A title card at the start of RaMell Ross’s debut feature, Hale County, This Morning This Evening, seemed to serve as a vision statement for his work: “using time to figure out how we’ve come to be seen.” The filmmaker’s impressionistic documentary portrait, which followed the ordinary lives of two men in the Black Belt of the American South, heralded a filmmaker immediately comfortable interrogating how viewers perceive images.
With his first foray into fiction filmmaking, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys, Ross pushes that language to new heights in interrogating historical narratives and invoking the audience’s empathy. The horrors of a Florida reform school—inspired by the real-life Dozier School for Boys—in the 1960s are felt, not shown, through Jomo Fray’s first-person camerawork in Nickel Boys. Inverting the long history of image-making that largely treats Black bodies as objects of surveillance, Ross plunges us into the subjective experiences of Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) as they learn to interpret the events taking place around them, as well as how the world sees them.
While the editing style of Nicholas Monsour evokes the historical archive throughout the film, Ross’s bold reframing of the narrative gaze doesn’t get mired in resurrecting or relitigating the past. His Nickel Boys, which he co-wrote with Joslyn Barnes, is an ecstatic invitation into the act of deconstructing a learned vocabulary of visual storytelling. The film points toward a world in which images can be used as a tool of liberation, not mere documentation.
I spoke with Ross before Nickel Boys opened in theaters. Our conversation covered how the work changed from script to screen, pushing forward the idea of point of view with his collaborators, and why he thinks the viewer completes the film.
Revisiting Hale County, I was struck again by the use of the intertitles asking all those existential questions about images. You’re not using the same device in Nickel Boys, but if you were, what questions would you be asking? Would it be like Millie asks with the home video camera at the end, “How do we see ourselves?”
Man, that’s a really good question, and I can’t answer it [without sounding] basic. The intertitles in Hale County are a bit poetic and draw from the writing I’ve done. Actually, they would be like stuff that I’ve written in prose, or poetic essays exploring film. “People are the real documents of civilization,” or “The God of the camera is a colonizer,” stuff like that.
I rewatched the film with the screenplay in hand, which was a fascinating experience. First, the screenplay provides detailed breakouts of those very discrete actions, especially at the beginning. That had the obvious purpose of being a blueprint for the POV cinematography, but did having to write that level of granularity also give you additional insight into the characters’ psychology?
Yeah! I think I was very fortunate to be the writer of the thing that I was going to direct because I could have that continuity across [it]. When building out the language with Joselyn, we could actually think about how it would be shot. Then, collaborating with Jomo, we’re not starting from, [in a faux serious voice] “What’s the visual language? What’s this going to be like?” It’s more, “How do we feel in the context of these POV shots that are articulated? How long does it take for someone to look over to the left and to the right?” It gave us a huge jump start.
What was the line between being prescriptive for the sake of the production while still giving the actors space to make it their own? What’s on screen often diverges slightly from what’s on the page.
A lot of it is just actors being actors. Their job is multifaceted, and I can never summarize it. But I would imagine, for most directors—or at least for myself—their job isn’t to be a machine or a robot of the script. It’s to breathe the words and to live the characters. And, in that, you don’t know what they’re going to do…and you also don’t want them to do exactly what’s there. That’s just a guide, and it’s something for them to fall back on more than it is for something for them to lead. You’ve seen the film, the talent that we were working with, they did more than embody. I feel like they, to some degree, lived, especially as they’re transferring the emotion through the lens, through the film, and playing into the eyes and brains of the audience.

The actors had to look into the camera directly and break established protocol by acknowledging its gaze to achieve the first-person POV. Was it important to have that line of continuity around camera consciousness running from the moment of capturing the image to an audience interpreting it?
This is very much a film that takes even more literally something that was important in Hale County, This Morning This Evening, which is the idea that the viewer completes the film. It’s genuinely only half real until it’s engaged with human consciousness to fill in the gaps and revel in the poetry. It’s like how a human being can’t understand the world outside of themselves in ways unless they’re perceived. To be seen is as important as seeing, and without the audience, there isn’t even a world in which people are trapped. It’s a world in which people have no relationship with another person, essentially. The main characters, at least.
I was at BAM in 2018 when you presented Lime Kiln Field Day, the Bert Williams film you incorporated into Hale County. That work of critical fabulation to fill in the untold stories of marginalized people was already something you were working with then, so how did it evolve and expand with Nickel Boys?
I like any reference to Saidiya Hartman in general. It feels like most folks still haven’t heard of the work that she’s done and the language and concepts she’s presented. As an evolution, it’s just to take it more seriously in terms of applying those ideas to the mythology that Colson produced. Actually having source material as in the Dozier School documents and pictures of those boys was something to both elevate and make monumental but also be a portal. It’s a dream come true for an artist to make something with the resources and the scale that Nickel Boys had but allow oneself to always be grounded in the filmmaking process by the truth of its origin story. It’s a genuine privilege. And we had way more information about the events around their lives than Saidiya did, especially when she was [writing] Wayward Lives.
When you’re thinking about the archive and editing in general, what guides your philosophy? It strikes me as more than just a Kuleshov effect of one plus one equals two. With the juxtaposition and the collision of these images, both found and captured, it feels like it’s you’re creating multitudes.
Thank you! I would say that, as my goal, it’s to create multitudes by putting the images together. It’s supposed to be one plus one equals all. Three plus despair equals enlightenment or revelation. It’s supposed to be employing moments of the archive that are trapped in this bizarre, unidirectional power dynamic and almost statistical representations of people, recontextualizing those moments in a contemporary archive, which is the Nickel Boys film, but also giving them breathing room. I like to think about very silly things like, “What is an image that has free will?” An image that has its own destiny, not the destiny of the person who made the image. Maybe that’s just true in general because once it leaves the purview of the maker, it becomes subject to the whims of culture. But I think that there’s maybe something deeper with images being ambiguous and recontextualized.
