‘Nickel Boys’ director RaMell Ross and cast on making Black pain ‘communal’ on New York Film Festival opening night
“Most of us don’t know about schools like Dozier, and they are, a lot of them, still around this country where children are being brutalized and suffering violence and suffering isolation,” explained Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor about the subject of her new film “Nickel Boys,” based on the novel by Colson Whitehead that was inspired by a real-life reform school in Florida that abused and killed its Black students. She discussed the film at the 62nd New York Film Festival, where “Nickel Boys” was the opening night selection. Watch her along with director RaMell Ross, co-stars Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, and cinematographer Jomo Fray above.
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“What I love about what RaMell has done is that he has made Black pain or the pain of these children communicable, meaning it’s transferred to us, and so therefore it’s communal,” Ellis-Taylor continued. That’s because Ross filmed the movie entirely from the first-person points of view of Elwood (Herisse) and Turner (Wilson), two of the students attending the fictional Nickel Academy. Observing their experiences through their eyes is “hard, but I feel like they didn’t get something hopeful. They didn’t know what it was like to not feel alone. And they didn’t have any escape. I feel like maybe we should feel a little bit of that. And I just think what RaMell has done so brilliantly is that we are not observers to what happened to these children. We are complicit, and we are part of it, and we feel that.”
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“The way that Colson wrote was concise and spare and didn’t over-describe, so it allowed me to imagine myself as Elwood and truly be visual in the world, and so that process led to the POV notion,” said Ross. For Fray, “it was fundamentally totally different than anything I’ve ever shot before.” The visual approach forced him to “totally rethink the gaze … These are instances where RaMell, I, or our camera operator Sam Ellison were inside the scene … in a more emotionally present way.”
SEE‘Nickel Boys’ trailer: First teaser for RaMell Ross’s acclaimed drama [Watch]
Herisse added, “In the same way that [Fray] had to step into the space of an actor, Brandon and I had to step into the space of a cinematographer, being behind the camera or next to the camera or really close to Jomo, contorting our arms to make it so that it was as realistic as possible.” Wilson was focused on “how to remain present … You put the camera in-between us and we’re used to being able to play with one another and look into each other’s eyes.” When speaking directly to the camera, they had to make sure to “imbue it with life,” but after a certain point “it’s not that weird to look down the lens anymore.” Though it never gets easier to look history in the eye.
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