Breaking Baz: ‘Nickel Boys’ Filmmaker RaMell Ross On Blocking Out Black “Trauma Porn” In Visual Poetry Adaptation Of Colson Whitehead’s Novel
EXCLUSIVE: When Plan B’s Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner handed RaMell, the visual artist and filmmaker, Ross Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Nickel Boys — the story of Black boys beaten, tortured and worse at a notorious state-run reform school in the Florida Panhandle — he knew he was being asked to bring his vision to the table, and not what he calls Black “trauma porn.”
The resulting film Nickel Boys, starring an incandescent Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (Origin, The Color Purple, If Beale Street Could Talk) as Harriet, Ethan Herisse as her studious grandson Curtis Elwood and Brandon Wilson as his friend, Turner, is the one that he and frequent collaborator Joslyn Barnes first conversed with Gardner and Kleiner over five years ago.
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“We flew out [to LA], and just talked for two hours about cinema and everything. Then at the end they’re like, ‘You ever heard of Colson Whitehead? He just wrote a new book, The Nickel Boys. It’s not released yet, but we want to know what you think,” he says, recalling the meeting.
They handed him a confidential manuscript of the novel. “They said, ‘Read it.’”
Ross later wrote Whitehead an email. “You know… ‘Colson you’re the best… Love your work… Thank you for this opportunity…” He wrote me back right away saying: ‘Thank you very, very much. I wish you the best of luck.’”
That was their only interaction.
Whitehead’s novel features a penal institution for juvenile offenders which he calls the Trevor Nickel Academy. It’s a fictional establishment based on the segregated Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida that opened in 1900 and shutdown 111 years later.
Many abuses against Black boys took place there. Barbaric punishments were meted out by staff. In 2014, forensic anthropologists disinterred the remains of boys from unmarked graves; they found evidence of broken bones and other wounds.
Ross, using the screenplay he penned with Barnes, brings a haunting, elegiac and transcendent visual narrative approach to Nickel Boys, interweaving some scenes with an initially jarring POV structure that, Ross later explains, forces you to be the character. ”It forces you to see through the character’s eyes and also your eyes simultaneously,” he adds.
In other words, the audience is challenged to upend conventionality and pay attention to a hellish tale that Ross suffuses with instances of love, elevating it into electrifying visual poetry, way above and way beyond what it might have been in the wrong hands.
Two white friends — close friends, really — offered two disparate views of the movie: One, a plain-speaking American, finds the film “excruciating.” The other chap, an equally blunt North Yorkshireman, hails Nickel Boys as his “film of the year.” Ross is not unaware of the divisiveness. He just wants people to watch and to feel the movie.
Nickel Boys opens the 62nd New York Film Festival this Friday, September 27, at Alice Tully Hall. The following month, on October 14, Nickel Boys will receive a special presentation at the British film Institute’s London Film Festival at the Southbank Centre, Royal Festival Hall, courtesy of Amazon MGM and Curzon Film.
The vision Ross outlined to Plan B, producer of Academy Award Best Pictures 12 Years A Slave and Moonlight, and, by extension, to Orion Pictures president Alana Mayo, is ”literally what the [finished] film is,” says Ross. I express surprise and admiration that a studio backed it seemingly unconditionally. Ross says that he’s proud of the collaboration he and Barnes had with Plan B, Orion and other partners, but admits to being equally, and pleasantly, just as surprised.
“If I were to agree on an achievement,” he discloses, “it is that this film was made through Plan B through Orion, through MGM, Louverture Films and Anonymous Content, because what you see is what was pitched.”
Even so, he and Barnes “saw the entire process, and we were unsure that it would continue every day.”
That they wouldn’t continue with the vision? “That we would continue to make the film,” Ross responds, “because we know that studios don’t make these films.”
“The miracle is that it happened,” says Ross. “Plan B has a reputation and put it on the line for this film. They pushed it through every barrier at every point. I’ve had much disappointment in my life, and my expectations are low, so I’m thinking: ‘There’s no way we’re going to make this,’ because we didn’t hold back when we wrote it.’
One of the issues, he explains, is that “there are essentially no scenes,” adding: “Of course, there are scenes, but there are 50 different locations. How could they finance 50 locations? And we just kept moving forward with all these steps until we were making it. Obviously, then the rubber hits the road, we’re applying the ideas. We’re applying the movement. Our actors, our talent are fucking showing up… Somehow made it through the machine.” Ross is marvelling as we share a pretty sad take-out hamburger and fried chicken sandwich lunch in a quiet suite at Telluride’s Hotel Columbia 48 hours after the film had its world premiere screening.
I wondered whether he and Barnes received notes from Plan B and Orion?
Ross considers the question and says: ”We had our moments of conversation around many elements of the film. I don’t have the power. Plan B was at the helm. It’s their baby and they asked for trust. It was like, ‘We got this.'”
“It’s like the entire process was a miracle. It almost brings me to tears, especially in hindsight,” he says, clearly moved.
A significant moment occurred when Ross heard Mayo had interacted with MGM and Orion’s legal team after they had questioned use of archival material — some rarely seen and hidden photographs of unidentified Dozier students that archival producer Allison Brandin and archival researcher Alex Westfall had discovered.
