← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Adapting 'Nickel Boys' for the Screen with RaMell Ross
00:20:25
Filmmaker RaMell Ross discusses his adaptation of Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys.
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- [00:04]
Ramel Ross
Listener supported WNYC Studios.
- [00:16]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I am grateful you are here. The new film Nickel Boy shows us the dreams and nightmares of a young man. As the film is shot almost entirely through the first person pov, that means we get to know our protagonist Elwood through what he sees through his eyes. We see his happy childhood growing up in Florida with his grandmother. We see the promise he shows at school. And we see how in one moment he is offered a ride by a man driving a stolen car and everything changes. Elwood is sent to Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school that uses young boys for labor. When those boys make any wrong move, they're taken to the White House where they're beaten. At the school, Elwood meets Turner, a kid who is back at Nickel for the second time. And is then that we finally see Elwood through Turner's eyes. The camera goes back and forth between the two boys as they attempt to make it out of Nickel with their lives and their sanity intact. Nickel Boys is adapted from Colson Whitehood's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, which is one of our first get lit with all of it book club selections. This film is nominated for a Golden Globe for best Dress Motion Picture. Ramelle Ross won Best Director at the Gotham Awards recently and the film is opening in select theaters on Friday. I'm joined now by the film's co writer and director, Ramel Ross. Nice to meet you.
- [01:44]
Ramel Ross
Hello, Allison. Nice to meet you too. Thanks for having me.
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Alison Stewart
Thanks for coming. This is your first narrative film, but before this you were a photographer, you were a documentarian. In fact, the folks, the producers behind Hale county this morning, this evening, the documentary thought you might be a good fit for this project. What part of your documentary background was useful to you on the narrative feature?
- [02:08]
Ramel Ross
Yeah, it's a good question. I think it is the by any means necessary. I think when you're making a documentary, you're interested in figuring out how to tell a story. And you'll pull from family photos, you'll pull from news footage, you'll pull from cinema, you'll pull from absolutely anything, including making footage yourself. And that approach, I think, allows one to consider letting what you want to say produce a form. And a lot of films are made thinking about the form, capturing what you want to say. And we brought that approach. Jocelyn Barnes and I are my co writer to Nickel Boyce.
- [02:46]
Alison Stewart
What about your work as a photographer?
- [02:49]
Ramel Ross
My work as A photographer, I think, underpins the aesthetic. This film is shot from the perspective of its two main characters. And my DP and I, we give them a photographic sensibility. We allow them to turn their head, which is the camera, look around the world and look at each other in the way in which we all look at the world, which is photographically. Photographs are so inscribed in our reality. We leave our house, no one will be photographed. We build buildings to see how they look photographed. And with that, it's kind of built into the way in which we engage with the visual field.
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Alison Stewart
When you read Nickel Boys, the Nickel Boys, what did you see as the.
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Unnamed Interviewer
Potential challenges when adapting it?
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Ramel Ross
Wow. The potential challenges was the adaptation process. You know Colson's. You've had Colson on here, you've heard him speak, you know his other books. He is a genius amongst geniuses. And the ecosystem of his book, the novel, his meaning making process, it's impossible to take that over to film. And so my co writer and I decided to distill his book to its essence and then allow those totems to move into the film medium and then talk to film and see what film wants to do with that essence. And I think that allowed us to pay homage to the book in a respectful way. And like, we won't. We won't try to replicate you or allow you to be a novel.
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Unnamed Interviewer
When did you realize you were going to use the first person pov?
- [04:31]
Ramel Ross
Yeah, that came right away. I read the book and the first thought was, wow, I wonder what the world looks like from their eyes in 1960. I made this film, Hell county this morning, this evening, which you mentioned. And it essentially is a first person film without my hands being in it. The way the camera moves, I like to call it observational logic and, you know, use the camera as an extension of consciousness, a lot of concepts to try to align the viewer's view of reality with the camera movement. And there's nothing better or more interesting to me than thinking about what's missing from the archive, specifically from black visuality in the 1960s. And so we could populate that with first person point of view, poetic images.
