No One Sees the World Like RaMell Ross

The director’s Nickel Boys is a staggering achievement — one we’ll be talking about for years to come.

Fans of RaMell Ross’s Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening might have felt some understandable trepidation about his decision to tackle a literary adaptation for his next feature. Ross’s new film, Nickel Boys, based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, opens the New York Film Festival tonight, after premiering at the Telluride Film Festival last month. How would Ross’s unique filmmaking style — built around montages of evocatively filmed, everyday details — translate into the high-stakes world of prestige studio movies? Surely, he’d have to water down his distinctive approach to deal with producers, actors, period atmosphere, narrative needs, dramatic arcs? Shockingly, he did not. If anything, Nickel Boys is an even bolder work than Hale County, utilizing point-of-view cameras and fusing them with the delicate lyricism of that earlier movie. It’s a staggering achievement — one that’s likely to be talked about for years to come.

Nickel Boys is your first feature-length picture in six years. You worked on Hale County This Morning, This Evening for quite a few years — shooting it over four and laying the groundwork for it in the years preceding. You make that movie, it premieres, it’s acclaimed, it comes out, wins awards, gets nominated for an Oscar. So, what happens the day after? After spending so many years focused on one project, how do you start a new one?
Well, personally, it’s a depressing state, because somewhere in the making of Hale County, it started to feel revelatory. The process of documenting, of participating in these lives, and making these associations, it was almost like a drug — an insight drug, where I was constantly able to see the world anew, and see my people and my race in a way in which I hadn’t encountered yet, specifically in cinema. And it culminated with the release of the film. Then, it goes out in the world, and then I start to talk about it, and I inevitably end up saying the same things at some point. I was like, I can keep it fresh, of course. The work is poetry. I’ll just use poetry. And I just ran out of poetry! As everyone knows, whenever you achieve something, or get some material item, you’re the same person you were before you had it. You’re not going to wake up and be different. So, it was quite depressing, because I no longer had that drug.

But that’s just the personal side. Art-wise, it was the same because I was already making photos and writing. But about four and a half years ago, producers Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner reached out to [Hale County producer] Joslyn Barnes to get in contact with me. As a person who works at my own pace, super slow, I don’t like to answer emails, and I was not interested in making a fiction film. I teach, I’m good, I’m really happy. But Dede made The Tree of Life! And I thought, If I’m going to meet someone, I’ll meet her. Literally the only producer I’ve ever met to make a film, and I get asked all the time. I was hesitant at first, and I expressed my concerns that if we moved into the project, I’d have creative freedom, and Dede and Jeremy were down.

Watching the film, it feels like such a natural outgrowth and continuation of your formal approach on Hale County. When you decided to do the book, did you have an idea in your head already of how you’d go about adapting it?
I hate to sound precious, but once I read the book, I thought POV. I thought poetry. I thought archival. It came pretty fast, because the way I entered the book aligned so much with my aesthetic values. That time period is saturated with archival images that aren’t from our point of view. Generally speaking, they lack the poetry. They lack the interstitialness, the lyricism. How does that affect today’s quotidian? So, if you repopulate that to make a film that’s only poetic in this deep narrative that’s ready-made, it seemed to me not only a radical act, but an actual intervention into visual aesthetics.

It’s fascinating, because when the film first starts, and we get this fragmented, point-of-view style, it feels like maybe we’re watching an aesthetic overture. And we assume it’ll settle into something more conventional eventually. And it absolutely doesn’t! Which then forces us to think about how we process images, and narrative.
It kind of feels like you have a friend that you meet and this friend, and you guys, you’re going to spend an hour together. And in the first 20 minutes they’re the exact same person you knew forever. And then all of a sudden, they start singing opera, and they start doing all these wild things. And they’re just giving you another world of experience with them, which you know because you know them, but also they’re sort of performing in a way that’s very different.

