After making one of the most critically lauded documentaries of the last decade (2018’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening), filmmaker RaMell Ross dove headfirst into his next project: a feature adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys. Ross shot the film entirely from the first-person perspective of the book’s two lead characters, offering a bold, refreshing vision that complements the legacy of its source material. Boxoffice Pro speaks with Ross about his approach to adaptation, his artistic influences, and how his lyrical storytelling carried over from documentary to fiction film.
How do you go from a lyrical documentary to adapting one of the most celebrated novels of our era as your narrative feature debut?
I entered into the process of adapting the book through Hale County This Morning, This Evening and through the lyrical and the poetic elements behind it. I try to maintain a genuine sense of whatever my sensibility is and not try to do things that one would assume one would do when they’re making or adapting a fiction film. When one makes a film, a lot of the process is modeled after the way films have been made, imposing a methodology for fear of walking in the dark and not knowing exactly where to plant the first street lamp as you navigate that darkness. Having done Hale County This Morning, This Evening before Nickel Boys, it was an experience I could rely on. In that sense, [Nickel Boys] emerged from that process.
There’s a difficulty in adapting a novel like The Nickel Boys for the screen. When I told my wife, who’d read the book, that I was going to go see a film adaptation of it, she gave me this puzzled look and asked, “How are they going to be able to pull off that book as a movie?” The entire third act of the book relies on some of the literary devices Colson Whitehead employs and disguises in plain sight early on in the novel. Those literary elements don’t carry over to visual storytelling, creating a structural challenge for any filmmaker adapting the book into a movie or series.
These challenges can be addressed through the screenplay, either in dialogue or tweaking the narrative structure, or in front of the screen, through elements like casting or performance. You address that challenge formally, through the visual grammar of your film by telling the entire story through the first-person perspective. It’s a bold decision, one that could alienate some viewers expecting a more traditional movie. How did you settle on taking this approach and committing to that first-person perspective throughout the film? Did you feel any pressure in taking viewers in that direction?
It’s an interesting question. I think that language—words like “bold” and “pressure”—is slightly imposed. Those factors don’t exist in the same way that maybe they exist in hindsight, after the project is done. When you’re working with materials, and the materials [themselves] produce the form of the project you’re working on, that sincerity between idea, concept, and material in form is relatively righteous. It’s almost self-emergent.
I think if I took my adaptation in the way in which adaptation is traditionally addressed, which is more illustrative, those factors would have been more in the forefront, because I’d constantly be comparing what we were doing to the source material. But that wasn’t the case. We went back to the Dozier School for Boys documents, to the Dozier School boys, and then we went to [the book] The Boys of the Dark, which was one of [author] Colson Whitehead’s source materials, and then finally to Colson’s [novel] The Nickel Boys. The combination of those materials produced our approach.
I think it’s an important distinction to make: The first-person perspective isn’t a stylistic choice; it’s an approach. A stylistic choice enhances a movie; an approach structures the entire narrative to benefit the story.
I love that you’re focusing on that, because it’s frustrating to read people’s reviews or have people talk about it as a “gimmick” or “the style of this film is this.” As you’re mentioning, it is part and parcel with the imagination of the entire world. For the people who haven’t seen the film, to read that, it does them an injustice in not letting them meet the film in a way that is more unencumbered, but it is also just a lack of care or a lack of reading into what’s actually happening.
How did you get everyone involved in the film on board with your vision?
I am fortunate to have come in with a proof of concept in Hale County. I could point to three or four scenes in the film that were quite literally how Nickel Boys would be shot. I’m lucky that Colson’s book is about two American black boys, and I’m an American black boy. The way that I think about images, specifically from my point of view, just vibes fundamentally with both of the characters. I could offer images and attention to detail, how they would be executed and iterated, for people that just made sense, and it all aligns. There are lot of coincidences that allowed it to be what it is.
How much was Colson Whitehead involved in the making of this film? Because having the author close to the work can sometimes help and sometimes hurt. What was your mindset as you entered this project?
I imagine having the author close to the adaptation would only hurt, almost in all cases. If a filmmaker is attempting to utilize every element of a film, you can’t pay the same attention to all the details that language and literature can offer.
