Here’s What RaMell Ross Wants You To Know About Nickel Boys 

In adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Nickel Boys,” director RaMell Ross faced what he calls a “terrifying feat.” The pressure of bringing onto the screen such a highly acclaimed work could have been debilitating, yet Ross found his way through by opting not to do a traditional adaptation at all.

“The approach that we found through talking about the impossibility was to not adapt,” Ross explains. “It was to create something with spiritual kinship – like the biology of the piece, but not the body and disposition and character of the piece, so that we can give respect to the piece.”

This unorthodox approach led Ross to a striking stylistic choice: to tell much of the story through point-of-view shots that put viewers directly into the experience of the protagonist, Elwood. The decision emerged organically from Ross’s visual-first creative process.

“You would imagine that someone would write a script that is an adaptation and then go to storyboarding,” Ross says. “But the approach that came was visualizing first and then writing the script.” This visualization centered on a fundamental question that arose while reading Whitehead’s book: “At what point did Elwood realize that he was raced or that he was black? When did people start calling him black? When did he see himself as black?”

The extended POV sequences in the film are intimate – a child’s-eye view of relatives in the kitchen cutting cake; the sensation of receiving a hug. “It’s attempting something that’s not possible in that medium because it’s only sensory visually and audibly,” Ross says, “but it’s so familiar to us that if we were to dream that, that’s what it would look like.”

To cast the pivotal role of Elwood, Ross listened to producer Dede Gardner’s recommendation to “not settle” for anything less than 100% certainty. This led him to Ethan Herisse, who possessed “kind eyes” and perfectly captured exactly what Ross had in mind. Brandon Wilson was given the role of Turner, described by Ross as “porous,” able to “play any role.” Aunjanue Ellis is the celebrated talent that rounds out the trio; she pursued the project herself.

Notably, the film takes a restrained approach to depicting the violence and abuse at the heart of its story. This wasn’t a response to audience feedback, but rather a considered artistic choice about the evolution of depicting Black trauma in cinema. “At this point in the relationship between Black people and cinema and Black people in news and Black people in trauma,” Ross reflects, “who is it for?”

The film integrates historical photographs in what Ross describes as “a four-year process” of researching and curating. These images do a number of things: they root the film in reality and, as Ross says, “rescue people from the archive.” He says, “Most of the archives weren’t built by people who look like me, so integrating those images into a new context offers something a little bit more than the way in which they’re just kind of visually statistically represented.”

As awards season approaches and buzz builds around the film, Ross is openly enthusiastic about the possibility of recognition. For him, it would serve as a tribute to the real-life victims of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, whose story inspired Whitehead’s novel. “I can’t think of any better tribute to the Dozier School Boys than for their story, which is about their literal visceral erasure, to be resurrected,” he says.

The director’s ultimate hope for audiences is not about specific takeaways but rather the visceral experience itself. “To give someone that atmosphere on screen, that centeredness on screen, inside the context of blackness, whatever that is, and the story – who cares what they take from it?” Ross says. “It’s not about that. It’s just about that body experience.”

Nickel Boys is out in selected theaters January 10th.