RaMell Ross dove into Nickel Boys with a uniquely useful background.
First, as a Black man raised in the South, the filmmaker had the knowledge and experience necessary to adapt Pulitzer Prize-winner Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys for the screen without too much additional research.
That’s not to say he didn’t look into it: he pointed to a previous non-fiction book — The Boys of the Dark by Robin Gaby Fisher, Michael O’McCarthy and Robert W. Straley — as a seminal jumping-off point.
Both books were based on a series of reports about the Dozier reform school in Florida. That multi-year forensic project unearthed the dozens of boys buried at the school. They were among hundreds more, many of them Black, who say they were brutalized, tortured and otherwise abused over its decades in operation.
Ross read all three in crafting his totemic film, Nickel Boys: the Oscar-buzzy tale of Elwood and Turner, two young Black men trapped in the maw of the Jim Crow-era Nickel Academy.
The story is meant to reflect the experiences of the boys at Dozier, but also to comment on the realities of Black strife around that time.
That’s where Ross’s background helped.
“When I think of Elwood, I just make up images from my childhood that are poetic, place Elwood’s name in them and then sit him in the classroom,” Ross told CBC’s Eli Glasner.
“It’s easy because it’s me, and I’m Elwood and Turner. So I just think about myself.”
Ross’s second advantage came from his hands-on experience. Nickel Boys is actually a sort-of debut: Ross had previously directed two feature-length documentaries and a TV episode, and worked as a photographer and cinematographer, but he’d never made a feature-length fictional film.
But as it turned out, his experience and near obsession with the nuts and bolts of camera work became a vital tool in Nickel Boys‘ creation.
As part of its commentary on voyeurism and the subjective experience of being Black in America, Nickel Boys plays directly with perspective.
The most immediate way it does so is by often having the camera stand in directly for a character. For some shots, that required a complicated system involving a Bluetooth-capable, actor-mounted camera.
Even when they weren’t using one of those rigs, how the images were framed was always front of mind for Ross.
“I have a very specific way of framing,” he said.
Ross’s photographic and cinematographic focus helped build the movie into a commentary on POV. His reasons for that run the gamut. One is philosophical: a Nietzschean examination of truth that, when Ross explains it, sounds just as complex as you might assume it would.
“The pursuit of truth — objective truth — is just a false pursuit,” he said. “One of the only ways to understand truth is to synthesize every single person’s point of view at the same time. And then you have something that is pointillistic enough to have a three-dimensional relationship to the concept.”
Cinematic trauma
But the other was about removing complications from the story. While the Dozier report and book looked straight at the violence perpetrated against the boys at the school, Ross instead chose to have the audience look away from much of it. There is violence shown, but the vast majority exists on the outskirts of the frame — suggested, spoken about, but rarely seen.
“There’s something about cinema which encourages overexposure. I think maybe because it’s not us in the image, that we’re willing to see the worst parts of others,” Ross said.
“[If] the violence was happening to us … would we want the camera exposing us at our most painful moment?”
Instead, he chose to focus on his characters’ reactions to each other. As the camera stands in for another character, Ross attempts to draw attention to small elements like eye contact, facial expressions or movements toward or away from it.
The intention, he said, was to show the reactions to violence instead of the violence itself.
“It’s most interesting to let the characters exist, and their violence exist, in the imagination of the person who is watching,” he said. “Because then they’re deeply tied to that character, because the images are theirs. The images aren’t the character’s.”