The pressure for me was the idea the film wouldn’t feel satisfactory for those who trusted me to adapt it, therefore cutting down opportunities for the future. People took a pretty big risk in giving me, [co-writer] Joslyn Barnes, and all of the other creatives the creative leeway to explore a lot of these things. To not do it means that the next person won’t have a similar opportunity. To do it well means there’ll be more opportunities, and more risks will be taken. That was the biggest concern. I wanted to deliver a satisfactory film, so that other people can also try, because most people don’t get that chance.
It’s an approach that benefits the narrative and complements the film. Not in the sense that you’re improving it or elevating the source material, but you’re adding to it. You’re adding a dimension that isn’t intrinsic to the original text. I came out thinking about your filmmaking decisions in conjunction with the power of the narrative behind it. It was executed perfectly.
I really appreciate that. Maybe it’s just the awards crowd, but there’s a fundamental hesitation with anything that is asking people to do anything other than sit back and have an emotional experience. Particularly with stories dealing with trauma and history, there seems to be some sort of fixation with the audience’s emotional connection to their stories as the end goal of the film, as opposed to an experiential enlightenment of what it means to see during those times and understand the larger historical context as it relates to features of culture.
I remember somebody responded to the film by saying the story is not served “through a flourish of images” or something like that. I’m like, “Well, that’s not what I took from Nickel Boys,” and also, “Why not?” Why does this story have to be told in the way in which you think it needs to be told, the way in which you expect to have an emotional response to these dead black children? There’s something really fascinating about viewers’ conditioned and programmed entitlement to a means of connecting with a story, while also being entertained. We were lucky enough to be able to approach the topic differently through this film, and maybe that can be part of what we bring to the conversation.
Because it’s a film rooted in first-person perspectives, a big part of these lyrical moments are when you draw on dreams and memories. Moments where we experience that unreliability of a person looking back to their own past. You incorporate wild animals in some of these moments, for example. We’ve seen filmmakers from other countries and cultures employ these devices, but it’s relatively absent from American cinema. What inspired you to infuse an otherwise grounded historical drama with these surrealistic touches?
The second that you think about first-person perspective, the sentient camera, you think about observational logic—the ladder built to address some of the ways in which the camera is working. You have to think about the relationship between our psychological realities, our inner realities, the external “objective” reality, and people’s participation in the objective reality, while having their own internal, psychological, experiential realities in conjunction with yours. The more we know about the brain, the more we know that the less we know. It’s one of those beautiful problems where the way that people exist in the world is simultaneously in fear of and in hope for the future, while reliving their past, while postponing the present, mixing them all together.
One of my favorite quotes from Chris Marker’s La Jetée is something like, “Nothing distinguishes memories from ordinary moments. Only afterward do they claim remembrance on account of their scars.” Thinking about something as complex as that, the distinctions that we make between fantasy, fiction, nonfiction, all of these are basic constructs that we need to shape in order to be social people. But if you’re going to take POV seriously, you have to deal with the idea that people are realities.
It’s interesting you mention Chris Marker, a filmmaker who has also oscillated between lyrical documentary and fictional narratives and who would often bring archival materials into his work and directly address the fallibility of memory.
I’m deeply influenced by Chris Marker. He is one of the greatest artists who has worked with these themes and concepts. He’s a writer, an essayist, a philosopher, and a filmmaker … he’s not interested in just one thing, and therefore, he’s able to make the filmmaking the site of a wider range of human experiences and ideas. That’s something I’m deeply interested in. His work is so moving and thought out. He has some sort of demigod position in my brain. I’m going to stop talking about him before you believe that I’m starting some religion around him.
Nickel Boys is a movie that really benefits from the theatrical experience, especially when you get to share that intimate first-person perspective in a communal setting. What does that theatrical experience mean to you as a filmmaker?
A lot of it has to do with the scale of the moviegoing experience. To have someone sit down and experience cinema as one would a mountain, or as one would a sunset, or some sort of large-scale landscape to which they’re giving themselves. You can’t recreate that at home. When you’re in a theater, you give the screen the sanctity one grants the cosmos. You let yourself go and become small in comparison to something that has been built to be large and sensory, and that’s how a lot of the most beautiful films are meant to be seen.
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