Franois Truffaut once said, “The film is the critique of the script, and the editing is the critique of the shooting.” How did that critical process work on Nickel Boys given that so much of the final product was envisioned from the script stage?
To take that quote and think about our version, it would be: Culture gave birth to the Dozier document, the Dozier document gave birth to The Boys of the Dark; The Boys of the Dark gave birth to Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys; The Nickel Boys gave birth to our Nickel Boys, which gave birth to the script and production, and it keeps going. I think about it as more of an evolution of form and less of a filling in the gaps or a lens on each one. There’s something accumulative about the way that this film is built, which you’re implying has a sort of entropy or a multitude that I hope feels exponential, and it feels subject to the mood and the feelings of the time in which a person’s encountering it. Maybe it’s true for all films, but the degree to which it’s true here, I think, is different. If you watch this film in a good mood, in a bad mood, with doldrums, or brooding, there are ways that you read the image juxtapositions differently because that’s the nature of bringing together two things that are discrete and singular.

What informed decisions like delaying more glimpses of the older Elwood? The script has some images of him at the computer early on.
It became important to maintain the momentum of Elwood’s life. We ended up not having as many images that we were happy with of Elwood as a child, so to jump forward in time, you would lose the thin emotional relationship and tie that we were trying to build. Also, it would be too confusing. Once we started to develop the practical shooting technique with Jomo, we realized that jumping to the future with the same camera technique would be confusing. What were some solutions to maintain the formal integrity of the film but also push forward the idea of point of view? We came up with the SnorriCam and put it behind [Daveed Diggs], and then it became its own sort of thing.
The film’s middle section trades POV between Elwood and Turner within scenes more than appears on the page. How did that language shift come about?
A lot of it had to do with just the way that it felt. [What] we have on paper made the most sense, all things being equal and preconceived. But if you’re making a film and everything’s preconceived…good luck! It may work, but I would argue there’s no way it does—unless it’s a conceptual film, and what it feels like and what it is less important than its connection with an audience. And so, in the edit, we have these things shot, we have the script as our blueprint. Things aren’t moving so far from the way the script is, and there are a couple of changes, but it just doesn’t work. We’re like, “We’re not seeing this person’s face long enough. The way that this person says this at the moment needs something else, so let’s just jump out of their point of view and view them from the other person.” It tells you what it wants to be.
Does something similar happen with some of the archival footage that you’re working with? There was a lot more of the narration of the Apollo 8 footage in the script, and some of The Defiant Ones got moved up as well.
Exactly, it didn’t feel right the way that it was written. That’s the beauty of working with an editor as talented as Nick [Monsour], who can watch something, make another change, then watch it again and genuinely meet the new thing where it is. As opposed to being like, “Well, last time when we had it, I’m still kind of thinking about…” He can allow his brain to press a reset for certain relationships to watching. Obviously, he’s talented in many other ways, but I attribute a lot of it to the patience and the experimental openness of Nick to get to these narrative needs without traditional form. We very much wanted the film to feel like it was evolving as you’re watching it, as a sort of person’s mind does. That’s not something that works until you’re 90% to 95% there. When you’re 70% there, it looks like madness. It doesn’t make sense!
Obviously, no film is made alone. Even Hale County, where you hold credits for editing and cinematography. But how do those additional points of view in key collaborative positions enrich Nickel Boys, especially your Hale County producer Joslyn Barnes who served as your co-writer here?
We made this thing up called the “edit team” for Hale County, This Morning This Evening, with Maya Krinsky, Robb Moss, and Joslyn Barnes. While they didn’t edit the film, I was in conversation with them about the edit. I would edit by myself for a week and then have these flash group conversations. I realized through that process that while Jos does read as a financial and social producer, whatever that means, she’s a deep creative producer. She’s quite brilliant, and I wanted to ensure that her voice was in almost every element of decision-making. And she’s also a great writer. She wrote [Athina Rachel Tsangari’s] film Harvest that was in the Venice and New York Film Festivals [this year]. It was thrilling to problem-solve point of view with her, and it prepared it to be developed even further with Jomo. Then, it prepares to be developed even further with Nick. We developed the point of view with Nick almost as much as with Jomo because we’re figuring out the language of the audience’s relation to what we already have. The hardest part was the edit. I had a very good sense of what the film would look like and what it should feel like, but the edit tells you itself. It’s like a little baby.
As I’ve been sitting with the film, I couldn’t help but think of the famous Kierkegaard quote: “Life can only be understood backward, it must be lived forwards.” Nickel Boys gives us such a singular way to make sense of what came before us. How do you hope people cast that vision ahead of us?
Well, I love a Kierkegaard [quote]! My favorite is, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” But the backward/forward relationship reminds me of this line by Henri Bergson, who said vision is coterminous with history. That was a driving force for the film—that the process of looking is a process of decoding the social world. It’s not this objective, “I just see things as they are.” While I would say I’m more of an existentialist than an essentialist, there’s something essential about cultural vision. I’m hoping that people just look at camera language as something that’s up for debate and genuine evolution. The information that happens is all about order of operations. When you’re looking and you see something before you see something else, if you swap those, the meaning of everything is different. It’s so bizarre, and that’s fun to think about. It shows you how fickle meaning and reality is, and should hopefully open up portals to empathy.
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