Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross on his groundbreaking approach to depicting the complexity of trauma
The Oscar-nominated director’s new film is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
The critically acclaimed new film Nickel Boys, based on Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, takes a truly unique and groundbreaking approach in how it depicts the complexity of trauma.
Director RaMell Ross chose to shoot the film largely from the point of view of its two main characters, Elwood and Turner, as they try to survive in an abusive reform school called the Nickel Academy. It's a fictionalized version of a real school in Florida, the Dozier School for Boys, which gained a reputation for brutality, cruelty and even murder of students by staff.
Though the story is entrenched in trauma, Ross made the decision not to visualize that trauma on-screen. The audience doesn't look at Elwood and Turner, but rather looks as them, literally seeing the world through their eyes.
"After reading the novel, it didn't make sense to do it another way," Ross says in an interview with Q's Tom Power. "How interesting is it that historical characters and historical figures are only — and can only — be explored from outside of themselves? … To bring the camera into the body and to make it an organ for those characters seems to be, maybe, the fairest way of exploring their reality, in that we're not thinking about them as others."
For Ross, using this perspective device isn't so much about instilling a greater sense of empathy in the audience, but rather giving the audience something more akin to a vicarious experience.
"When we see people make decisions and we're outside of them, there's always judgment," he explains. "There is something about the world happening and us responding to it, as opposed to those things happening at a distance."
While Ross is acclaimed for his photography and documentary work (his 2018 film Hale County This Morning, This Evening was nominated for an Oscar), Nickel Boys is his fiction feature debut. To depict traumatic moments, he intercuts real images and archive footage of Dozier boys, which adds weight and context to the story, linking fiction to reality and reminding the audience that what they're watching actually happened.
The director says he was interested in "the way in which trauma is built across time and distilled across memory."
Power notes that, for him, some of the most powerful and affecting scenes of the film are not action-packed, dialogue-heavy or particularly emotional, but rather more quiet, mundane moments like looking at sunlight through the trees.
"[In cinema] narratives are built around the flagship moments of someone's life," Ross says. "The focusing of the dramatic, and the sometimes negative, sometimes overly-positive moments of someone's life erases the majority of life, because the majority of life is incredibly banal. It's incredibly mundane…. And so to do that inside someone's life with cinema, to me, just connects [the film] more with what it means to be a human."
The full interview with RaMell Ross is available on our YouTube channel and on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with RaMell Ross produced by Ben Edwards.
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