RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys” is as vivid as its source material: Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2019 novel about two Black boys enduring routine abuse at a 1960s Florida reform school. Ross, along with co-writer Joslyn Barnes and cinematographer Jomo Fray, transforms Whitehead’s third-person narrative into a vivid sensory experience told primarily in first person. The result is one of the most impactful, forward-thinking films of the year, blending technical proficiency and emotional fluidity.
Ross and his team tell the story largely through the eyes of teenagers Elwood (Ethan Herisse)—and, occasionally, his best friend Turner (Brandon Wilson). Though the film is primarily set in the past, the action sometimes skips forward to the older Elwood (Daveed Diggs) as he looks back on his time at the Nickel Academy, which is based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys. This thoughtful, multifaceted approach yields sharp observations about how trauma lives within memory.
Here, Ross walks us through a few of the movie’s most effective scenes and the techniques he used to bring them to life.
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Forming the self
“Nickel Boys” is hardly the first movie to employ first-person POV. But by keeping viewers inside one person’s experience for lengthy stretches, Ross creates a uniquely discombobulating relationship between his protagonists and the people around them. Elwood and Turner are essentially defined by the way others see them, whether it’s racist school administrators or their empathetic teenage peers.
When he first began working on “Nickel Boys,” Ross turned to social theorist Charles Horton Cooley’s writings about the concept of the “looking-glass self.” As the filmmaker puts it, “You come to know yourself through the way that people look at you. That becomes your reality. They reflect back to you who you are, and then that builds your identity.”
An out-of-body experience
Since most of the film is seen through Elwood’s eyes, the moments when it departs from this visual parlance stand out. For example, during one scene of intense physical trauma, the camera transitions eerily and seamlessly from Elwood’s POV to third person, shot from behind as though he were seeing the moment over his own shoulder.
This was achieved through the use of a SnorriCam, a camera rig that attaches to an actor’s body. That sense of living outside oneself carries over to the middle-aged Elwood, as though this painful childhood experience still resonates deep in his bones.
“The film was an opportunity to have the camera more clearly represent those psychological states, specifically as they relate to trauma and health,” Ross says. “When people come out of surgery and they’re taking medicine, they very much feel separate from themselves, almost as if they can ‘see’ themselves. How fascinating a thing to try to home in on.”
RaMell Ross on the set of “Nickel Boys” Credit: L. Kasimu Harris
A bittersweet reunion
This schism between mind and body is used to powerful effect when Elwood runs into his former classmate Chickie Pete (Craig Tate) at a Harlem dive bar in the 1980s. With the SnorriCam mounted on his torso, Diggs is able to translate his physicality into camera movements. The actor essentially becomes the camera operator, blurring the line between performance and directing. Diggs expresses Elwood’s reticence to revisit the past by keeping Chickie at the margins of the frame.
“It’s almost like a psychological exercise through body language,” Ross says. “You can analyze where a person is leaning and the way they feel based on all of those heightened gestures—like the way Daveed opens up to Craig Tate, or the way his head tilts down. All these things are so much more easily read when they’re reduced to silhouette. Jomo and I were incredibly happy that Daveed was deeply interested without us even saying so. He realized that he could control the audience’s relationship between his character and Chickie Pete primarily through microgestures.”
Thrown gazes
Though the emotional scope of “Nickel Boys” is massive, its view of the physical world is expressed through minutiae. This focus on small details, such as articles of clothing and household objects, speaks to the intimate nature of the film. Even labeling its overarching technique as “first-person POV” might be a misnomer, given how it approximates human vision using telephoto lenses rather than recreating it exactly.
Ross and Fray craft extreme close-ups that blur the surrounding environment and lock viewers’ eyes onto details described in Whitehead’s novel, emphasizing their significance as building blocks of Elwood’s memories. A more visually straightforward adaptation might have treated them as fleeting background elements.
This attention to detail also breaks with the first-person approach. The physical world becomes larger-than-life when seen through the eyes of a younger Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp) in the movie’s introductory scenes. Everything from expensive trinkets to his grandmother’s cooking takes on enormous significance. Ross achieves this through “macroshots”—extreme close-ups that he calls “thrown gazes,” which appear whenever a character becomes hyperfixated on their surroundings.
“The world’s going around, but you’re only seeing this small thing, either for safety reasons [the film avoids explicit depictions of physical abuse] or for general curiosity,” Ross explains. “Once we figured out that we didn’t have to be so dogmatic with the POV, we realized that we could use all the visual possibilities of cinema.”
This story originally appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of Backstage Magazine.
