Cinema’s most transcendent promise is that it can put us in another person’s shoes. But what if a film could take that further and allow us to see directly through someone else’s eyes? And not only that but experience how others look at the individual whose skin we are inhabiting? That kind of intimacy could, hopefully, lead to greater empathy.
Told mostly in the first-person point of view, director RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys” is an experiential — and experimental — adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel from 2019.
The real-life horrors at Florida’s Dozier School for Boys inspired Whitehead’s source material. Founded in 1900, the institution closed its doors in 2011 after an investigation unearthed multiple cases of abuse and death and evidence of unmarked graves.
Ross’s vivid reimagining of the book includes cutaways to archival photos and documents about Dozier, but its primary interest is the lived-in sensory impressions of Elwood (Ethan Herisse), an idealistic Black teen raised by his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in 1960s Tallahassee, and Turner (Brandon Wilson), a friend Elwood meets after he is falsely accused of a crime and unjustly sent to Nickel Academy, a stand-in for Dozier.
Watching “Nickel Boys” entails surrendering to its “sentient perspective,” as Ross calls the cinematography. It means discovering the warmth and harshness of the world as Elwood encounters it — and later, as Turner does — not merely as a spectator but as if living it ourselves. And when other characters look directly into the camera to address Elwood or Turner, they are seeing us through the screen.
The feat of narrative innovation has already earned Ross and his cinematographer, Jomo Fray, prizes from critics’ groups and gasps from audiences. “Nickel Boys” is Ross’ first foray into scripted fiction following his Oscar-nominated, nonlinear documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” which observes moments of modern-day Black life in Alabama.
“I never questioned whether or not it would work,” Ross, 42, tells me, lying on the carpeted floor of a suite in a Beverly Hills hotel. “Allowing [a viewer] to be simultaneous with the experience of someone else is what’s missing from human beings’ capacity to be vicarious.”
With his hands behind his head and one leg crossed atop the other, the director’s pose appears both tense and relaxed. The making of “Nickel Boys” required a similar balancing act: meticulous technical artifice to deliver a seemingly spontaneous lyricism.
First, Ross co-wrote the screenplay with Joslyn Barnes, also a producer on the film and on “Hale County.” The pair received a manuscript of Whitehead’s book from production companies Plan B and Anonymous Content before it was published in 2019.
Out of “respect and self-preservation,” Ross says, the writing duo knew from the onset that they wanted to distill the essence of the novel without taking any imagery directly from its pages. To avoid comparisons based on what made it in and what didn’t, Ross reinterpreted the fictional character’s lives by filtering them through his own personal prism.
“One of the benefits of me adapting the film is that I’m Elwood and Turner,” he says. “I’m a Black child. All I have to do is think about my life, what I’ve seen, what I’ve experienced, and apply it to their narrative. It feels authentic because it is.”
Ross’ own “Hale County” served as a key visual and philosophical reference for “Nickel Boys.” He thought about the frames as if Elwood and Turner each had their own cameras and were making their own version of “Hale County.” What would they focus on? This meant that the writing was image-based rather than linguistic.
“To take point-of-view very seriously and bring the camera into their bodies,” Ross says, “we needed to know how they look at things, how meaning is made for them, and how does that display the person that they are?”
Throughout this transformation of the material, it wasn’t lost on Ross and Barnes that the film was being produced via major companies rather than in total independence. And while they were steadfast in their intent to make it first-person, there were concerns about the emotional resonance such a drama could have with viewers.
“It’s a film where ideally you’re on the edge of your seat, leaning forward and participating as opposed to just receiving it passively,” says Barnes on a video call.
At the heart of “Nickel Boys” was “the transfer of love,” as Barnes puts it, between the characters: Hattie’s love for Elwood opens him up to the compassionate message of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which instills in him a larger sense of political awareness. Later, Hattie hugs a more cynical Turner, which enables him to forge a fraternal bond with Elwood, their friendship a turning point.
Ross also points to a similar scene of transference involving Ellis-Taylor looking directly at us, the viewers, with the love with which she would look at her grandson. It’s quietly revolutionary in its cinematic power, the emotional core of the film.
