulary of how they’re seeing their worlds and making meanings through those camera angles and through that mode of looking was a way to write the film in a way that’s closer to how human beings experience life and less about the way that cinema writes narrative.
What a joy to make up images! To organize the camera’s movement in them to make meaning for the characters’ relationship to their context.
Nadine Whitney: I believe you’ve done that in a way that has contributed to a change in the poetics of cinema.
One of the things I didn’t see was the torturing of the Black body in an expanded manner. Can you tell me about making the choice not to show the extent of the torture and abuse on the human body? To avoid giving the subjective point of view to the person who is inflicting violence.
RaMell Ross: Yeah, you know, we know what those images look like, and they’ve had great social and cultural purpose, right? We needed to know for people that weren’t experiencing it themselves and we’re not in close relation to those who are what it looked like that they needed proof that they were happening.
We needed proof that they happened. We needed some historical recreation, just in order to visualize what is impossible to visualize because it’s so unbelievably inhumane to do, we have a hard time believing that someone would chain someone to a fence or a tree or hang someone or whip them until they died. At some point in time, we had to see them, because otherwise people have a hard time believing anything. But when we over index on those, when we overindulge in that visually, it does something else psychologically that I think we’re just now starting as a culture to understand has devastating effects.
Who deserves that violence? I think, with that being said, one has to ask at this point in time, given the proliferation of these images, who is it for? Like we knew before who it was for, it had a very clear it for people who did not know, but everyone knows now.
In the in the film, we don’t show it. If you ask yourself that question, you realize you don’t need to show it. You start to think otherwise, and thinking otherwise is way more interesting. It’s like, oh, actually, the moment of being hit by the whip, that’s just the beginning of the violence.
There’s a psychological violence that ripples across the cosmos of a person’s brain in perpetuity. There is trauma that becomes encoded in the world and in sound and in colors and in shadows. Also, if you take point of view as literal, as we did conceptually literal, you realize that in those moments of violence, no one is looking directly in the eyes of the evil, looking directly in the eyes of the perpetrator, directly at the wound itself, at the blood. They are coping in those moments. We tried to show how human beings would behave in a moment in which their being subjected to those horrors.
Nadine Whitney: And, as you said if you are showing the wound you’re showing the person who inflicted them. That’s their point of view.
RaMell Ross: Yeah. I like that observation. It’s true. We’re not focusing on the the system that enables it or the person that’s doing it. We are focusing on the victim, you know, and they’re the one that’s in the least control and the least responsible.
What a joy it is to have the film affecting you in Australia which is half of the earth away. We know that communities like the Black community, the American Indian community, and indigenous communities across the world have rarely represented themselves globally through the visual sphere. The ideas in Nickel Boys are making their ways through all of these continents and consciousnesses. It’s unbelievable.
Nadine Whitney: Thank you so much, RaMell. Keep making films. Keep being a genius. Keep changing the poetics of the image. Keep being a teacher, a philosopher, and a seed and seat of power.