- [05:21]
Alison Stewart
What do you think the audience gets that we are looking at through a character's eyes, a person's eyes. What do you think we can extract from that?
- [05:35]
Ramel Ross
So beautiful. It's so beautiful. It's. It was a concept that came to life with Angel Ellis Taylor and Brandon Wilson and. And Ethan Harisi, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs. When you look with the love that you look at your child with. If you're filming that from the third person camera, which is most cinema, you're watching two characters do it right, and you're kind of a voyeur, fundamentally, and you're watching their behavior and you're seeing that love. But when they're looking into the camera, into you, with that love, you're touched by it. Like you are a scene partner. You get a sense for that ineffable power that is the gaze of a loving one. But you also get the opposite, which is as a character, as Elwood and Brandon. You get to see how the world looks at them and how Hattie does not look at them. And wow. It's a huge contrast.
- [06:35]
Alison Stewart
It's wild. Yeah. I think the scene that really.
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Unnamed Interviewer
You really understand what it comes to mean, it's early on, is when the grandmother hugs the boy.
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Ramel Ross
Oof.
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Unnamed Interviewer
She comes right in, she comes right into the lens. And at that moment you're like, oh, wait, this.
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Alison Stewart
This is what this boy is feeling, the warmth of this grandmother.
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Ramel Ross
Yeah, that's. It's interesting, right? Like photography and film, you know, they kind of have always. They're built from theater, or at least film is, and they have their mainstay way of being used. But first person is the way that we are in the world, you know, and who would think that in that hug moment we could somehow escape that? We're sitting in a chair and we're looking at a screen and you can move in for a hug and that can, you know, if you're. If you're open enough while you're watching, that can remind you of every hug you've ever given or gotten.
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Unnamed Interviewer
How did you talk to your actors about reacting to a pov? The first person pov, you know, I.
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Ramel Ross
Didn'T talk to him too much about it. I just, It's. I think acting is not my forte. I think working with actors is something I'm interested in. But I believe that kind of whatever the actor does is essentially the right thing. Right. It may need to be nudged a bit or influenced, but like their behavior feeling authentic, like them being surprised, them having to adjust in the moment like that is what human beings do. And adding that to the space of fiction and acting, I think just offers that fundamental integrity, allows you to believe. And so we didn't talk that much about the process of filming. They knew we would film point of view. But what that looked like, they found out on set that day.
- [08:18]
Unnamed Interviewer
I was gonna ask about the logistics of it never Mind the creativity of it. I mean, did they have to stand a certain way? Did they have to behave a certain way?
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Ramel Ross
They didn't have to behave a certain way, but they had to always look down the barrel of the lens, have a brilliant friend and DP Joe Mo Frey, who built out two custom camera rigs and brought forth a couple different camera systems that would allow us to work with neck movement and have the camera be part of the body of David and part of the body of Brandon and Ethan when needed. And so it really varied. There was a lot of genuine invention and tweaking. Jomo's rig team made things on set for us. They were welding, they were buying Home Depot supplies.
- [09:10]
Unnamed Interviewer
That's interesting because I would imagine you as a director, have to make observations about the way a person moves their head or how a person looks at somebody's feet or somebody's hands, because it may not be the same in reality versus on the set when you have your camera crew and everybody around.
- [09:27]
Ramel Ross
Yeah, well, the trick to this film or the key to this film is that I'm lucky to be a writer and the director. And so the film is written visually, you know, when the original script was like camera movement. And we're actually trying to explore the world from the way that the boys look at it. The order of operations of looking in a room produces a narrative of meaning. And so I'm taking that into the pre production process. With Jomo, we start to build out the key elements to, like, what vision feels like, not what vision is. You know, we don't want a wide frame of view because the large scope allows the eye to wander. What vision does is vision is very specific. It feels like, you know, like it's attention based. And so the directing was as much writing and as much the camera movement.
