The Nickel Boys Director RaMell Ross on Controlling the Story Through First-Person Narrative

Ask The Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross what first attracted him to directing, and he says that it isn’t his main point of interest. 

“I don’t know if I’m attracted to directing,” he told MovieMaker after a New York Film Festival screening of the film. “I’m attracted to the image-making part of it. With truly controlling the image, directing becomes necessary, so I’m led to directing through the visual world.”

The film stands out for its reinvention of traditional cinematic language: It is told in the alternating first-person perspectives of the main characters, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who are attending the fictional Nickel Academy in Tallahassee, Florida in 1962, as the Civil Rights Movement rises in opposition to Jim Crow. Oscar-nominated Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Hattie, who offers safe harbor for Elwood and Turner.

The Nickel Boys is based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, which was inspired by the real-life Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a brutal institution known for the deaths of nearly 100 students.

Ross was best known as a photographer and Brown University professor before his directorial debut, 2018’s Peabody-award-winning, Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a portrait that investigates and dismantles racist stereotypes of Black Southern life. Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, co-presidents of Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment, took an early interest in the book and sought out Ross to adapt it.

The film played Friday at the opening of the 62nd annual New York Film Festival, and Ross spoke with MovieMaker on the following rainy Sunday about working with co-writer and producer Joslyn Barnes and cinematographer Jomo Fray (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt) — and how to get energized for each day of directing. 

Sonya Alexander: After you read The Nickel Boys, what was your first impression?

RaMell Ross: Can I curse?

Sonya Alexander: Sure!

RaMell Ross: “F—!” … After you finish it, you kind of don’t know anything anymore because you’re reading it thinking you know stuff, and at the end you don’t. You wonder, “Should I question every narrative I’ve ever been told about everything? In a couple of months, is everything going to turn into having been something else?”

Sonya Alexander: How would you compare the rhythm of Colson’s writing to yours?

RaMell Ross: I wouldn’t compare them because I think if I were to, it would be an unfruitful comparison — because it’s like comparing language to music. If you’re going to translate something and be super faithful, that’s one thing. If you’re going to be imaginative, don’t burden yourself with comparison. Let it be inspired. 

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Sonya Alexander: You’ve collaborated with Joslyn Barnes before.

RaMell Ross: She didn’t write on Hale County, but she worked on it a bunch.

Sonya Alexander: How was your experience collaborating on this? 

RaMell Ross: I don’t know if I could have done it otherwise. Joslyn’s voice is so wise. She’s brilliant on many fronts but also wildly active and politically conscious. That had been her life before she came into cinema. She came into film late. She was working for The World Bank. She was into politics. 

Her first language was French. She was raised in North Africa. She brings a richness to a global understanding of a larger sweep of history that I can only read about, and still need to learn from. She brings that to prose, and her interest in narrative, and her interest in character development. What an asset to have a friend who’s willing to give that to a film.

Sonya Alexander: How did you break down the book together?

RaMell Ross: We tried to look at what its essence was. That’s a deeply subjective thing. There’s nothing universal about that, and I can’t imagine Colson agreeing with what we think the essence is of his masterpiece. Would never pretend to say that we got it right. 

I will say, what we thought was the essence of Colson’s book was a complex conversation about different ways of viewing the historical moment as it relates to agency and self-preservation for people of color as a concept. 

A huge sweeping notion of love as Hattie opens Elwood to it, gives it to Elwood, Elwood becomes open to it and understands it better through Martin Luther King, which he brings to Turner, which allows Turner to be open to the love that Hattie gives him when he gets hugged, which allows him to accept the love from Elwood, and then they start to mingle perspectives. It’s tracing the love that Hattie initiated, and that King stoked.

Sonya Alexander: Did you see yourself at all in the story?

RaMell Ross: I am the story! [Laughs] As Colson has said, that he is both Elwood and Turner, I am both Elwood and Turner. That’s why the visualization was easy, it’s just my eyes.

Sonya Alexander: How would you describe the visual language?

RaMell Ross: I would describe it as human. I would describe it as social. I would describe it as subjective. And I would describe it as everybody’s. 

RaMell Ross on Filming The Nickel Boys

Sonya Alexander: Prior to this you worked on documentaries. Did you have to use different lenses for this?