“Normally as an audience we would watch her look at her grandson and we would know that she’s looking at him with love, but we only know it — we don’t experience it,” Ross says. “I haven’t seen a person look through the lens into the soul of the audience with that type of love.”
But because the eyes we are looking through are those of a Black teen in the Jim Crow South, often the “returned gaze,” as Barnes refers to how others see Elwood and Turner, is one of racist prejudice. Early on, we witness the sternness with which a white police officer stares at young Elwood just for crossing his path.
“People have been doing POV forever, like ‘Hardcore Henry,’ but that’s not something that happens inside the drama of other people’s lives, and specifically inside the race of other people’s lives,” says Ross.
For viewers not from racialized identities, there might be a novelty to being in this position — ideally paired with a new sense of solidarity — but for those intimately familiar with Elwood’s lived experience, watching “Nickel Boys” may evoke complicated emotions.
Ross believes that a Black person (and other people of color) watching the film, which puts them inside another Black person’s worldview, might actually amplify their own experience.
“You’re like, ‘Finally, I’m actually seeing myself represented in the most personal way, from the inside,’” explains Ross. “But then you’re also almost retraumatized.” With that in mind, Barnes and Ross deliberately avoided showing any onscreen physical violence.
Cinematographer Fray, speaking on Zoom from New York, was eager to try it out and break what he calls the “membrane” between the audience and the story on the screen in conventional filmmaking. That separation prevents the viewer from fully connecting to what they are seeing. “Nickel Boys” throws that off.
Producers suggested Fray to Ross as a possible collaborator. During their first meeting, Fray shared his intent to make the movie feel like Ross’ renowned work in large-format photography. That informed, egoless comment won the director over.
“What RaMell was always after was trying to make an immersive experience,” Fray explains, “to invite the audience not only into the idea of the hostility of the Jim Crow South but also invite them into the very bodies of Black youths, to feel what it feels like to go through the world as them.”
Some of the references that Ross and Fray discussed were Terrence Malick’s breathtaking “The Tree of Life” and the grueling Russian medieval sci-fi masterpiece “Hard to Be a God.”
The result was a rigorous shot list of intentionally designed maneuvers — “maybe 35 or 36 pages, single-spaced,” Fray recalls, “meticulously describing every single pan, tilt, gesture or move with the camera.”
Each scene was conceived as a long take or “oner,” an uninterrupted and unedited continuous shot. How these were executed varied. It was mostly Fray, Ross and camera operator Sam Ellison moving through the spaces.
“The difference between the camera on my shoulder versus holding it between my hands is that the latter feels more like a head on a neck,” says Fray. “You can swivel and make really quick adjustments in a way that you can’t physically do with the camera on your shoulder.”
The actors, either Herisse or Wilson, would stand close to the person operating the camera, not only to deliver lines but to capture their hands in the frame touching objects or interacting with their co-stars.
On a few occasions, the two leads wore custom rigs that attached the camera to their bodies for a hyper-visceral effect. Elsewhere, the filmmakers used a SnorriCam, a different camera device, attached to the older Elwood (Daveed Diggs) and shooting him from behind, to convey the out-of-body, dissociative experience that trauma can inflict on survivors.
Whoever was operating the camera was essentially embodying Elwood or Turner. “As a cinematographer, this put me in a fundamentally different relationship with image-making,” says Fray. “When the camera hugs a character, it’s me they’re physically hugging, and that intimacy is felt.”
One instance that revealed to Fray just how transformative this storytelling approach could be involved Ellis-Taylor.
“Aunjanue goes off-book,” remembers Fray. “She touches the table and she just says, ‘Elwood, look at me, son.’ It was then that I went from camera operator and cinematographer to scene partner. She needed me, as Elwood, to understand what she’s saying and so my camera drifts back up and makes eye contact back with Aunjanue.”
Since its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, “Nickel Boys” has inspired passionate reactions.
“I don’t know if it’s the form of the film, if it’s POV, if it’s the specific imagery or sounds,” Ross says. “One imagines it’s all those things combined, but no one’s ever said remotely the same thing after watching. It always elicits a subjective response.”
For all its formal daring, “Nickel Boys” has a humanistic essence. Hopefully, once the camera shuts its flickering eye, audiences feel like they know these characters better than they ever imagine knowing another.