What were your conversations with Colson Whitehead like?
I’d say they were non-existent. It was funny. He and Dede and Jeremy “chose me,” whatever that means. As we finished the script and were going into production, I wrote him an email and was like, “Hey, I always wanted to be a writer,” all this stuff. “Really appreciate it.” And he wrote back, “Thanks for your note. Good luck.” And that was it! At first, I was… not hurt, but I was like, “Oh, man.” Then I realized, “Wait, that’s the best. He’s actually giving me freedom to do my thing.” So, I’m not beholden to him in any way. I am, but not really.

Has he seen the movie?
I think so. Apparently, he’s writing a book right now and he’s hard at work. I’m not complaining.

Almost everyone I’ve talked to about Nickel Boys thought the film was extraordinary, but I’ve spoken to a couple of people who said that they might have found the film more moving if it was more conventional. But that seems to me to be partly the point: When we see ostensibly objective, or conventional depictions of suffering, it can be moving, but there’s also a voyeuristic quality to it. When we’re embedded in the perspective of a person, we start to experience it differently.
I’ve thought about these things so much. One thing in the Zeitgeist that people can understand — though it’s not the exact same thing — is double consciousness. It doesn’t give you the Black double consciousness, but it gives you a type of psychological double consciousness, where you’re both in it and on the outside of it. Traditional cinema is the person that’s walking by the homeless person on the street and being like, “Oh, my god, that’s so horrible.” But then being the homeless person on the street and seeing the people walk by is a different type of filmic experience.

In the past, when filmmakers have tried to shoot an entire film in point-of-view style, it’s tended to be a disaster. I think maybe the only other time it’s worked was a movie that’s about as different as one can imagine from Nickel Boys: Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void.
Oh, I love that film.

I think the problem is that all too often the point of view is combined with a certain fluidity, so suddenly the camera is moving all over the place, which can feel artificial and awkward. Watching your use of point of view here, as you meld it with the impressionistic, fragmented style of Hale County, I realized, Oh, this is how point of view could work. Because this is closer to how we actually experience the world.
To give you a long answer, in the history of Southern photography — large format, eight-by-ten cameras — Walker Evans and William Christenberry are doing things in full focus. F22, you can see everything super-clear, and it’s all super-formal. Then you think about the way that Black musicians have changed the use of instruments just based on their needs and the soul. They’re not using the instruments formally and classically. I don’t use the eight-by-ten camera formally and classically. I use it to express something deep that has to do with my experience in the world. Not a picture of the world, but my experience of it.

My proof of concept for Nickel Boys was Hale County. I used three scenes, and I said, “It’s going to be exactly like this, which is a long lens and shallow focus.” Because you use the language of documentary and the language of cinema, because people think that shaky, moving camera is a person; that’s sort of been its code. So, to have a full-frame, 24mm frame, and you can see everything, we’re trying to replicate the purview of human vision. But like you said, human vision is attention-oriented. It’s not scaled. You can be looking at the entire coast of a place and one little fly can be in your face, and you don’t see anything else. If you can do that with the camera, then you can control someone’s attention in the frame, and not just give them what it is to see from the eyes.

When I watch the film, and when I watch Hale County, it feels more like how my mind works than not. It’s not linear, it’s not straight. It’s not a normal film. It’s jumping time, and jumping textures, and jumping images, and points of view, and focal lengths, and sounds, but also it’s coherent. I think this is actually the way that the brain wants to work. It wants to let us have access to this wide range of associations. But because we’re so utilitarian-oriented, we’re on these one-track minds, reading things in specific ways. We’re just not allowed to let our unconscious flow into our consciousness and be within the image of the world, and the image of ourselves. Images are reductive intentionally for legibility — but they’re also complex, unconsciously, unknowingly. I think that photography, one, rewires our senses. And it’s also produced a language that has to catch up with our brains.

How did you build up and collect all these images initially? Some of them are from the book, obviously. But a lot of it is just life.
That’s where it came from. Life. I just made it up. The beautiful thing about the story is that I can just think about everything I’ve seen. I’m Elwood. I had a childhood, and I love images. And so I can think in images quite well. The original script was images and camera movement. That was it. The hard part is shaping it. We had hundreds of images. And so many that we didn’t shoot that I’m really excited to put in something else, because they’re quite beautiful, and ambiguous, and innocent, and visceral.

