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Sentient Images: RaMell Ross on Nickel Boys
Brandon Wilson in Nickel Boys RaMell Ross’s 2018 feature debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, is a non-narrative portrait of its Alabama locale, shot entirely by the filmmaker over years of immersion, his instinctually captured material assembled into intricate juxtapositions. Few scale-ups for a second film have been more dramatic: Nickel Boys is a narrative feature adapted from a pre-existing text (Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys), proceeding in more-or-less linear order through an incident-filled narrative, with an on-record budget of around $23 million and production handled by Plan B Entertainment and Louverture Films. The latter’s Joslyn Barnes was also a producer and editorial consultant on Hale County; for this film, she co-wrote the adaptation with Ross in addition to her producing duties.
Primarily set in the mid-1960s, Whitehead’s novel tells the experiences of two boys sent to Florida’s Nickel Academy (fictional, but based on that state’s real-life Dozier School for Boys). While hitchhiking, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) accepts a ride from the Black driver of a car that turns out to be stolen. Sentenced to Nickel for an indefinite period of “reform,” the bookish optimist is befriended by the tougher, more despairing Turner (Brandon Wilson). Under the brutal thumb of school administrator Spencer (Hamish Linklater), the duo try to ride out sentences that could be interrupted at any moment by administrative violence, up to and including death. The two boys grow close enough that after Elwood is beaten severely, Turner eats soap powder to generate a stomach ache and join him in the infirmary. Eventually, their thoughts turn to escape, an attempt manifested as, among other things, recurring time-lapse imagery of a fugitive’s POV from the inside of a boxcar.
Nickel Boys considers Hale County’s literal first-person POV from a whole new production tier. The film is initially set entirely from Elwood’s POV, so revealing his body requires a reflection in a slow rack focus as he stands in front of a shop window, behind whose glass TVs broadcast a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. Ross shifts perspective for the first time 37 minutes in, replaying the scene of Elwood and Turner’s initial meeting from the latter’s reverse angle. Nickel Boys plays almost every scene from one of their two perspectives, sometimes using shot/reverse shot to hop between the two, and introducing an occasional third POV floating behind the head of the now-adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs), as though trauma were an observant specter floating just outside his body, including during a spellbinding decades-later reunion with a now-grown fellow “student,” Chickie Pete (Craig Tate), at a New York bar. The footage was captured by a team including DP Jomo Fray, along with Ross and A camera operator Sam Ellison, and supplemented by an array of opaquely evocative archival images that occasionally burst into the mix, including two Black Santas: one chained up and hanging from a hook as it lifts him, another freely surfing.
I spoke twice with the filmmaker about Nickel Boys, entering theatrical release from Amazon MGM Studios beginning on December 13 in NYC and December 20 in Los Angeles.
Filmmaker: When it comes to the part of pre-production where it’s like, “how many cars, how many locations,” were you sent to some kind of boot camp or was it just real-time learning?
Ross: The experience has been writing with Joslyn, making the script as powerful as it could be so people can look at that and say, “OK, that means we need how many locations?” I had nothing to do with it. On the day, I’m responsible for the practicality of everything coming together. But in terms of getting things there, because I’m not a producer, I’m not involved with those conversations. It was really complex because there are no scenes per se that you’re spending a ton of time in, and you’re not coming back to many places. You’re in the shower once, in this place once, in this place once—it’s really complex to pull off, which is why it was such a mindfuck for everyone. They’re trying to figure out how to shoot two things in one place. We’re only in Elwood’s bedroom once, but we need to dress a whole bedroom. That’s so expensive, and that’s not in the same location as this other room in the house—we shot multiple houses as one house. The backyard is not from the house that we shot the kitchen in. So, we need two locations for that—that’s double the money, double the security. It’s quite challenging. I realized early on why films like this aren’t made and why it’s easier to squeeze the film down to its smallest portion so that it can just be made. It ends up being an absurd amount of money, but it started to make sense. I was like, “Oh, that’s why.” They would read that we have one scene written for 70 boys, then James Roque, our first AD, was like, “How about eight?” You know, really big compromises. They don’t change the spirit of the film necessarily, but you have to pick and choose: “I actually need 70. The film breaks [if you don’t have them].” Then, they have to take that from somewhere else.
Filmmaker: My initial theory, which now seems wrong, is that maybe you were consistently playing one of the boys as the camera operator, and the other camera operator was playing one of them.