- [10:18]
Alison Stewart
My guest is Ramel Ross, director and co writer of the new film Nickel Boys. It's based on Colson Whitehead's novel. It tells the story of two boys sent to an abusive Florida reform school in the 1960s. When you co wrote your script with Jocelyn Barnes, I read somewhere that you put drafts, you put images in your first drafts.
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Ramel Ross
Mm.
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Alison Stewart
So, yeah, yeah. How did you go about translating those images or were they just for you?
- [10:42]
Ramel Ross
Well, it's interesting. So, you know, the mythology of the filmmaking process, it's like the game of telephone. It continues to shift depending on who's talking. And, you know, we all use different words. So it was that the treatment we made was an edit of the film. And of course the edit is the Last thing you do. But in our case, because the film was so visual, we wanted to allow for the language of the film and the dialogue to be servant to the image and not the other way around. And so basically the film was written out visually. Right. So it gives you an image of something. And these things are called adjacent images that have their sort of metaphoric, symbolic and experiential. So they're not just strictly narratively driven. And then there's another image that we would write out and we wrote the entire film that way. And then we would take that and go into that image and then try to articulate what dialogue would participate in it. And I think that gave that richness that I think you felt when you.
- [11:42]
Alison Stewart
Watched, you know, that the film uses.
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Unnamed Interviewer
So many images, sometimes creating almost a collage of ideas, so that you can get to the idea, the idea that you want, I think. Did you know what images that you wanted to use or did they come along the way?
- [11:56]
Ramel Ross
Yeah. It was lovely reading Colson's narrative because I saw myself as both Elwood and Turner, as he has said that he is. Like the conversation is between himself. And so almost all the images are just from either my imagination or my childhood. I just think about what I did when I was a kid. Oh, I used to sit down and let a balloon slowly go up to the ceiling and hit a fan. You know, I used to lie down on the grass and twirl a leaf. These types of things just align with the narrative because I see myself as them. And I think it gives a kind of authenticity too, to the images you're seeing. They don't read as hyper fiction. They just read as pretty banal and pretty quotidian. I like to call the images the epic banal.
- [12:45]
Alison Stewart
The novel is based on a true.
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Unnamed Interviewer
Story of the Dozier School for Boys. Did you do any research into the school?
- [12:52]
Ramel Ross
Oh, man, so much. Carlson did a bunch of research for his book, of course. And so Jocelyn and I went to his sort of index or glossary and went through all the books and articles that he had read. There was one in particular that was really powerful. It's the Dozier document. It's like 156 page forensic report of the findings at the Dozier School for Boys. There's also this incredible book called Boys of the Dark, which is a nonfiction account of the Dozier School trials. And that was a huge resource for us.
- [13:30]
Unnamed Interviewer
You said in an interview that while you were reading that book you wondered, I wonder at what point Elwood knew he was black. No, I'll say it better. At one point, Elwood knew he was raced. Why was that question in your mind?
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Ramel Ross
Because it's always part of the. To me, the language of being a person of color in the US which is dealing with the fiction nonfiction of blackness, the fiction nonfiction of whatever race a person is. And in a time in which, you know, the Jim Crow laws were prominent. And thinking about the film from their perspective, having gone through this process myself. Like what markers of reality ensured Elwood that he was inescapably black? Like what experiences showed him how he would be treated if he did X, Y and Z. That's a visual thing, largely. It's clearly a conceptual thing. But I can't imagine a more devastating realization. Specifically in a time in which you're. You're seeing the space race, you're seeing these feats of tech, technology, and you're incredibly young, I'm sure. I think it came into my life a lot later than it would for him because the consequences were starker during his time.
- [14:56]
Alison Stewart
One of the most heart wrenching scenes in the book is where Elwood is beaten by the head of school. How did you decide you wanted to approach this scene? This is a tough scene.