I remember when we discussed Hale County a few years ago, you talked about how your still photography had prepared you for that film, in the way that you’d establish the frame and then have the patience to wait for something to happen — for a revelation to happen. When you’re working with something scripted, does that process of discovery change?
It does completely. Especially when you have 33 days. And then you lose 5 days because of COVID. A person gets COVID and has to go, and you lose a scene. But we realized really early, Jomo Fray and I, that you have to miss things. You don’t want to hit every mark. If you hit the marks, then you’re producing it. But if you’re catching up to the world, then you’re in the world. Because the world is separate from your experience of engaging with it. We called it single-point perspective. The camera is situated in a way that it moves a bit like the human neck. So, just being responsive to the environment, but not trying to synchronize with it.

When we talk about the theories behind images, and we talk about things like representation, or challenging convention, it can sound like we’re talking about spinach, or broccoli — like it’s all just stuff that’s “good for you.” But what you create is also beautiful. 
One of the reasons why this approach got pushed through is because I’ve thought so much about my own work. I can talk about my work and my sensibility very clearly. So, it’s convincing! Before we made the script, I had a vision for the film. And I would’ve shot the thing on DSLRs, no problem, and would’ve been completely happy with it, because I’d have control. But I don’t have the technical expertise to make the image as beautiful as you saw it, the way that Jomo, and Nora Mendis, and all of the other production heads, did. Jomo comes in, and he’s a master. And then the concept is capable of developing: “Oh, we can shoot the film as if Elwood and Turner had their own Hale County cameras. We can make it feel like they’re documenting a time period they would not have been capable of documenting, with a poetry that didn’t exist. At 6K with a Sony VENICE on Rialto mode. Have it be a 4:3 aspect ratio.” I can really start to use all the resources from people who are masters of craft and artists in themselves.

Because of the point-of-view approach, your two leads, Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, are often not onscreen, even when their characters are. How do you get them to inhabit their characters in a situation like that?
Well, they came 80 percent ready, so it wasn’t like we needed to retrain them. They’ve been acting since they were kids, but they’re not superstars, and they don’t have long IMDB pages. We did have to set their expectations that they weren’t going to be on camera the entire time. But we still needed them to be present: There’s a lot of hand acting and voice acting, and a lot goes into that. When Elwood’s tying the things over his finger, it’s quite easy to record someone doing that in the real world. But then to have it feel right, that takes direction. They were so open and wanted to genuinely play that. And they were, I think, deeply enthusiastic to be part of a production that was predominantly Black. As a director, I would say I’m kind of fun. I’m not screaming at them. I don’t have rules. They can do anything that they want, and then we’ll go from there and start molding. We went through hundreds to find them, as I’m sure you can imagine. I’d never seen casting tapes directed at me to evaluate, right? That was new.

“Good day, Mr. Kubrick.” That famous video, right?
So good! So good! I actually have a copy of that on my computer. Editor Nick Monsour introduced me to that hilarious tape.

If you look at any period film that involves Black people, actors are embodying characters from that time period. They have an accent, and they’re doing something of what they’ve seen the past is, or they’ve read the past is, or they know the director wants — something like that. So, we got tapes like that. Like a guy had a straw hat on, with a straw thing in his mouth. But this is what Hollywood encourages! Also, if we think about what masculinity looks like in Black culture right now, there were a lot of GQ looks, a lot of chiseled faces, the types of actors that could be in a superhero film and do really well. But it wasn’t someone who conveys the individuality and optimism that an Elwood has, or the cynicism that a Turner has. 

When I saw Brandon, he was just leaning against the window — just the Brandon that you see, running Turner’s lines. He was so flexible and confident in himself. And I thought, Oh, man, that feels like that could be Turner. That’s Turner. Then Ethan, he was a version of that, but he had this optimism. It was early in the process, but I think that was the first time that, visually, the Nickel Boys narrative came alive — because he felt exactly like the Elwood in my head, with his joy of life.

