Oscar Nominee RaMell Ross Brings a New Perspective to “The Nickel Boys”
Filmmaker RaMell Ross talks about his bold adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Nickel Boys," now nominated for two Academy Awards

Movies based on great novels tend to be fairly straightforward affairs. Not to oversimplify matters, but the literary source and the machinery of its widely read plot can easily take precedence over other elements. But in adapting Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys,” winner of the 2019 National Book Award and the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, filmmaker RaMell Ross instinctively took a radically different approach.
Ross made his debut in 2018 with “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” an intimate, rhapsodic portrait of Black life in smalltown Alabama that distilled five years of footage into a single cinematic day—and became an Academy Award nominee for best documentary. Ross, who stands six feet, six inches tall, once aspired to play professional basketball until he was sidelined by injuries. Yet, the agility he picked up as a point guard for the Georgetown University Hoyas proved useful when he held a camera in his hands instead of a basketball, distinguishing his work with a fluid sense of movement—of how bodies glide through the world around them.
He seemed a natural match to bring Whitehead’s fiction to the screen. Set in the early 1960s, when JFK was in the White House, the space race was in full gear and Martin Luther King Jr. was on the march for civil rights, the story tracks the friendship of two Black teenagers—Elwood (played by Ethan Herisse) and Turner (played by Brandon Wilson)—who struggle to survive horrific abuse at the Nickel Academy, a Marianna, Florida, reform school based on the Florida School for Boys (also known as the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys). A year after the state-run institution was finally shuttered in 2011, a University of Florida forensic team discovered some 55 unmarked graves (27 additional graves were later documented) and accounted for almost 100 deaths of the young men held there. Nearly three out of four were Black.
“Nickel Boys” is nominated for two Academy Awards, for best picture and best adapted screenplay. It marks Ross’s first foray into fiction and posed an energizing challenge. Although he embraces the visionary concepts of image-making, he had never done a screenplay. When I met the director for an early morning conversation in a Tallahassee hotel room during a recent press tour, he smiled when sharing about “going on YouTube (to look up) ‘How to write a script.’” Ross did something much riskier and ambitious than anything words could achieve. The film is shot almost entirely from the point of view of its two main characters as if directly through their eyes, an approach he calls “sentient perspective.”

“One of the working concepts that my co-writer Jocelyn Barnes and I had was ‘What if Elwood and Turner had their own cameras to make their own ‘Hale Counties?’” Ross says. “Of course, we cared about the emotional connection between the audience and the characters and the story. We also wanted to be true to at least the feelings that Colson had. But it was really an organic, having-the-form-emerge-from-the-source-material type of project.”
Locations in New Orleans, Hammond and LaPlace, Louisiana, stand in for Tallahassee’s historically Black Frenchtown neighborhood (Elwood’s home) and Marianna, and the film doesn’t attempt to exactly match the actual sites of the period. However, it makes powerful use of the uncovered forensic data and other archival imagery, drawing on the same factual material that inspired the novel. Some of these details appear in a five-minute montage near the close of the film—set to the lilting Ethiopian jazz of composer Mulatu Astatke—that fully summons the story out of fiction and into reality, lyrical and tragic all at once.
Strikingly, the film’s original treatment was 35-odd single-spaced pages of camera movements, designed with cinematographer Jomo Fray (also behind the camera on Raven Jackson’s thematically related Sundance favorite “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt”). To experience each scene as part of the character’s consciousness required ingenuity and improvisation.
Empathy is core to the idea of truth in bridging the social divides, which emerges through the intention of films that are made in the documentary world. It becomes like such a platitude to hear that.
—RaMell Ross
“He’s a very sensitive image-maker,” Ross says of Fray. “I can frame and do all the photographic elements, but I’ve never lit scenes to build the emotion that needs to be captured. The technical aspect of what we needed for rigs is completely out of my wheelhouse. He quite literally invented some stuff. The rigs were not made for this amount of weight so Jomo and his rigging crew … I don’t know if they’re welding, but they’re doing MacGyver shit.”
Working with Fray, Ross conceived unique ideas for creating scenes. One they called the “thrown gaze.” Ross explains them as “these macro shots … (of) these hyper sensitive moments when you’re hanging out or you’re by yourself or whatever and everything kind of goes blurry—you’re in some really small moment and then you pop back out and it’s just part of consciousness,” he explains. These sensory flourishes recur throughout “Nickel Boys,” drawing the audience into acute moments of what the filmmaker calls the “epic banal.” They can illuminate a daydream or underscore a nightmare, as when one of the Nickel boys is taken to the dreaded White House to be bound and beaten and his eyes focus on a Bible. Significantly, the violence occurs off screen, felt and heard rather than seen.

“In cinema, we tend to reduce the power of images in order for narrative continuity,” Ross says. What he sought to do, instead, was “expand time and allow the moment to have the scale and scope of what it’s like to be in reality.” It’s a response, he explains, to the way “narratives of people of color and the life force itself are just so utilitarian, so institutionalized from slavery … and photography itself, when it’s tied to people of color.”
Ross has previously said that he wanted the film to convey a sense of vicariousness. I asked him to elaborate.
“I never thought of it before I said that, but I think as a documentary filmmaker the language of the industry is empathy,” he replies. “You know, (film critic) Roger Ebert called film an empathy machine. Empathy is core to the idea of truth in bridging the social divides, which emerges through the intention of films that are made in the documentary world. It becomes like such a platitude to hear that. Every treatment has empathy in it. Granted the world is not progressing socially or ideologically—who really knows? Especially as a person of color, empathy has never seemed to do the job.”
Rather, Ross wanted to evoke something more potent. To put the audience in the shoes of Elwood and Turner. “There’s no way you would question it as you question other people’s lives that are outside of us,” he continues. “Vicariousness … seems fundamentally more true, because it’s not othering in the same way.”
Across its two hour and 20-minute runtime, “Nickel Boys” elevates beauty above the bloodshed and a spirit of transcendence over daily and, as the movie flashes decades ahead, lifetime trauma. It evokes the racism and brutality of the Jim Crow South with visceral tension but also celebrates the love and joy that carries life forward despite it all.
“Obviously, you don’t want to make a movie nobody wants to watch,” Ross says. “It’s a core tension of artmaking, just the aestheticization of life. Essentially packaging it for human appreciation, as opposed to its confrontation or something.” It was important to the filmmaker to light the characters “with the grace that allows us to see them as beautiful beings in the world.”
In cultivating the visual language of “Nickel Boys,” Ross hopes to counter what now are centuries-old conventions.
“For people of color, I hope it’s almost like a kind of fresh air within a devastating story that needs to be told,” he says. “I hope people find value in the fact that it is still being told. The conversations around struggle narratives and the excess of them that we have is a true problem. Most of the stories are (about) civil rights, and ‘blah blah blah blah blah.’ But I think the camera and the form of cinema—at least according to this film—can attempt to speak to the complexity of the situation and can be explicitly, subjectively Black in point of view. I think it’s something for my people to ruminate on.”