RaMell Ross’ first film, the Oscar-nominated “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” was an unusual project for a director whose day job was as an artist and a teacher at Brown University in Rhode Island. “It was a small art project that converted into a doc,” said Ross, who wasn’t looking to make another movie, much less a narrative film, when “Hale County” was finished.
But Plan B producers Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner came to him and his producer Joslyn Barnes about the Colson Whitehead novel “The Nickel Boys,” a harrowing story based on a real-life Florida reformatory that abused and even killed young Black teens for decades. Ross figured that Gardner’s work on Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” a narrative film with the feel of a giant art project, might make her the right person to help him with a bold film shot almost entirely from the perspective of Elwood and Turner, two Black teenagers who wind up in the brutal Nickel Academy.
When you initially read the Colson Whitehead novel, could you see the kind of film you’d like to make?
It was the first time I’d ever read a book thinking about adaptation while reading it, because it never had crossed my mind that I’d be doing that. But my first idea was point of view. I was like, Oh, that would be interesting if I shot it from Elwood’s perspective. To me, the imagery from this time period needed the poetic world. It’s very absent, I think, from archival footage or mainstream cinema from the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s and ’70s.
That was my first thought, but I didn’t think immediately that MGM and Plan B were going to make a film that’s POV. But I said to Joslyn, “It’d be really cool if I could do this POV, although I don’t know if they’d really do it.” And in typical Joslyn fashion, she was like, “I think that’s a great idea.” [Laughs]
But the film isn’t always shot from Elwood’s perspective — at one point, it begins shifting between him and Turner.
The problem with giving a character POV is that you then have to ask, “Why doesn’t everyone have POV?” It was important to me to centralize Black subjectivity, so I was going to give it to Black characters. We give it to Turner, and then you’re going back and forth as their perspectives and their world views are intertwining. And you find out why later on.
In cinema, there’s a vocabulary of camera movement that is very different than if you were actually looking through somebody’s eyes. I suppose this film is somewhere in between, because it’s more lyrical than if you just followed a person’s eye movement.
Yeah. But it’s also not as lyrical as your memory would be. Cinema lends itself to the play between the surreal, the symbolic, the experiential, the nonsensical and the aesthetic. It’s on this weird carousel that’s always turning.
There is a lot of violence inflicted on the characters in the film — but the way you tell the story, the film is visceral, but it’s not graphic.
Yeah, yeah. Those were really early conversations. A lot of the conversations were about the effectiveness of some of the techniques we were going to use. Like, let’s not show one punch in the boxing match. And we did end up showing one or two. But the boxing match has to be more about the audience’s reactions than it is about the fight. It’s not about the beating scene. Why don’t we use sound and our senses and the actual images of people who these things happen to, as opposed to watching a fictional character be tortured for the delight or the horror of the audience?
There are a variety of different ways in which we experience trauma as human beings without seeing it. I guess because cinema’s so visual, the habit is to show, you know? We think showing somehow means honoring when it may have done the opposite over time.
Does it change the responsibility you have in making this movie to know that Nickel Academy is based on a real place, the Dozier School for Boys?
I guess so. I wouldn’t say it changes the responsibility, but I would say it heightens the ethical stakes. Making specifically fiction films, you’re almost sacredly blockaded from ethics. You’re like, “This is just fiction, we’re allowed to do this. We’re supposed to take this leeway.” But I think given the proximity of the events to now…
The real school only closed in 2011, right? There’s someone on death row in Florida right now who went to the Dozier School and is citing it as a primary reason why they turned to chaos in their life. It also has a specific intersection with my interest, which is Black subjectivity and Black representation. And also to me — and maybe this is about responsibility — it seemed like an opportunity to try to make a cinematic difference or an aesthetic difference. You could make a statement because all of the material is perfectly aligned.
This story first appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
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