
Nickel Boys is a powerful film that you won’t soon forget. It is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Colson Whitehead, which was inspired by the shocking true life story of the Dozier School for Boys, which in recent years has been discovered to be highly abusive to generations of young boys.
RaMell Ross, Academy Award nominee for Hale County This Morning, This Evening, directed the film in POV, which is an undeniably purely cinematic way of literally putting you in the protagonists’ shoes. I can’t imagine anyone leaving the theater un-shook after experiencing this perpetual institutional horror. This is an artfully told film that honors the past and speaks very clearly to the present day.
The film is not a somber piece either, despite the weight of their situation the filmmaker also celebrates the beauty of everyday life with long shots of nature and artful doses of archival images. Ross has been doing lots of events and I was very impressed by how long he spent with everyone who wanted to speak to him at the event I was at. We recently connected over Zoom.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]
How did you first get involved with this project? What was it about the book that grabbed you?
I was asked by Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner to read the book. It was equally the way it was told and the sort of space within the way it was told to sort of imagine poetically. The characters are so strong, and the way that they’re related is so charged, but I thought I could add a point of view with the poetics of the period. Those visuals don’t exist for all the reasons one can imagine and the reasons people know and that was enough for me. It’s an opportunity to kind of repopulate an archive to kind of alter today’s quotidian idea.
I love it when directors bring in new talent. It’s great seeing the other people that we know, but there’s something special about new faces… You are viewing the world mostly through Ellwood’s point of view, and then later Turner of course. What was it like meeting those boys for the first time?
We had Victoria Thomas as our casting director. We sent out a blast and she sent us a whole bunch of tapes and those two just were magnetic and stood out distinctly. They were, I remember Dede Gardner, one thing she said to me before we started the process was just make sure that you’re more than a hundred percent sure of the boys. Brandon Wilson was the first, Ethan Herisse was the last, and I think we cast Ethan maybe two weeks before we were going to shoot, and during their chemistry read is when we kind of knew we had a film officially.
Jocelyn Barnes is your collaborator on this. Can you talk a little bit about adapting the book with her? What was your process like? As a writer, I always find partnerships a little bit challenging. How did that work on this?
We had worked together before and I knew her creative sensibilities. Plan B had connected us for this project and after our first meeting I asked her to co-write and we proceeded to lay out the film visually. We built an image-based treatment as an edit of the film to explore how Elwood and Turner see the world differently. Then we populated it with the necessary language to convey certain moments. We worked with this idea called adjacent imagery – imagery that’s not solely plot-driven. It has a sort of experiential, metaphoric, and symbolic resonance so that it’s not so utilitarian.

Adjacent Imagery is an underused cinematic tool that can be quite powerful when used well. It helps to evoke a mood… When did you realize you wanted to shoot this in POV?
From the very beginning, I knew I wanted to do this in POV. The entire treatment and script, it’s all written using the camera and the language of visuality. So you get to learn the way that the people see the world from where they look in the scene.
I hadn’t seen a movie like this where the POV changes from character to character. Where did that idea come from or how did it come about? It’s such a powerful storytelling device in this film.
I didn’t study film. I come from an art background, so I’m just doing the more instinctual things. To me, POV is a more natural way to use the camera. This became the camera language of Nickel Boys. When I read Colson’s book, because I think in first person, it’s just a very natural imaginary space.
It’s fascinating. I’d love to see the idea go further or just continue and explore new ideas with it.
I tell my students to make films. Go somewhere, take your camera, edit it, shoot it, learn a photographic sensibility. Most filmmakers, just outsource their vision to their DP. They’re not framing the images. They don’t necessarily think visually. I feel like it’s almost the future of filmmaking because cameras are so portable.

Cameras are everywhere. Literally. We’re all on camera all the time. There are infinite possibilities. So let us mention your DP because obviously, Jomo Fray did an amazing job on this. Talk a little bit about working with him…
I’m really lucky to have come across the collaborators I did and Jomo Fray, he was a really big fan of Hale County This Morning, This Evening and had studied a bit of my photography. One of the first things he said was he wanted to sort of reproduce the density of the large format images I make. He has a particular ability to address the emotional volume of an image. He is deeply fluid with camera systems and lenses and has, I think just natural ability to think about the image as an interface for something other than illustration, and the combination of us two is art.
How much did the true story weigh on you while you were making it? Did you do a lot of research about the actual or did you just stick to the book?
I mean we went back to Colson’s source materials. There’s this book called ‘The Boys of the Dark: A Story of Betrayal and Redemption in the Deep South’, which is a sort of nonfiction account of the Dozier School For Boys. Then there’s a document called the Dozier Document, which is 156 page or so forensic account of what happened on the grounds and what items were exhumed.
In this process, you look at those images inside the Dozier Document and you’re like, there’s no more powerful images than these. They have to be in the film. We decided early on that it was just as important that we paid homage or gave homage to the Dozier boys as it was as much as Carlson’s mythology essentially.
And the actual school didn’t close until 2011? How is that possible?
It’s mind-blowing. It was an accident of course, that they found the stuff. It wasn’t even like they were like, somebody did things wrong at this school. Let’s look. It was just like this young student who found a bone that looked a little weird and they test the bone and they realize it’s human and then they start to exhume bodies and then the truth comes out.

How long did the edit take you? Was it a really long edit or were you very precise or how did that work?
You never have enough time. I think we had four or five months… Nicholas Monsour is just an incredible brain and incredible editor and he was the organizing principle of at least the edit days. He has an uncanny ability to memorize all the scenes and be able to make the POV work in the cuts because it’s quite difficult, obviously it’s not a natural or at least a previously used language.
He had to adapt to the shooting style and then have the unnatural task of integrating all this archival footage, which was written into the script but doesn’t feel it’s all about touch and it’s all about the meaning that can be made by the pulling out of what comes from an image when you put it beside another and all these things.
Do you have any favorite moments in the film?
I love the moment when Turner goes underwater and swims to Elwood then he reaches up with his left hand to touch one of Elwood’s scars and then it cuts to an archival image. Yeah, that’s my favorite one.
This is an excellent movie. It played Telluride, it’s up for a bunch of awards, and you’ve won a few awards. I didn’t know this story before, even though it’s an honored book. Thank you for bringing it to the forefront. What is it like being on the other end of this now that you’re showing it to people?
It’s incredible because honestly, you don’t think when you’re doing something that is so intentional and rooted in the ethics of the source material that it will be received this way. You make that decision and the reason why you’re doing it is because you think that it says something important and it is something important. It’s surreal because you’re not supposed to be rewarded. This world usually doesn’t reward you for doing things righteously.
Nickel Boys is now playing in theaters.