At a certain point in the film, a switch in perspective happens between Elwood and Turner. We’re watching the world through Elwood’s eyes, and then suddenly we’re seeing it through Turner’s eyes as well. How did you decide on this?
That’s something that happened over the writing process with Joslyn. Once we decided that POV is not going to go to everyone — because if you’re going to give POV, then why does everyone not have POV? — then we thought, “Oh, what if we gave it to Turner? What if only Turner could see Elwood? What if only Elwood could see Turner?” The switch, the swap. It becomes more than a camera technique. It becomes a way in which these people are exchanging vitality.

Later, you start to incorporate what seem like archival elements. So, the texture changes again, and another formal element comes in. 
That was scripted the way it’s in there — because that smash of dramatic narrative, that beautiful cinema, with that archival image is a collapse that I think is just necessary and real. You feel that.

Again, it seems like another way in which we experience the story even as we start to reflect on how we experience stories. 
Which is the most human thing ever! We have a whisper in our head, we watch ourselves. Interestingly, I’ve found one place where you can get that duality is the audiobook. Because you’re not using your eyes in that way. You can have that visual input, and the audio input, and the input of the world and have that complex experience. I do this in my class, I call them “Order of Time Walks.” Do you know Carlo Rovelli’s Order of Time? It’s read by Benedict Cumberbatch. So, you have Benedict Cumberbatch’s smooth silky voice, while Carlo Rovelli is talking about what time means and doesn’t mean, in profound yet accessible language, and you’re out in the world and seeing things move. It’s mind blowing. It changes your relationship to time and space, because you’re in the world experiencing what he’s talking about.

Tell me about your project Return to Origin, for which, as I understand, you shipped yourself from Rhode Island to Alabama?
Basically, I shipped myself from Rhode Island to Alabama as some sort of homage to Henry Box Brown. But more to put myself in a really precarious situation, to approximate what it felt like to be terrified in that way. But I was super-safe. No one could get in the box. I could get out. Only two people knew I was in there. But the journey itself was so visceral. The experience gave me something about what’s at risk as an artist trying to say things that are meaningful — if that leap of logic is possible.

Our first idea was FedEx. Did research with my studio manager for a year. We were tracing trucks, we’re talking to FedEx. Turns out, with something that big, if they’re going to go cross-country, you’re going to be put into a warehouse for two or three days. I’m like, “Oh, do they have good airflow in there?” They’re like, “Why do you care about airflow?” I’m like, “Oh, just wondering.” So, way too dangerous. Also, they’re putting forks through the boxes sometimes if they fall. And we need an oxygen tank. So, then we decided, “All right, got to do open air goose-neck trailer, have air flow, have it strapped down. And we’ll just use U-ship.” That thing where you can just have a random person who has a CLL or one of those licenses drive you. So we built the box out of Outlander railroad ties. Get my food, get everything organized, have someone set to come pick me up, get ready to do it. The person never shows up the first time, which no one knows. So, then we bail on that one. And then two months later we fully accomplished it. Basically, I just lived in this box for three days. Should have only been one and a half, because we were supposed to go straight there — but the driver had overdriven his hours, so he stopped at a rest stop in Pennsylvania for 15 hours. Obviously, he didn’t know I was in there, because we didn’t tell them. I’m just sitting there, like, “Why aren’t we moving? This is crazy.” But also, I filmed it. I had two GoPros, 100 batteries, an alarm set. Every hour I changed the battery. I have 59 straight hours of the entire journey that I’m going to make into a 59-hour film. But the coolest part about that is I started this project that I’ve wanted to start for a while called the Black Dictionary, which is me writing the word “black” before every word in the dictionary that I had as a child, to speak to the absurdity of someone being called Black, and also to get through it, if that’s even possible. So, on the inside is all text from the Black Dictionary. 

This also was the inspiration behind the boxcar scene in Nickel Boys. My studio manager and I built that, and then after we finished production, we drove cross-country and filmed me in it. And then we put it in the film. I imagined it because I was in a box going cross-country already, so I wanted to put Turner in a boxcar. I thought, I’ve never seen a time-lapse out of a boxcar. How amazing would that be?