Ross: The only time any of the operator’s bodies are physically in the film is me in the boxcar. Otherwise, no cameramen’s bodies are in it, aside from if Elwood and Turner have the rig on them. Most of the time, they don’t—they’re situated around the camera in a really awkward way. But the process of doing that was quite easy. Some of the more complex [shots] Jomo would do because he has all the experience. Sam also has a lot of experience. The treatment was written in camera movement, kind of a proof-of-concept for producers, then whittled into a more normal script. When I got with Jomo, we practiced every camera movement with my DSLR in a room before we got to set. We knew how we wanted the camera to be iterating what was written, so we had a head start there. We knew the more challenging [shots] we needed to spend more time on—we practiced the hug [between Turner and Elwood’s visiting grandmother Hattie, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor] for hours. So, on the day, the hardest element was taken care of, and we could concentrate on responding to Aunjanue. Sam has the camera rig on, I have a monitor, Jomo has a monitor, we’re all on the headsets, then Sam ducked to the right: “All right, next time, Sam, when you duck, duck a lot slower—a sad look away, not a fast look away.” We’re all in communication.
Filmmaker: Is the camera size of the DSLR and the Venice you used basically the same so you didn’t have to adjust for that?
Ross: In Jomo’s brilliance, he was like, “We should shoot on a Sony Venice that has Rialto mode.” I was like, “What’s that?” He said, “I’m not gonna let you use the DSLR you want. We’re gonna shoot in 6K and have it be mobile.” [In Rialto mode, the lens and sensor can be separated from the camera body using an umbilical cord.] Obviously, all that heavy stuff makes it a little difficult, but [Rialto mode] allows us to put [the camera body] on a rig [and] get it close to someone’s body. Otherwise, it would have been too bulky.
Filmmaker: And the choice of shooting primarily with two lenses, the 50mm and the 80mm, how does that break down?
Ross: Probably the best decision that I inflexibly came in with was knowing that we needed to shoot at long lengths. Hale County does POV in a couple scenes, and I realized while shooting that the wider the lens, the more movement was distracting and brought you to Hardcore Henry. If you shoot really shallow, the more separation there’ll be between things; the longer the lens, the more focused someone’s attention will be. It’s not POV, but it feels more like it because your attention is actually capable of being held.
Filmmaker: In terms of the idea that, if you were to make another film, you would be the camera operator again, was that always something you wanted to do or was it the opposite—“I want to get away from this”?
Ross: I wanted to shoot the whole thing myself, but they were like, “I believe that you could, but you actually can’t.” “Why not?” “Do you really want to hear why? One, you’re not in a union. Also, you won’t have time because you won’t be able to direct the actors.” I actually thought I was going to have to do everything, which is ridiculous, but finding people to outsource the idea to and improve it—I came from making Hale County relatively by myself, so I didn’t have any experience of that.
Filmmaker: How much of it did you shoot, and were there certain types of shots that played more to your strengths than other people’s? Or was it just the needs of the moment?
Ross: I think it’s more the needs of the moment, like the classroom scene in which the pencil falls and Mr. Hill [Jimmie Fails] is on the record player. [In this scene, Elwood observes as his teacher puts on a recording of MLK’s “Fun Town” speech while students around him toss pencils into the ceiling, one of which gets unstuck and falls down.] That involves a ton of choreography; the camera operating is more about a web of movement and less about the literal framing of the image, more about human vision than it is in conversation with the photograph. There’s something about those [types of images] that we outsource to Sam, but some of the other, smaller images are split between Jomo and myself. From an operating standpoint, the film is probably split a third between everyone. I think I operated the least, but most of my images made it in.
Filmmaker: There’s the shot—Elwood looking into the shop window—that’s the reveal/clarification of Elwood. There’s a rack focus, there’s his reflection and there are all these TVs onto which I assume the MLK footage was composited onto afterward. VFX elements are unavoidably baked into it.
