'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross On Leveraging the Lyricism Of Imagery To Relay a Lived Experience [PODCAST]

Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys tells a fictionalized account of two young men — Elwood and Turner — who bond amidst the horrors of the Nickel Academy. The novel was heavily influenced by the real life Dozier School in Florida that operated for 111 years after which dozens of bodies were uncovered in mass graves on the site. The novel, written as a partial response to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, examined the dark truths of sanctioned, institutionalized racism in southern American.

When director RaMell Ross [Oscar-nominee for Hale County This Morning, This Evening] read Whitehead’s novel, he saw in it the opportunity to explore this tragic footnote in American history through an untraditional approach.

“The part that seemed the most paternally satisfying was thinking about the time period in which it takes place and the way that people of color have been represented in photography and film. So, it was specifically around that time and imagining that there’s so much poetry of vision and poetry of life that has been a bit lost,” Ross explained. “This is an opportunity, because Coulson’s narrative is so clear and we know it so well, to fill out the bones of what’s familiar with what is poetic.”

Choosing Nickel Boys as his first narrative feature was not the giant leap from his documentary filmmaking days. In fact, he leveraged techniques learned through nonfiction filmmaking to shape the narrative and visual style of Nickel Boys.

His approach has many critics, including the Gotham Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle which both awarded Ross Best Director of 2024, comparing his work to that of the great visual poet Terrance Malick. It’s an apt comparison given Ross’s approach to the imagery of the film.

“I took point of view and I took the idea of trying to get to experience a person’s lived imagery through a sort of musical use of images. Hale County taught me that it is possible to get to some emotional core that is a sum of images that doesn’t have to be directly illustrative of sort of plot advancement or narrative that has narrative clarity,” Ross recalled. “I used two or three, actually three or four, shots from Hale County as proof of concept of how the camera would move.”

Here, in an interview with The Contending, Ross dives into detail about the making of the film, working with a cast of newcomers as well as the Oscar-nominated Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and gives his thoughts behind why he chose to leverage first-person POV to tell this amazing story.

Click below for my full conversation with Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross. Nickel Boys opens in NY on Friday, December 13, and in Los Angeles on Friday, December 20.