No two filmmakers travel the same path to their chosen profession. RaMell Ross has traveled one unlike that of almost anyone else to direct his lauded feature debut, “Nickel Boys.” Before adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, he was a documentarian, and before that a photographer. His initial desire to pick up a camera was, as much as anything else, born of a need to make sense of heartbreak.
“I was having so much depression and so much tragedy in my life,” recalls Ross, the wall-length windows at MGM’s Los Angeles offices looking out to the Hollywood Hills behind him. Now in his early 40s, he was 21 at the time, a young man who had always been into video games and basketball. “I was supposed to go to the NBA, but I had all these injuries. I lost basketball, and then I also lost my mom. You lose the two things that are your first loves, you can either go into drugs and eventually die or f— your life up … or maybe you can excel. That’s when I started taking photos.” Capturing images provided him the comfort of doing something entirely on his own — “something that was tied to making meaning in the world.”
Ross’ intimate, deceptively offhand photos, which often focused on Southern Black lives, paved the way for his Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” which embodied the warmth and gentle rhythms of an Alabama community. With “Hale County,” Ross taught audiences how to look at his work, rewarding the viewer’s careful attention with a lyrical, meditative study of everyday environments.
He is still teaching us with “Nickel Boys,” which concerns Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), teenagers in the early 1960s who meet at Nickel Academy, a racist, abusive Southern reform school. Daringly, the film is largely told from Elwood’s perspective — literally, as the camera serves as the character’s point of view, the audience experiencing almost everything through his “eyes.”
Measuring 6-foot-6 — Ross played college ball at Georgetown — he has a quick sense of humor. He’s incredibly engaging but not polished in that slick, dull way that filmmakers can become when they’ve been part of the Hollywood machine for too long. And as demonstrated by the movies he’s created, he follows his intuition, liberated from the filmmaking “rules” he doesn’t know. “I’m really fortunate in that I never made a documentary before ‘Hale County,’” he says. “I’d never made a fiction film before ‘Nickel.’ I didn’t go to film school. My sensibility has been built from life experiences and the problems that I’ve recognized in the world.”
After reading Whitehead’s fictionalized take on Florida’s real-life Dozier School for Boys, where reports suggest that over 100 boys died during more than a century of operation, Ross decided that a risky conceptual approach was key to conveying the story’s urgent horror. He had never before written a screenplay — the script is credited to Ross and Joslyn Barnes — so he worked instinctively, even if it confused his producers.
“The first treatment was an edit of the film with written images,” explains Ross, and then images with camera movements. But Oscar-winning producer Dede Gardner told them the script was unreadable in that format. “‘We understand what you guys are doing, but we need to share this with department heads,’” Ross recalls her saying, “‘and they need to be able to imagine the world — not the world through his eyes but the world that is outside of their bodies.’ So then we had to go back to do it a little more traditional.”
The result is a film whose formal audacity is matched by its moral seriousness, examining America’s Jim Crow era through casually searing images interwoven with poetic reveries and archival footage, our nation’s raw-wound present connected to an inescapable past. Ross wasn’t trying to be unconventional — he simply didn’t know any other way to make the movie in his head.
Since “Nickel Boys’” rapturous premiere at Telluride, some reviewers have praised the film’s first-person perspective as a fresh way to create empathy for characters whose lives may be radically different from that of the viewer. But Ross has misgivings about that interpretation.
“For me, it’s more about embodiment,” he says, calling “empathy” a buzzword in the documentary world. Instead, he intends for viewers to experience the lives of characters vicariously. “I think vicariousness is more powerful than empathy, because ‘empathy’ implies ‘you’ being other than ‘them.’ I think ‘vicariousness’ is maybe a ‘we.’”
With “Nickel Boys,” Ross has crafted a vital new way of seeing. As he has since his early days as a photographer, he is creating meaning in the world — so much so that life itself feels transformed. Ross invites us to unlearn the complacent strictures of cinema he never bothered to absorb. And he hopes audiences will follow him on the journey.
“Having a subjective experience of another person’s life, that’s way beyond empathy — that’s truth,” he says. “You’re giving them something that’s as real as them walking outside in the world, and the sun being bright on their face, and them feeling something ineffable. If you can give someone that in the context of another person’s life, that’s life-changing.”