Ross: The film is pretty VFX-heavy. This one was extremely complicated because it’s basically impossible to be able to see all of those things as clearly as you can. That is a composite of five shots. One shot is Elwood looking at the TVs, with static to get that light, but without his reflection, as it was impossible to get both. We had a pretty experienced VFX team, and they were like, “We need to have light emerging from the TVs because you can’t reproduce that light in post.” So, in the original shot, we have white noise on the TVs reflecting onto other parts of the scene so that it feels real. Another shot is looking out toward Elwood, in order to capture his reflection. The third shot, from Elwood’s perspective, is of the store clerk tinkering with the cables. This Black worker is essentially undermining the store [by] changing the channel and setting these TVs up to show this. There was a white store owner [who] comes and closes the curtain, but we ended up cutting it. The fourth shot is the reflection of people gathering around to see the screens. The last was the inserts on the TVs. The original plan was to have archival images popping up, but it was too chaotic because the frame is already so dense, and having MLK there made sense as the way to draw the community into this unprecedented moment.
Filmmaker: Tell me about the one image with your body in the frame, the boxcar. It sounds a little analogous to the project you had done where you had yourself shipped. [In October 2021, as part of a project called Return to Origin, inspired by Henry Box Brown, a slave who escaped by similarly shipping himself in 1849, Ross shipped himself from Rhode Island to Alabama inside a crate.]
Ross: Exactly. That’s where the idea came from. It was really fun. My art studio manager built the boxcar, and we filmed the time-lapse through it. It’s a completely independent DIY thing because my guy can build anything. All we have is a small window out on the road. We can find a frame somehow that looks like we’re actually moving. We spent four days doing it.
Filmmaker: So, filming that was like decompression before you got into the edit?
Ross: It was really the only way that we could make it, because we lost a week to COVID. [Ross tested positive on the first day of what was supposed to be a 33-day shoot, cutting his shooting days down to 27.] So, we lost a bunch of scenes, and the boxcar was so vital. Everyone wanted to make sure that we could figure out how to still have that footage. I think I did it four times. I drove up to Massachusetts in a snowstorm and did it by myself—went on a mountain, all these things.
Filmmaker: I want to ask about working with the King estate. There’s an actual cardboard image of him, and his “Fun Town” speech you include is important to the book. But I remember with Selma, the estate wouldn’t let the movie license his actual speeches [they had been exclusively licensed to Steven Spielberg for a never-realized biopic] so they had to write pastiche speeches. What was the process in this case? Which I know is a little bit outside your purview, but I’m sure you heard about it.
Ross: I mean, I definitely heard about it. We got permission, but it was not easy because they’re rightfully very protective, and I’m sure they’re afraid of meme culture slowly disintegrating what could be one of the brightest voices to ever exist in this country. So, good thing that the producers are so powerful and saw it as such an integral element that they were willing to put their reputations on the line with how the film would treat him. Joslyn is friends with Harry Belafonte and [produced] The Black Power Mixtape. She’s known as someone who’s on the politically right side of aesthetics, as is [Plan B’s] Jeremy Kleiner. Also, Allison Brandin, head of archival, has relationships with the estates. A combination of all of their relationships could get to the right ear of the person in the organization so that they actually look at it. We eventually got it, but it was many, many months, and at times we weren’t sure if we were going to be able to use him at all.
Filmmaker: What would you have done if you hadn’t been able to clear him?
Ross: I think we would have pivoted well, in that the person watching the film wouldn’t have known that we weren’t able to get him. He would just have less of a presence, and some other political figure would have taken it.
Filmmaker: Reading the book, I thought it was interesting that the Andy Griffith Show, The Defiant Ones and The Ugly American, all of which are in the film one way or another, are referenced in there. The Andy Griffith element is very logical on its own, but how did you feel about working with that? Because we’re at a cultural memory tipping point right now, and the Andy Griffith Show is on the last legs of syndication.
Ross: It is?
Filmmaker: I think so. The whistling is not one of those things that’s going to automatically trigger people’s memory in 20 or 30 years.
Ross: That’s interesting. I haven’t thought about the future of that part of the film’s legibility. I like to put images beside each other because I think they all belong beside each other. With The Defiant Ones, [getting] that would open up the reading of the film to be tied into the history of cinema, and specifically for Black films. I think the idea first came up because Ethan looks like Sidney Poitier. So, we wrote it in, and that led to putting images of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier at Martin Luther King’s funeral. Because around that time Turner was in New York, and he looks like him, and we’re already referencing King. That’s how we start building these extra layers of meanings and finding more images. When you get lucky, an idea integrates well and breeds other ones. The script is fairly close to what we have in our edit. The treatment was the film; that was in there. We eventually had every visual on a card so that we could move things more easily.