Ross claps his hands. “Alana Mayo came in and said: ‘How can we make it work? I know you say we can’t, but we can’t not.’ They pushed that through,” he says, while admitting it was “a tough moment.”
The archival images were key in reminding the audience the story is not fiction. “This is an expression of a tragic thing, while not trying to reclaim the agency of how we see ourselves — not people who are just beat and who get witnessed, and who always get to witness the suffering of our own people.
“We have a deeply poetic subjectivity, which I think is fundamental to everyone,” he says powerfully, “which cinema has somehow burned in a way by means of its fundamental objectification of humans. Almost by necessity, one could say. But when you connect that to the relationship between people of color on the camera, that’s a fucking terrible thing.”
What if Orion hadn’t, at that juncture, come through? Would he have, for instance, told them he wasn’t making it and where to go?
“Definitely,” he says, without hesitation.
“The deal with Jeremy and Dede was that they would support the vision of whatever we made,” says Ross. “Obviously, things have to be cut down, things become impractical and too expensive. Something on the day doesn’t work or the location on the day doesn’t support the thing, so you have to adjust. But they came to me, and then I went to Joslyn to co-write in order to do not what someone would normally do with this script. And that they would support it, and I trusted them.”
You mean, because there’s a knee-jerk way of adapting Whitehead’s book? “Yeah, and it does well and it’s sad and it has a catharsis at the end — and it’s terrible,” he says spitting out the adjective like he’s ridding himself of a piece of rotting fish.”
The knee-jerk version, he believes, would feature “a little bit of [Black] trauma porn, [and a] visualization of suffering. We know that story really well, and you leave with only sadness and despair… And you don’t think about it again.”
Ross says that he realized quite early on “that the further the film was from the book, the more respectful it is of the book.” People might not think that, he adds, as they could be wanting something akin to “a book that is so well expressed as Colson’s is. It is complete. It is a hammer.”
You see it in the scene, early on the movie, where Ellis-Taylor’s Harriet is on her hands and knees, in a waitresses uniform, sweeping up after white patrons have mindlessly dropped their litter under the table. “Did you notice the bruises on her knees?” Ross interrupts.
Later, she’s in the bath and the bruising’s there to be witnessed. The moment’s captured by cinematographer Jomo Fray (Selah and the Spades) through a lens that translates it into a poetic image, almost hallucinogenic, the intent being to make you ponder how she came by those bruises.
My response
Someone asked me if I responded to Nickel Boys as a Black man. I am a Black man, but I don’t answer the question. No. I just see it as a human being who has seen and lived in the world, just like my white friend from North Yorkshire. My Black friends have yet to see the film. I’ll be sure to ask them.
I can see Harriet in my mind’s eye visit her grandson, who has been arrested for the misfortune of hitching a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car, to tell him that the lawyer’s stolen their money, and that it didn’t work out for him. The boy tries to hide his fear but his grandmother sees through him, and she breaks down.
That sticks out for Ross too, “just in terms of Aunjanue’s glue.” The thing is, Ross explains, is that “Aunjanue actually breaks. It wasn’t like she was performing breaking, which is why it’s so hard to watch. She’s experiencing those emotions.”
Every time that he shot the scene, he thought he’d captured the best one. “Every time that we did it,I think she had to regroup in a way that was [like] resetting herself and then going through the same devastating experience over and over, which I can’t imagine not being traumatizing in itself. I’m unsure how a lot of performers do that.”
Another moment occurs when Harriet, in her Sunday best, travels to the Trevor Nickel Boys Academy to visit Elwood only to be told that she can’t see him.
She sees Elwood’s friend Turner, and asks him if she can embrace him instead. Initially hesitant, he agrees. Ross observes: “Who knows when was the last time that guy was hugged?” Realistically, the last contact with anything or anybody he’d made would have been from the touch of a leather strap.”
Ross thought of Ellis-Taylor for the role because he needed someone who could withhold the stresses of the role and demonstrate will. “We’re not performing blackness,” he says. ‘We’re actually performing strength as it cracks.”
As we talk, I’m reminded of a comment Ellis-Taylor made at the Q&A following the first Telluride screening. She wanted to be challenged. “I like people who do dope shit, whether it’s making great ice-cream or making great movies,” she said.
At breakfast the next morning, I spot her and ask if she’d care to repeat the “dope shit line” because I like the way it unfurls from her mouth.
Dividing time
Ross divides his time between Rhode Island, where he’s an Assistant Professor of Visual Art with the department of visual arts at Brown University, and Alabama’s Hale County where he shoots images of locals who have become his friends.
He tells me that Brown has a link to Nickel Boys in that his art studio manager Bobby Davis almost got sent to Dozier’s when he was a teenager: “His mom said, ‘No, we can handle it, and he turned his life around. He almost went there! What the fuck!”
