RaMell Ross (Hale County This Morning, This Evening) leveraged his background in documentary filmmaking and unique perspective to bring to life Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys to vivid life onscreen. Ross and his creative team were less focused on telling a fully narrative story than they were giving the audience the lived-in perspective of the novel’s two main characters, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), as they navigate the horrors of the Nickel Academy. The film takes a first person POV to orient the audience within this world and ask them to step into these two boys’ shoes for the duration of the film.
Naturally, a traditional editing approach needed to be tweaked to shape the story and its pace in a way that allowed for the first person POV to breathe. Editor Nicholas Monsour immediately understood the structure of the film and its difference from a traditionally lensed narrative feature.
“The one thing that was pretty obvious was they really wanted to capture long swaths of action from one angle, and that made me think immediately that we needed to really be more strict than usual about the timings of these scenes. It wasn’t that we were trying to fit the movie into a ‘cookie cutter’ pattern of act structure. The structure is in the narrative in a very specific way to the experience of these characters,” Monsour explained. “The main thing was how do you maintain that pace that you feel and want the movie to have while you are depending on the real world to cooperate with that timing, with what the actors do and what animals do and how long it takes to physically move through a space.”
That pacing required intensive collaboration with Jomo Fray, the cinematographer, with the script supervisor, and with Ross to walk through each beat of a scene and plan for the assembly of the finished product. Often, the filmed scene would come in at a different timing pattern than originally anticipated, so Monsour needed to adjust how the scene would flow in the edit.
Because the film shifts point of view between Elwood and Turner, the editing rhythms shifted to reflect that change in perspective. For example, the first time that the POV shifts occurs during a cafeteria scene where Elwood and Turner initially bond. To mark that change, the edit includes a flash-forward in time of a character traveling in a boxcar. The film had previously inserted moments of still photography and archival footage, but here, the flash-forward marked an almost subconscious departure from the on-going narrative.
“It wasn’t just about now we’re seeing through this [character’s] eyes, now we’re seeing through this [character’s] eyes. Many of the threads were all shifting at that moment, and that was part of the decision to play that scene twice, once from Elwood’s point of view, once from Turner’s point of view,” Monsour said. “Because again, it was a cue to the audience that this isn’t just about shifting sort of CCTV coverage from one angle to another. This is shifting a whole frame of mind and even whose memory are we in necessarily.”
One particularly compelling aspect of the film’s edit is the relationship between editor and actor. Given the first person POV, we often don’t see the face of the actor as he’s performing the scene. Yet, the audience grows to understand the character and their internal narrative through what they choose to see in the world. We understand through the first act of the film that Elwood grew up with a deep love in comic books and space exploration. That infers specific details about the character that, in later scenes, contrast with what we think we know about him.
Monsour became awe-struck by dailies as he saw what Ross captured from his fantastic company of actors, including Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Hamish Linklater in addition to newcomers Herisse and Wilson. Performances of that calibre become a precious commodity for an editor.
“The work that these actors did to psychologically go to the places this film goes is so breathtaking to see that I often just feel like handling this kind of precious material all comes through the edit computer, all this stuff that people have done — the costumes, the production design, all of that, especially the actors, because they kind of hand over their work for you to finish in a way — if you start cheating it and saying, ‘Oh, grab that look and put it here,’ you might be right, but you really have to think about it because there might be some logic that they brought to their character that you’re not picking up on. I find trusting what they’ve done to be most useful.”
Nickel Boys is now playing in New York and will open in Los Angeles on Friday, December 20. It will later stream exclusively on Prime Video.