I love The Andy Griffith Show because it’s just so absurd—but in a good way. It was good television, but thinking about it in the context of progressive notions of race, it’s just like, “What a capsule.” So, what were these two boys watching on television? What was their relationship to the entertainment visual world? And the theme song, at least to our generation and those before, it’s such a clear signifier—maybe not in terms of its meaning, but in terms of its feel. It’s a beautiful juxtaposition. How ironic is it that [Turner’s] happily whistling the Andy Griffith Show theme after he takes [soap] powder to go meet his friend in this horrible reformatory [clinic after] they’ve been abused? Is that ironic? Is it sad? Is it funny? Maybe it’s all of them. It was near impossible to get because this is prime season to degrade. People would love to break that thing in half, so they’re protecting it, as they should.
Filmmaker: In the novel, there’s one cultural reference you do not include, Amos ’n’ Andy. Did you think about it and you just couldn’t do it, or was it something that you rejected part and parcel because part of your agenda here is to steer away from some of the tropes of Black misery porn?
Ross: I think we did write Amos ’n’ Andy in the audio in the home, then we came to the conclusion: why would Hattie [Elwood’s grandmother] be letting them listen to it? Is it better to have it be heard so that the audience knows the effects and the power of radio waves on consciousness, or is it worse? Then, we put [the TV adaptation of the radio series] on the TV and were like, “No, we need something more light. We don’t want to overburden that scene.” We had most of the references that Colson used at some point, then whether or not we thought we could bring it in in a sensory way determined whether or not it made sense.
Filmmaker: Some of the images parallel, so that the arrival at the reformatory acts as this grim echo of things that happened earlier in a happier context: reaching out for an orange in a field becomes forced labor orange-picking, Christmas is more threadbare. Those image systems are organic to the film rather than taken from the novel. You’re flexing a different part of your brain to construct those parallels in advance, rather than finding them within the footage that you’ve generated.
Ross: One of the more difficult things was to not be heavy-handed with the symbolism and reoccurring overlaps of meaning. You want them to mean something specifically, but just the way that things rhyme over time. That process was more about restraint than inclusion. In that sense, it was supposed to be both vague and prominent.
Filmmaker: In the bar where Elwood meets the adult Chickie Pete, Craig Tate steals the scene, and he only has a third of the frame to work with. Daveed Diggs’s head is in the center of the frame, and the left side is almost blocked out, so Tate is boxed off on the right. How do you go about working through something like that?
Ross: Jomo and I knew this could work because it worked in Hale County [in an extended shot following a player from behind during basketball practice]. So, we’re like, “We think Daveed can be a body that can let the world be revealed.” The fact that you’re not getting the entire frame emphasizes POV in a bizarre way because his attention is so focused, and fortunately Craig Tate outperformed all the high expectations we [had] for him. Daveed spent a lot of time looking at the monitor and going through the motions to have a good sense of how much he could turn his head before you could see his face, his nose and, when he turned this much, how much he was revealing of Craig. If he started to move too much in one direction, we had a pose for where to tap on the back of his body for him to make adjustments. Rarely did it happen, because he was very spatially aware. The most important part was to just make sure that he doesn’t unproductively cover his face. When you’re coming into Nickel, when the two boys are walking by, you’re not like, “Look up and get a perfect look of them looking in the car as you walk by.” That’s not how people’s vision works. You see them coming late and miss them, but you know that they were there. So, it’s OK to not see Craig the whole time, it’s OK to have his face eclipsed, but it can’t be unproductive.
Filmmaker: When the camera is strapped to Daveed’s back, it must be just below the middle of his rib cage or something. Is it strapped to him?
Ross: It’s in lockstep with his body and shoulders. This was a custom rig that Jomo’s crew built, and normally it’s not built for cameras as heavy as the Venice, even in Rialto mode. It was a challenge for them to composite something that could hold it but also be mobile enough for Daveed, and when Brandon has it on at the end and is running around, the camera is actually relatively high on their bodies. It’s really top-heavy. In the scene where Daveed was hanging out with his first girlfriend and leaning forward or sitting back, we’re holding the rig behind him because it’s so cumbersome.
Filmmaker: Did you find yourself acting things out or sharing motions with the actors?
Ross: Definitely, and it’s really embarrassing. You realize how much imagination goes into their translations because my execution of their body or position or gesture is so pathetic. You’re like, “Man, I really hope they don’t do what I just did because that’s not what I’m talking about.” The key is trying to figure out ways to not show them but give them ideas that produce the thing.
