RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys is an astonishing document of America’s racial past told through a bracingly empathetic, first-person point of view. The unique lensing by cinematographer Jomo Fray visualizes the story of Elwood (Ethan Herisse), an impressionable kid from Tallahassee, Florida, who’s ripped away from the caring arms of his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) to the abusive boys’ reformatory Nickel Academy. This filming style, along with Ross and Joslyn Barnes’ adaptive screenplay, is the kind of radical humanization that bucks against nearly the entirety of cinematic history for a new subjectivity that elides any simplistic definition of Black existence.

Similar to Ross’s transcendent Academy Award-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Nickel Boys fundamentally sees Black life through the eyes of those who’ve lived it, taking inspiration from a real subject. Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys is based on the Dozier School for Boys, an actual reform school that was discovered to have committed heinous crimes against young Black men. Nevertheless, Ross’s film isn’t what you’d expect from a story set at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. This isn’t a series of traumatic events inflicted upon a Black body. Rather, it’s a story of how a friendship, shared by Elwood and his worldly buddy Turner (Brandon Wilson), transports the pair away from the suffocating confines of brutal racism toward a type of freedom that seemingly transcends time, form and the corporeal.

Nickel Boys’ blending of first-person framing, ed with archival footage and catalogued artifacts in a nonlinear story, is the type of intrepid filmmaking that’s been wowing viewers, as seen in its 4.1 average rating at the time of writing. Mitchell puts it well when he says, “Cinematic moonshot. Cards on the table. Gambles all of its chips on faith in the medium and achieves something I don’t even fully know how to articulate the importance of now; but if film is going to be preserved as an art form, it’s films like this that are going to ensure it.” Nickel Boys’ daring and ambitious power often overwhelms its audience, inviting them to ruminate on Ross’s meaning-making. Darryl writes, “Devastating and beautiful. My entire theater was dead silent and didn’t move for about a minute after the final shot.”

The opening montage of Elwood’s childhood features images of him underneath a Christmas tree or at a family party and other quiet formative events—they’re meant to give us a sense of Elwood’s innocence. How did you choose what memories would best convey who Elwood the child is?
I wanted to pull out what felt like the epic banal—I like to say that term. What feels real and what feels quotidian for a kid or for a sensitive viewer or for someone who’s deeply analytical is epic. They all come from my memory and my imagination that aligns, I think, so much with Elwood and Turner as children. In this case, specifically Elwood, it was quite easy to imagine images. I have so many more that we had to cut from the film for good reasons. 

These memories also possess such wonderful spontaneity, such as when Elwood is on the bus and a little girl slides on the floor underneath his seat, and his eyes follow her as she slides back under.
There’s nothing more beautiful than being a human being, at least it seems to me from my human perspective. We wanted to give Elwood and the Dozier School for Boys—and I’ve said this before—but quite literally, life. What is life other than the intersection of spontaneity and utility and society and the general momentum of the world? I can recall moments of my life in which things like that occurred that just become indelible impressions, right? Who expects for that moment to happen? And when it does, you’re reminded of something ineffable. You’re reminded of something somatic that can’t be articulated. It doesn’t have any purpose outside of giving life to Elwood, and not having all of his images, or the way we present him, be doomed in a narrative that is moving towards violence.

There’s the spontaneity. But there’s also, I think, what you’re talking about, a kind of life force that feels so familiar. We’ve talked about it before, how you used The Defiant Ones and Lady in the Lake to inform the visual language—what other films, if any, also help shape that?
The film emerged from Hale County This Morning, This Evening and some of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, and, of course, The Tree of Life. I talk about Toni Morrison and her orientation of writing from the perspective of Black people, not towards the perspective of Black people—centralizing the Black Gaze—which is something I tried to literally do with the camera by making it an organ. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, too; the floral and spiritual ambition and undertones of film and art, which is always the kind of feeling I’m trying to approach when we get to an edit or we get to an image. How can it feel the way in which I feel about that poem? Those are all of the abstract and sometimes literal references.

But it is fascinating. Are you conscious of the voice you’ve built in the midst of working?
I think so, but the language that I would use is the “mode of inquiry”. The ability for Hale County to question and to present the answer to the things I’m interested in that’s found over the course of shooting and editing and making that final product is something that has more iterations and has a sort of value. I’m interested in seeing what that looks like in the context of an actual narrative in Colson’s beautiful mythology. How can you apply that aesthetic to characters? And if so, what does that feel like and what does that tell you about them? Does it tell you anything? It’s just part of the same ongoing question.