He filmed Hale County This Morning, This Evening in Alabama. I see his portraits and landscapes from there adorning gallery walls across the U.S. Several of Ross’s short films have been filmed in Hale County as well, including his 2019 short Easter Snap, where a slaughtered hog is dragged to be cleaned and processed ready for pit roasting. It reminds me of a moment in Nickel Boys where Elwood, following a confrontation with other boys, is dragged away by wardens as if he were a piece of meat. The images of Ross’s artistry do stay with you in a way that more conventionally made movies using similar material rarely do.
Ross and I talk about Blackness in our culture and our politics. It’s 2024: Why are we still shocked at the crimes committed against people of color, and all others who have labels? Yet I see Kamala Harris rise and she doesn’t harp on about her Blackness, nor her gender for that matter. Obviously, both are apparent. She doesn’t have to announce them.
But how to explain what’s going on in America?
It’s an untenable situation. It’s like there’s no going back, says Ross. “To me, every single film that a Black person makes is in response to the problems of cinema history and Black stories. That’s a horrible world for Black cinema. We need those stories, but they become the only narrative, the paradox of trying to reconcile the problem of blackness and the celebration of blackness.”
I ask him about the often patronizing ways in which I feel a Black artist is treated. Ross smartly turns that around and says that it’s because the U.S. has never “acknowledged or considered its visual constitution.”
The guy’s way smarter than me. What does that even mean?
It’s about the rules of visuality. There’s a written constitution that says, “all men are whatever, blah, blah, blah… But we also have an unconscious perceptual one that we have produced: A rule-based value system that’s based on symbols. The entire visual field is codified, and it’s codified within Western ideology. It’s codified within American values.” His point being that it is “codified within racism.”
“And I think we say it in smaller ways,” he continues: “The lighter you are, the better you are. The darker you are… It’s really ephemeral. Photography is difficult to talk about. There’s no language to talk about it aside from language that is already fraught.”
There’s a profound difference, he says, with images made by Black and white people.
He gives the example of shooting a documentary. “If a person who is not a person of color is going into a Black home and making a film about Black families or whatever, every time they’re pointing the camera, they’re like ‘Oh, yes, blackness, blackness,blackness, blackness. If a person of color goes in, they’re not trying to capture that. They’re one step beyond that. They’re trying to capture something else, even under the same purpose, and that difference is huge,” he says outstretching his arms to illustrate his point.
RaMell Ross was born in Germany 42 years ago. His parents were both in the military and were stationed there. His maternal grandmother, he says, “has blonde hair, blue eyes,” and met his Black American grandfather in Germany during World War II. Gisele Ross, his mother, who became an artist, was born in France. “I don’t speak any of these languages,” he jokes.
Ross is a strapping six feet, six inches in height. Somewhat unsurprisingly, he won a full scholarship at Georgetown to play basketball. We stand up and check our height, and he 6″6 alright, although not as tall as my son, who’s 6″8. He was supposed to be going the NBA, until he broke his foot, twice. His mother died when he was aged 21. “Mother, basketball, two first loves,” gone, he says.
Per chance, he took a photography class and realized he had, “control of something. I get to make my world.” He obsessed over the visual field and then started to realize “that there’s a really strong connection between having a camera on your body and looking and moving through space, and being a basketball player with the ball, predicting when someone moves somewhere and making adjustments. And I’m just like, ‘I love it. It’s like my sport.’”
That’s how he started, he says. “It’s all from loss. That’s why I’m so serious about it.”
In that instant, I see how that sense of loss is woven into Nickel Boys. The gig love that Ellis-Taylor’s Harrier extends in the film, is in Whitehead’s novel; it’s also his mother’s love.
“It could be,” he says. “I think I’m able to impressionistically combine images to get sentiment and feeling, and that’s maybe love I’ve not been able to have given to my mother. I can put it into the thing because I was supposed to be able to maybe put it into my mom or something. That kind of makes sense.”
Does he have to pinch himself that he got to make Nickel Boys?
“Oh my God, I mean I know this isn’t a dream because I’ve never had a dream this long, unless one would call life a dream,” he says.
I’m eager to know what he might do next, although I warn him that he won’t always have the protection of Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Alana Mayo and the many other producers and executives who helped make Nickel Boys shine.
“I’m unsure I’ll do it otherwise,” he answers.
He had not been seeking to make Nickel Boys. “I turned down many, many films after Hale County,” he says. “I bet I hadn’t made any because I don’t need to. I purposefully teach so that I can spend life making my art in Alabama. But if the opportunity presents itself and the idea is right, and if it seems like we can do something as rich as what Dede and Jeremy’s opportunity offered, then yeah,” he grins.
It’s a marvellous position to be in where you’re not required to sell your soul for cash money, I tell him.
Roaring with laughter, he says: “I’m going to be honest with you though.If someone offers me $100 million to make a piece of shit, I’m going to go on Twitter. I’m going to be like, ‘Hey guys,I’m sorry. $100 million.’ And this isn’t selling out, because this money is going to go to the South, and I’m going to make the most unbelievable change in this community with this money. That’s just the trade I’m going to make. Fuck you! But I’m not going to make it for $50,000. I’m not going to make it for $100,000. That’s not my thing. Time is too valuable. But for $100 million, mark my word, I will do that thing.”
It’s a vicious circle. And that “piece of shit” would be his Black trauma porn.
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