Director RaMell Ross's vision gives 'Nickel Boys' new perspective (2025)

When he read Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Nickel Boys,” director RaMell Ross knew immediately what he wanted to do with it.

For his screen adaptation, called “Nickel Boys,” he decided it needed a “poetic approach” inside Whitehead’s narrative.

“We wanted (the actors) to be as comfortable as possible embodying their characters or becoming their characters,” Ross says. “So, I think it was more a surprise for them that it would be directly into the camera and wouldn’t have as much movement as normal because it’s a single-point perspective.”

Figuring it out

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who plays the grandmother of one of the boys, didn’t understand what he was going to do until she got to work the first day. Since the film didn’t have a large budget “we didn’t have hours in the day to figure it out. I had to embrace all the things that otherwise would have been enemies or hindrances.”

Basically, that meant doing a fiction film as if it were a documentary, Ross’s wheelhouse.

“The work he did in ‘Hale County’ was something I felt as a Southerner,” Ellis-Taylor explains. “I felt someone saw my reality in a beautiful way. I knew that he would do something that matched that in his narrative filmmaking.”

Ross’s motives were just as pure with “Nickel Boys.”

“There’s a different register and resonance when you make a documentary film,” he says. Viewers “know they’re coming into something that’s truthful.”

Fiction offers more flexibility.

Confidence helps

For Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, the actors who play two of the boys at the academy, Ross’s approach was understandable. “He was very confident,” Wilson says. “So, it was an easy conversation.”

Actors stood behind the camera to deliver their lines and help their co-stars. “For this, the camera is the person you’re talking to, that you’re giving everything to,” Herisse says. “There’s nothing to compare it to.”

The approach gives the audience a chance to “live in another person’s shoes,” he adds. “You’re seeing a life unfold and you’re not being detached from it. You’re fully experiencing it.”

The method, Ross says, is designed to let the viewer learn more about himself or herself. “We fundamentally think we know a lot about ourselves, but this type of film puts up a very specific type of mirror, which I think is useful.”

Truth-based

Whitehead’s book and Ross’s movie detail what it’s like to be falsely accused of stealing a car. Without a chance to clear his name, Elwood Curtis is sent to a segregated reform school, which is based on an actual school from the 1960s. There, he meets a boy named Turner and the two try to survive abuse from the school’s administrators.

When Ellis-Taylor’s character comes to see her grandson, she’s denied a visit and forced to find her own way into the world.

Making the film taught Ross he was more interested in others than himself. “I found out that it’s actually possible to employ the camera in a way that touches on the emotional, internal tenors of an audience without using expected modes.”

An assistant professor of visual art at Brown University, Ross hasn’t shown the film to his students but he’s ready for their assessment.

“They know me so well,” he says with a smile. “I am looking forward to it.”

He’s also eager to experiment with documentary films.

“If it wants to be in the fiction space, then it’ll be there,” he says. “If it wants to be in the doc space, it’ll be there.”

Under other circumstances, Ross says, it might have been difficult making the transition from one form to another. Here, however, "I felt completely supported by the producers and by the collaborators. No one ever asked me to make any sort of distinctions between documentary and fiction. They allowed me to do the thing that I do. So I was able to be fairly fluid between the two genres."

"Nickel Boys" opens in theaters this month.