'Nickel Boys' is Proof of Life
Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross on “trying to approximate the complexity of real-life”
Light spoilers for Nickel Boys below, with a bigger spoiler warning at the end.
Nickel Boys was the most profound experience I had in movie-going this past year. It is so rare that a movie is staggering, the kind of brilliant and moving that makes you want to proselytize. Two boys meet at the reform school they’ve been sent to in Jim Crow-era Florida. One, Elwood (Ethan Herisse), is tense and afraid. The other, Turner (Brandon Wilson), has such an easy brevity. The two friends will become closer than either immediately recognizes; a spiritual continuity runs between them.
The movie is based on an excellent Colson Whitehead book that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. (A higher honor to earn: it was passed between me and my dad.) The film adaptation, released this year, was directed by RaMell Ross, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind the documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening.1 “I'm looking for visual insight and quite literally not linguistic insight,” Ross told me in a conversation on Zoom the other day. “You're putting two images together that you wouldn't necessarily think would go together, and the timing of leaving an image and the timing of entering into an image is just as important as the image itself. And when they come together, you know something. You don't know what you know, but it's something.”
With Hale County This Morning, This Evening (streaming now on Criterion) Ross was explicit about wanting to reframe our perspective and the centrality of the subject. “How do we not frame someone?” wondered one interstitial title. But Ross himself is gregarious and quick-witted for someone who has made movies that are so evocative and contemplative. But that’s part of Nickel Boys’ strength, the way it lingers on images and moods but not never on any single meaning. It’s about growing up, it’s about love and family, it’s about relief, it’s about rescue, it’s about memory... When I emerged from the theater after seeing it the first time, I couldn’t imagine how this movie — any movie — could be made any other way. It was so thoughtful and rich; there was never a wasted image. We talked about Nickel Boys after a screening at the film at MoMA a few weeks ago, but we go into greater detail below.
How did you come on board to direct Nickel Boys? What were the initial conversations like with Plan B2?
It was a kind of lucky me situation. I think Colson and Plan B had seen Hale County This Morning, This Evening. They had the rights with Anonymous Content and they asked me to take a look [at the book] for an adaptation. It was two years before the book came out. It was a little bit surprising too, because of who Colson [Whitehead] is, and then of course he gets a Pulitzer Prize while we're adapting it, which is also cool. But that’s the origin story.
As you’re reading Colson’s book and it’s getting all this acclaim, were you consciously thinking about that at all or consciously trying not to pay attention to it?
I think I’m fairly good at compartmentalizing, so I think there was one side that was like, “Oh no, the bibliophiles, they’re going to come for my head and Joslyn’s [Barnes, the co-screenwriter] head, and they’re going to be comparing the two,” and, “Oh, no, with a built-in audience, it’s both good and bad.” But I think the other side of me was not really caring too much.
It’s funny to talk about the process. Largely, I think it all went through because I don’t think Joslyn and I genuinely believed at every moment that the film was going to be made, because we knew that the ideas were pretty wild, and it fundamentally was going through a studio. Though there are independent producers that are corralling the resources, it’s such an incremental process. It’s like, “Okay, what’s your approach?” And then you send a two-page approach, hundreds of people read it, and then they’re like, “Okay, we’ll move to the next step.” And then you do treatment, and then you do a script. I think to our benefit, we were a bit naive and we’re just like “Let’s just have fun during the process and see where it goes.”
The really novel part of Nickel Boys is the first-person POV you use throughout the film. Was that your immediate reaction to the text?
It was my immediate reaction to the text, but it’s also the way in which I think about art making because having a photographic practice that’s very long-standing and is invested in a certain type of recursive, reflexive employment of the image of people of color, and seeing things photographically, it’s like the way I did Hale County. It’s kind of the only way I know how to make films. Obviously, I know how to frame third person, and I’ve done stuff like that. But I think because the process is so large scale, I had to lean into what I actually knew how to do. I know how to make images, and that’s what I cared about the most.
I knew that if we could make images that had the resonance of the images that were in Hale County This Morning, This Evening, that a person would be able to make it through the film, and that would be enough. We’re essentially giving the camera and quote-unquote life to young black kids whose lives were cut short. It seemed like that would be enough.
And so it’s kind of the recklessness of the process, and maybe that’s the secret. The secret was just that it didn’t matter if it did well or not. It didn’t matter if it was accepted as long as it was photographic and from the subjectivity of black consciousness. It had a deep, deep, deep value, and it kind of made decision-making easy because the spirit of the film was always there.
My favorite class to teach is called “Other Lives of Time,” and it’s based on the idea that cinema is an anagram for human beings’ individual relationship to time. So there’s time in our brains and our consciousness, the more idiosyncratic the film, you can rework your relationship to memory, time, space, and impressions, and put that into cinema.
From a technical standpoint, how does that impact other departments? Obviously the camerawork changes, but sound operates differently in first-person. What I think the movie does really well is playing with that perspective. Something that might be minor to you is major to me as the POV switches between the two main characters, Elwood and Turner.
Yeah, I love that. I like to say that the film elicits deeply subjective responses because of how almost aleatoric,3 or there are all these different rendezvous of insight between the collision of things that are built separately. A lot of the things that happen, I think, align a lot with the way in which we go out into the world. Well, things are relatively mundane. We’re constantly, if you’re attuned and porous, aware of the intersection of the car, and the music that's coming from out of that car, but also the music that coming out of this other car, and then also the sound of your mom’s voice in your head, but then also the seatbelt that’s on your neck. There’s so many things that are producing what we know to be the experience of life. The film is kind of peddling in the specificity of each of those as separate processes. Thatss not what you asked, but I feel like it makes sense.
Obviously, the movie is, in some ways, a shared memory, one memory between friends, of what it was like to survive Nickel. But memories, especially those in childhood, can become larger or smaller than it was to experience them. In Nickel, Elwood remembers his grandmother ironing, but not necessarily how it happened that his mom left his grandmother to raise him. There’s something about the film’s perspective that feels not so literal but the narrativization of our own memories that— you know, I don’t know if there’s a question here…
You’re saying all the stuff: the narrativization of our own memories. That’s it. Our memories, they’re memories before they’re narratives. Experience precedes language, and then we apply language to it based on our own abilities and experience. And I think that’s really important in thinking about what it means to be a person of color because our images are so consumable traditionally and so utilitarian that I want to give them so much strategic ambiguity. And that’s so it can be what you’re saying: impression, and impression before their language, before their narrative eyes within our narratives.
There’s also this way that sequences, across different timelines, sort of match or rhyme. There’s the archival, in conversation with Elwood and Turner at Nickel, in conversation with their adulthood. How did you piece together these timelines?
The films that I like to try to make are films in which I'm learning something from the process of the final piece, where you’re learning by making, you’re not executing a concept. It’s not conceptual art. It’s something else. And so the film is supposed to feel like it’s evolving in front of your eyes. In the same way that our lives and the world just kind of emerge constantly in front of us, and wherever we turn, we’re just making sense of it. But yet all the images are different, but they’re all connected. How do you do that inside someone else’s narrative in film form? How do you give film consciousness?
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