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Summary
- RaMell Ross' Feature film adaptation of Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead portrays Jim Crow-era abuse at a reform school.
- Ross' innovative POV-style filming in 4:3 aspect ratio challenges traditional norms in narrative filmmaking.
- Ross discusses editing process, lengthy first cut, and the unique challenges of shooting poetic observational moments.
Best known for his award-winning documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, RaMell Ross has built his career telling brilliant stories unique to the Black experience in America. The documentary subsequently received the Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at Sundance, won a Peabody award, and was nominated for an Academy Award. Now, the highly acclaimed filmmaker leaps head first into narrative fiction with his highly anticipated adaptation of Colson Whitehead's 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys.
Inspired by the infamously violent Dozier School for Boys and filmed in a unique POV style, Nickel Boys alternates between Jim Crow era Tallahassee, Florida in 1962 and the present. As a young man, Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) is wrongfully accused as an accomplice to car robbery. After being sent to a segregated reform school called Nickel Academy, he forms a tight friendship with a boy named Turner (Brandon Wilson) as they do their best to survive abuse by the school and those in charge.
Ross was kind enough to sit down with Collider's own Steve Weintraub to discuss all things Nickel Boys. Together, they talked about shaping the film through a 4:3 aspect ratio, pleading for just a little more time to edit, and how he and his DP, Jomo Fray, spent six weeks of pre-production solely dedicated to discovering new camera moves in order to portray new points of view, emotions, and evocations.
There’s Nothing “Traditional” About ‘Nickel Boys’ Camera Work
“It was all discovery and all exploration.”
COLLIDER: I really want to start with congratulations, sincerely. One of the things that I really loved about the movie is the way you shot it, the use of POV. It's not the norm in movies, so at any point was the line producer or producers or anyone involved like, “Do you really want to do this?”
RAMELL ROSS: Occasionally, there was a desire to have more coverage because the film is anti-coverage. It's a single-point perspective, and the film was built to miss things. The goal of it is to have the camera not be the center of the world, to be the center of someone who's in the world, and so you're not capable of understanding everything that's happening, nor are there even traditional establishing shots. So, I think maybe that came up, but everyone was very easily swayed when I was like, “It's not on the shot list.”
With Jomo Fray, your cinematographer, what were the conversations like before stepping on set to make sure you were getting what you needed? Were you thinking about the editing room? You said there's no coverage, but were there certain days where you were like, “Let's just shoot a little of this just to make sure we have protection?”
ROSS: That's a really good question. The conversations with Jomo and I were so long and over such a long period of time, it's kind of hard to, obviously, summarize them. But the idea of POV preexisted conversations with Jomo, and so did the images, but when you get into how it's going to be executed and how it's going to feel, man, those things are the most difficult and the most ephemeral and the most conversational things that are possible. We spent maybe six weeks in his Airbnb with my DSLR testing moves; that's how we came to the hug, that's how we imagined the thrown gazes, which people would normally call a macro shot. But to us, that was a way for us to cut in scenes because everything's imagined as a oner. That wasn't in the script, thrown gazes. Then we also figured out when we're running out of time, we can use thrown gazes as a way to traverse the scene and still feel authentically POV, and so, man, was it amazing collaborating with that fellow.
Image via Amazon MGM Studios I love talking about the editing process because it's where it all comes together. What was it like in the editing room for this? Because there are so many things you can. How long did you have to edit? We'll start with that.
ROSS: I'm unsure how long we had to edit because I was so in it. We were just always like, “Can we have another two weeks? Can we have another two weeks?” [Laughs] So, it kind of got lost. I think we spent around four months — five months, including sound mixing. But, Nick Monsour, the editor, had an impossible task, which he did quite well, which was how do we make the film feel like it's breathing and evolving in the way in which a dream does, in which you take everything as it is, although it may not always feel realistic? How do you make images mean something, but not lose the overall feeling of the narrative? And so, Joslyn Barnes, who was the co-writer and producer, was there almost every day with Nick and I. It was all discovery and all exploration.
“If It Was Up to Me, The Film Would Be 13 Hours Long”
Image via Amazon MGM Studios The movie's about two hours and 20 minutes. Did you have a crazy long first cut?
ROSS: You're asking really funny questions that no one's asked. [Laughs] We did have a much longer cut. You know what? If it was up to me, the film would be 13 hours long, to be honest with you.
I have a real question for you, no bullshit. What was the cut that you're like, “It's not getting shorter than this?” Was it three hours? What was the one where you like, “What are we cutting?”
ROSS: It was this one.
So this was the one where you're like, “It's not getting shorter than this?”
ROSS: [Laughs] Yes. I just want it to be literal.
Because I've spoken to some filmmakers, and they're like, “We were at three hours, and we were like, ‘What the fuck do we do?’”
ROSS: Maybe everyone's not as fortunate as I am to have the people surrounding me. Everyone had such good reasons to cut it down. We didn't need to have this extra three seconds on the scene; we could still get the meaning that could happen when the images collide if it was a little bit earlier. Making all of these micro-changes over time, I think the original quote-unquote director's cut was at 2:50 or something, and that was the best we could do. Then when you get the feedback, you realize maybe you can do better. Then we end at this one.
'Nickel Boys' Director Explains His Approach to the Film's Photography
"No one questioned it, so I was like, 'Thank the Lord!'"
Which shot or sequence ended up being the toughest to shoot and why?
ROSS: To me, the toughest to shoot is not contingent on actors. Those are the ones in which it's completely out of the hands of the crafts folks, right? You put everything on the plate, and you hope that it just comes together and transcends the organization of things. That's the actors’ job. But some of early in Elwood's life in the film is just poetic observation of moments in time, of course, that collide in a way that both has narrative thrust but also poetic, momentary meaning. Inside the classroom in which Mr. Hill is moving the arm on the record to try to find that perfect MLK quote, and then also, there's a kid rapping on the desk, and then a pencil falls — that's impossible. That's all in-camera. There's nothing that's changed there, and it's just quite difficult.
Shooting in the 4:3 ratio, what was your motivation for that? And again, did you get any pressure to not do that?
ROSS: No, I had to justify it, but no one pushed back. My photography is 8x10 and 4x5; it's pretty close to 4:3. I can frame a lot easier. Also, when you're going back and forth between archival footage, you realize that archival footage typically was in 4:3 because of television. That's the way that a lot of America came to know cinema and documentary. That makes a lot of sense, and so those are my reasons, and no one questioned it, so I was like, “Thank the Lord!”
What are you really excited for audiences to see with this film?
ROSS: I'm excited for them to see what it looks like to be seen as a character, as opposed to being over the shoulder, or to be that spirit or angel or objective viewer or godlike thing that the camera does naturally, but to be looked at by Hattie and have that transfer of emotion that actors as talented as [Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor] give to the other actors, that we normally see from a distance — to have that come to you. I want people to experience that look of love.
Image via Amazong MGM Studios I have to wrap with you, but I am curious, are you working on something else? I’m looking forward to what you do next after this.
ROSS: Thank you, thank you. I am not working on something else, but I am working on the other thing, which is myself. I hope to take a long and lengthy vacation, maybe spend some time underwater and in the sky.
Nickel Boys is in theaters on December 13.
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Nickel Boys
Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys chronicles the powerful friendship between two young African American men navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida.
Director RaMell Ross
Runtime 140 Minutes
Writers RaMell Ross , Joslyn Barnes , Colson Whitehead
English (US) ·