RaMell Ross: Technically, we shot on different cameras that require different apparatus fundamentally, but the focal lengths are the same. They actually lean more towards what I understand to be a more advanced way of shooting a Hale County, which are only using long lenses as opposed to a couple wide for things. Hale County is a proof of concept for Nickel Boys.

Sonya Alexander: Do you have anything you do the night before shooting to prep?

RaMell Ross: Sleep! I found by week one I needed a freezing cold shower every morning because of the type of energy needed to make a film with a lot of people and to constantly be mining for improving things. … I’ve never experienced anything like it. Doing it six weeks, two months in a row. Actually, with prep, four months. It was a lot. 

Sonya Alexander: How do you think your vision as a cinematographer affected your vision as a director?

RaMell Ross: I think it allowed for the film to be an actual film of visual language, not of filmic language. With Jomo, who’s absolutely a master of cinematic language, and lights, the sky was the limit. We didn’t go to the sky because we had a set goal, but it’s good to know that you can do anything. 

Sonya Alexander: You got a galley of the book?

RaMell Ross: Plan B’s Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner called Jos, and we went and chatted. I didn’t even know what they wanted to chat about. We just talked for two hours. At the end they asked if I’d ever heard of Colson Whitehead and I said, “Sure, is he here or something? What do you mean?” [Laughs] They pulled out the book and said, “We have this thing! We’d love for you to read it and want to know what you think. Maybe an adaptation?” I read it and the conversation kept slowly moving forward. 

Sonya Alexander: How was it working with the cast?

RaMell Ross: It was a delight. It was a full-fledged learning experience. I don’t know how they do what they do. I tried to figure out how to let them do what they do to the best that they could do it. They were selected because they were already people we wanted, so I didn’t want to impose much of what I think the character is. 

Sonya Alexander: Did doing the project change you in any way? You or your filming style?

Ramell Ross: I’m not changed by the film. I think I’m changed by the process and the fact of it. It gives me two types of specific hope. One being that people are still willing to take huge risks with people. It’s a huge risk to make this film. “Here RaMell, take this Pulitzer Prize winning book and make something that I kind of understand. I’ve never seen it, but I guess we’ll just have faith.” That’s not usually the movie industry. It doesn’t work on faith. … Maybe people will get more chances now. 

Sonya Alexander: What was your most difficult day on the set?

RaMell Ross: Probably when we got shut down because I got Covid the first day. I had to direct from a trailer, everything’s on monitors. The production designer got Covid the next day. Then they shut it down. James Roque, our A.D., figured out how to make it work. I tested not positive on Saturday. 

Sonya Alexander: What do you see next on your plate?

Ramell Ross: Maybe some grits? I don’t have another film on the backburner. This wasn’t on my backburner. This was introduced to me and then I fell in love with the characters and the story and the opportunity and the ideas. That could happen again. I do have a lot of things in Alabama that I need to get back to doing. I haven’t been photographing there in a while. I haven’t seen my guys in a while. 

Sonya Alexander: I don’t know if you know about the Criterion Mobile truck that’s here for the festival.

RaMell Ross: No, I didn’t. 

Sonya Alexander: If you had a chance to go in there, what four films would you select?

RaMell Ross: I’d grab Tropical Malady. I don’t own a copy of that. If it’s me showing people what films I like, I’d have one answer. But if I was being honest, I’d go to the most expensive film sets they had and take those. I’d watch them because they’d be free, and I like coming to films outside of my direct interest in knowing them and my desire to be in conversation with that artist because there’s nothing in that closet that’s not profound. 

I would use saving money as a means to get to something that I would never come across, never watch otherwise. 

Sonya Alexander: What advice would you give to aspiring filmmakers?

RaMell Ross: Know what you want out of the filmmaking process. Figure out what you care about. Figure out why you’re doing it. Then make decisions based on that so you’re not spending time pursuing dreams that aren’t even yours. 

Sonya Alexander: What do you want people to take away from the film?

RaMell Ross: It would be more that I’d want people to come in and as Brandon Wilson, who played Turner said, “Let go of self.” As much as possible, let go of their ego and be there to have an experience. 

The Nickel Boys arrives in theaters November 8 from Amazon MGM Studios.

Main image: Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross, courtesy of the New York Film Festival.