How do those lines of inquiry translate to your production of images?
One of the breakthrough sentences that I wrote was that “I wanted to use time to understand how we came to be seen.” I say that in Hale County, and it sounds super conceptual, and maybe it’s just about patience, but it isn’t necessarily only about patience and looking for a long time. To me, it’s also about making images that are not easily consumed, making images that have that impression that you’re talking about, the one on the bus. There’s an after image inside of you, giving images an element to not just be utilitarian or illustrative, but also giving them time allows a person to be in the context of meaning-making in a way that I find super generative. That was a very intentional approach to this film.

That image making, of course, creates opportunities to flip the perceived meaning of images, too. I’m thinking about the lunchroom scene where we begin half of it from Elwood’s perspective, and then you replay the scene from Turner’s perspective. That moment of inversion isn’t in the book. Why that instance to turn the audience on their head, so to speak?
There are a couple of reasons. We know that shooting a film from one point of view comes with some baggage. Not being able to see the character does affect the way you experience a narrative. That’s good—we need to keep exploring other modes of connecting with narrative and characters. But at the same time, we didn’t want to deprive the audience of seeing him. It’s also such a beautiful idea. When Joslyn [Barnes] and I were talking through what point of view would mean, to have only Turner see him, well, being able to see someone is almost a philosophical and spiritual feat. But in that moment in time in the narrative, you’re almost a little like: ‘I know what the film’s gonna be.’

It coincides with Elwood almost realizing the extent to which he’s in this new world. He goes through the orange grove and he has a couple other moments, I think he sees the football being thrown, and he’s no longer the bright-eyed Elwood you saw in the reflections. He is no longer the bright-eyed Elwood you saw in the photo booth. He’s fundamentally caving into himself. To see him for the first time in that way does something to the audience. Because the viewer as Elwood, from this point in time, aside from getting pulled over, they’ve had an optimistic view of the world, and maybe an optimistic view of one’s disposition in it.

Much like the opening defines a childhood, the ending defines the entirety of someone’s life. But this time it’s not solely through memory, it’s also by way of home movies and the ephemera we use to record someone’s existence.
And god, what an impossible task. My favorite thing to say during interviews is when someone asks about the montage, and I’m like, I made a version of the montage using that same song, and it’s about 60 or 70 percent accurate of what we wanted before we even got halfway through the writing process. I have a version of it that’s me running in a park with my iPhone and breathing, and then cutting to the same footage from that chase because we had already started doing our archival research. It gave Joslyn and I a place we knew we needed to end up at, and it allowed us to omit information with the expectation that it would come together in a deeply emotional way at the end.

It was really a great way to kind of finish the film. Before you even start, you know where you want to end. The process of making those images or imagining those images or organizing those images is one of just sheer intuition. No one can speak in montage and have it be legible. It’s basically like speaking in tongues with actual words in a religious context, so we just wanted to collapse or implode his psychology. We wanted to implode his consciousness and have him find himself.

You’ve talked about meaning-making through images, and the relationship the audience has to that meaning-making. You’ve got Hale County, a documentary, and now this semi-fictional work. So as you’ve come out to the end of both of these, have you found one medium more malleable toward the task of meaning making? Or do you easily switch between these two modes?
You know, Robert, I have no idea because I think the work that I make is always idea-based. I’m just filming my guys in Alabama for a couple years and then I started to get grant money and meet producers, and then I had to determine where my film’s gonna end up. Then you realize that documentary has a very specific purpose in people’s brains. Fiction does a very specific thing, too. But ultimately each of them emerges from the idea. The content produces the form.

So I think whatever the idea is, if documentary makes more sense in of the way it needs to be digested, then it’ll be that and it’ll be ‘fiction’ otherwise. But aside from those, I don’t draw deep distinctions. To me, Hale County is just as much a museum piece as it is a ‘documentary.’ I think it can hold its own in the fiction space too. If you were to say that this is a fictional film, I don’t think it couldn’t be accepted in that way. I think it’s dangerous to have the genre produce the piece.