Filmmaker: Before, you were shooting everything yourself. Now, you’re disembodied from the process a little bit, and there’s a physical distance. What was that like for you?
Ross: It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. When we first started, I was like, “Jomo, I want to shoot a minimum of half the stuff.” He’s like, “Fine. It’s a really heavy camera.” I’m like, “Sure, but I don’t know if I can instruct someone to make the frame correctly. Do we want to spend time being like, ‘A little bit more to the left, up six inches, point down, change the T-stop to three?’” One, that’s Jomo’s job as the DP, and two, it’s just not efficient. So, Jomo and I spent a lot of time shot listing. I know what the frames should look like already, so we got there faster. Jomo learned really fast; Sam learned really fast. So, it wasn’t that bad. Once we had our frame set, I could take the monitor, Jomo or Sam can do his thing. If they’re on the monitor, they can concentrate on all the other elements. I have a very strong sensibility, so I know when something’s wrong. I do this with my large-format photography, so my whole thing is visual.
Filmmaker: In the scenes with eyeline matches, where the reverse angle is really important, I assume that’s all tightly written in there. They’re pretty precise; they’re not a few degrees off or anything.
Ross: We noticed there was a very specific point on the camera, the top of the lens right below the rim, at which you looked. It wasn’t the dead center of the lens, it wasn’t their reflection; they couldn’t glaze their eyes over and look towards the lens. They had to concentratedly look at a specific point. and it seems like you’re looking through the camera lens into the other character. We gave them instructions: “When you’re looking into the camera lens, you’re looking directly at [the other] character’s eyes. So, when you look away, the audience is obviously going to view you as looking away from the character.” They went from there. and when they weren’t looking in that spot we just cut immediately. One of the most interesting parts was choreographing everyone else’s eye contact with the camera. If the extras are looking at Elwood and Turner, giving them permission to do that almost secretly allowed the camera as character to be the center of the world, in the way in which a person is the center of their own world in a really unconscious way.
Filmmaker: In terms of the archival footage, I’m curious about the David Blaine escape artist type.
Ross: Oh yeah, the Santa Claus. The first thing that the archival is supposed to do is tie the history of the way those boys were treated to the history of visualization of people of color across time and interacting with cameras from news footage. In that same montage, there’s a Black surfing Santa Claus. My mom used to paint black Santa Clauses and sell them at markets, and we used to go on weekends and sit there while she sold them. It’s part of my art practice; I incorporated some of them in a show I had at the Ogden Museum. I wanted to incorporate black Santas.
Filmmaker: Do you like to do table readings? Is that something you did here?
Ross: We didn’t have time. We didn’t rehearse. It was just all on the day.
Filmmaker: How involved were you with casting?
Ross: The entire process, but we had a ton of resources and people. [Plan B producer] Dede [Gardner] and Jeremy were like, “You should really think about Hamish.” I’m like, “OK, I’m looking at people,” and they’re like, “No, you should really think about Hamish.” Oh—it’s not a suggestion; they actually think he may be the right guy. I looked up a lot of Hamish’s work and was like, “This dude might be perfect.”
Filmmaker: Brutal white racism is essentially boring and stupid. It’s performed by people who are not especially charismatic or who lack a large vocabulary. That’s a thing that can happen in movies because you need the energy dramatically, like Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained.
Ross: Charismatic as fuck.
Filmmaker: Exactly. In reality, people like Bull Connor are just bricks. Hamish Linklater is pretty charismatic, but it feels like you’ve taken away the possibility of that kind of charisma a little bit for the character. So, I’m wondering how you think about conceiving the racist elements of the film that have to be depicted to some extent but that you don’t want to actually become seductive or interesting.
Ross: It’s probably one of the most interesting things about the film, how to render that recognizable but not reinforce it. That buttoned-up scientist look, the tucked-in, really thin fit—Joslyn and I wanted him to be almost as if he has a calculator and a pencil, going to a board and teaching physics. I haven’t necessarily seen that type of racist presentation before. I’m not saying that it’s the scientists that I’m pointing to, just that presentation of average whiteness. A person who’s interested in intelligence, science, religion and discipline—those are the justifications, the core foundations to what we call the American project, and they are the ones who believe in inferiority the most.
