In adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Nickel Boys” from page to screen, documentarian and filmmaker RaMell Ross (“Hale County This Morning, This Evening”) and cinematographer Jomo Fray (“All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt”) were determined to make it a viewing experience that allowed audiences the full scope of beauty, terror, tragedy, and redemption experienced by the boys at the center of the novel. To do so, they shot the film almost entirely in first-person point-of-view, employing a range of techniques to create the impression that what you’re seeing is coming directly from the eyes of characters Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson).
“To give subjectivity to the Dozier School boys is fundamentally mind-blowing,” said Ross in a recent interview with Vanity Fair. “In literature, you’re allowed to write from the inside, but at least most cinema is from the outside. This allows them to see and to give them vision, to force the audience to participate in their subjectivity.”
“Nickel Boys” follows Elwood and Turner as they become close while serving time at a segregated reform school in Florida called Nickel Academy (based on the Dozer School for Boys) during the 1960s. Prior to Elwood being placed there for essentially being in the wrong place at the wrong time, we also experience a taste of his life outside of Nickel, being raised by his grandma, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). At one point in the film, Hattie has to deliver the news that she’s been swindled by the lawyer who was supposed to help her get Elwood out. In discussing the visual and emotional framing of the scene, Fray explained how he couldn’t always plan for what he was capturing and had to remain spontaneous to mirror human perspective.
“It’s an intense moment between Hattie and Elwood, and where the gaze goes says so much about where the character is in their mind — what they’re thinking, what they’re processing, how much they can take in, what they can’t take in,” said Fray. “Sometimes it’s hard to make eye contact when you’re hearing things you don’t want to hear, and I remember as the camera kind of drifted away from Aunjanue, I was staying away and letting it process. She hits the table and she says, ‘Elwood. Elwood, look at me’ — which is not in the script. It forced me back to reaching her gaze.”
Another aspect that was important to Ross was making sure each image told a thousand stories. Ross broke down all the information he aimed to get across in a brief amount of time by pointing to a scene follows Turner’s perspective outside of Nickel, while at the same time under the watchful eye of Harper (Fred Hechinger), one of the school’s unstable white employees.
“This image is talking about Turner’s slight vanity; it’s talking about his freedom with being able to chew bubblegum; it’s talking about the control that Harper has over him, the playful use of violence. Very plural,” Ross said. “It’s deeply rich and it’s also, what, six seconds long? But you learn almost everything you need to know about the relationship between him and the institution.”
Fray said his aims were never to “never to be large or impose my subjectivity onto the space,” in this sense veering more towards “what cinema traditionally does in creating images.” Ross agreed that the film does feature a lot of “traditional camera language,” but when people look into the lens — the character’s eyes — there is a “shock to the viewer” that correlates with how he wants the narrative to effect those who take it in.
“A camera with sentience was the thing we were talking about. It was always about what it is to not capture how we see, but to capture how it feels for us to see — which sounds semantic, but it isn’t,” said Fray. “If you were to have a camera system that mimics how we go through the world, it would probably be something like steadicam. But because of the grammar of cinema, handheld actually feels more inside the body, more present.”
“Nickel Boys” is set to be distributed theatrically by Amazon MGM in New York on December 13 and Los Angeles on December 20.