- [15:10]
Ramel Ross
Yeah, I think Jocelyn and I decided we wanted to approach it without showing the violence. And I say that for those who are listening and think that the film may be too difficult for them. The film is a meaningful film that tries to forefront the poetry of life more so than the tragedy of the context in which life is existing. And so during this scene, we wanted to kind of get away from the voyeurism that is the experience of watching people of color experience suffering, physical suffering, and also acknowledge that that's just the first act of the trauma. There's way more trauma aside from that first initial act. And while visualizing violence has been necessary to share it globally and to kind of prove the injustices that were happening to people, at some point in time, it becomes a bit rote and becomes over indexed. And you realize that maybe it has the opposite effect of saying that maybe it only happens to these people, or it's supposed to happen to these people.
- [16:20]
Alison Stewart
Well, you're talking to an audience that likely read the book Public Radio. Probably almost everybody has read Nickel Boys. I wanted to ask you about the sound design in this film, because in.
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Unnamed Interviewer
That scene, for example, the fan is very loud in the room.
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Ramel Ross
Yeah.
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Unnamed Interviewer
How did you and your sound team decide to have the sounds work with this first person point of view?
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Ramel Ross
Yeah, we thought a lot about what consciousness felt like, or what consciousness does and the way that it accepts in sound and music and. And kind of everything sonic and make sense of it. And the way that when you're going through trauma and situations in which you're hyper aware, there's often an overriding sound. Right. Either some sort of hum or some tick that becomes some marker of time. But we're always trying to cope in these situations and our defense mechanisms are conscious and overriding in a way. And so we wanted there to be that type of unpredictable yet fundamentally fluid dystopic soundscape. It's really hard to explain. I would love to have a musician or one of my sound guys, Dan Timmons or Tony Volante, come in here and use their beautiful language. But I think you get the hint.
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Unnamed Interviewer
What was your biggest challenge in making this film?
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Ramel Ross
I think the biggest challenge was the edit.
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Unnamed Interviewer
Oh, interesting.
- [17:59]
Ramel Ross
Yeah, the film. Our editor is Nicholas Mansour. And the film, it's. It's collapsing. So many different languages of the image and the camera both still and moving and a lot of different textures and formats of capture that it's easy for it to feel like kaleidoscopic in an off putting way and not kaleidoscopic in a rhythmic stream of consciousness type of way. And making edits and leaping time in the way in which we did and then working with a relatively underexplored use of the camera, which is point of view. It takes a lot of judging and sort of trusting, putting things together and thinking that, hoping that, you know, five minutes later when you make another gesture that will justify in retrospect, the one that you made before. And it takes a long time, takes a really long time.
- [18:58]
Unnamed Interviewer
Zhuzhing.
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Ramel Ross
You have to zhuzh it off a little je ne sais quoi, a little sprinkle something on it. You know, we were sprinkling, everyone was coming in, praying to someone.
- [19:09]
Unnamed Interviewer
This is a little bit of a generic question, but I think it's interesting considering the book and considering the themes of the book. What do you hope audiences leave the theater talking about or thinking about?
- [19:23]
Ramel Ross
I prefer speechlessness. I prefer for audience members to have an experience not unlike a roller coaster, but not as dramatic as a roller coaster in which it's visually and sonically so visceral that it genuine feels something along the lines of a dream or it leaves some indelible impression in you that you're constantly trying to work out and understand as to why it was so powerful. I think if you can provide something experiential and something experience based inside ideas of blackness and inside historical narratives, inside the characters themselves, then I think you're actually changing the way that people relate to history. You're allowing them to absorb it into their physiology. I like to call the film an experiential monument. It's the type of history that you can't erase in the way in which we see history being erased in many states.
- [20:21]
Unnamed Interviewer
The name of the movie is Nickel Boys. I've been speaking with its co writer and director Ramel Ross. It is really nice to meet you. Thanks for being with us, Allison.
- [20:30]
Ramel Ross
The pleasure was genuinely all mine.
- [20:34]
Unnamed Announcer
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