A movie adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning book based on the infamous Dozier School for Boys, has been nominated for two Academy Awards.
Nickel Boys, which received Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, was shot almost entirely in the POV of boys in the fictitious Nickel Reform School in Florida during the Jim Crow era. The events of the film are based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys.
Hundreds of children who attended Dozier in Marianna and the Okeechobee School were mentally, physically, and sexually abused between 1940 and 1975. Dozens were killed. After years of the survivors fighting for recognition, the State of Florida finally approved $20 million in damages to the survivors last year.
RaMell Ross, the films director and one of two writers of the screenplay, sat down for an extensive interview about his film with WFSU Public Media earlier this month when he came into town for a showing of his film hosted by Florida A&M University.
Nickel Boys is playing in theaters now. The conversation contains minor spoilers for the film. Here is that conversation with minor edits for clarity:
Wood: I have with me filmmaker Ramel Ross, director of Nickel Boys, which is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Colson Whitehead. Thanks for coming into the studio today.
Ross: Thank you for having me.
Wood: So, when did you first hear about the Dozier School for Boys, and what prompted you to work on this film?
Ross: I sadly heard about the Dozier School for Boys from the book, and that's the first disappointing element of the entire thing that, for whatever reason, and I feel like I'm fairly informed about, you know, these types of events in history. Had no idea that it happened.
Wood: You’re having a showing later tonight here in Tallahassee. How important do you think it is to come to the panhandle, not far from where the school was to have a showing of your film?
Ross: I think there couldn't be a more important location to show it. You know, the community was aware of it, is aware of it, and I think should be reminded, and should have, I think what we call the film an experiential monument of the story and of the boys’ lives who were lost and its relationship to culture at large.
Wood: The film is shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio, and was almost entirely from the two main characters, point of view, Elwood and turner. When I watched it made the film really immersive and personal to me. Why did you decide to shoot the film in that aspect ratio and perspective?
Ross: Well, there's a couple reasons why it's point of view, and a couple reasons why it's 4:3. I think the first idea for it to be 4:3 came from the desire to have it fully integrated with the archival footage. We knew that we would be drawing from archives across time. And 4:3 was the original television format. It's a lot less jarring to go from those images to our images if they're in the same aspect ratio.
But then you realize, once you know the movie's going to be point of view, that it's a more narrow frame of view, and it allows for there to be a sort of hyper focus and almost telephoto relationship between the visual field and the character, slash audience member who's looking with point of view. I think that's the most complex one in terms of its reasons. But I'd say briefly, you know, there's nothing more interesting than giving subjectivity to characters. It happens very often in writing. It's very difficult to do in cinema, and for the Dozier school boys, it seemed like that gesture was kind of righteous to give them life, to give them vision when their lives were cut short.
Wood: The subject matter of the film, and the film is very serious, just like the real events that occurred are very serious, and they experienced terrible tragedies. But the film didn't just focus on those terrible experience it spent a lot of time showing you know seemingly mundane but very personal aspect of aspects of their lives, both in nickel and out of nickel. Why was it important to include those moments in the film?
Ross: When you think about stories like this, you know, they seem to be organized around the death of the characters, they seem to be organized around the tragedy of the circumstances in their lives. And I think it's easy to forget that I'm sure a large part of their lives were still filled with joy. They were still filled with revelation, and they were filled with visual insight. They were filled with those really beautiful and intangible and ineffable moments of being a human.
We wanted for these characters to not be organized or hyper organized or reduced to the narratives, to not be reduced to the tragic circumstances that they found themselves in, but to offer the audience an exploration of the interior life of them, through the poetry of looking through images that I like to call the epic banal, through what it feels like and seems like being a human is which is experience based, and in that way, you're kind of, as I mentioned, like giving life to the characters, as opposed to narrativizing or essential centralizing them.
Wood: With that, a lot of the scenes that feature or deal with those extreme forms of physical abuse that the boys suffered were largely suggested at. A lot of sound was used. A lot of it showed the aftermath. One of the moving things for me that while I was watching, how to pit form in my stomach when we had those mundane moments but then it showed the physical scarring on their bodies from the aftermath of what they experienced. What made you decide to depict those instances of violence in that way?
Ross: I think the first instinct to work with the violence in the way in which we did was, if you take seriously making the camera an organ, which was a core philosophy of the film, of course, shooting from the point of view, something that Jomo Frey, the director of photography, and I eventually would call sentient imagery, you realize, or you start to question, how much of the trauma and the violence inflicted on these boys bodies was witnessed by others, right? Like you're not in the room watching other people get beat. You're in another room, and if it's happening to you, you're not looking at your leg as it's being whipped. Your eyes and your attention to somewhere else to be able to cope with it. And so it just makes sense if you take making the camera and organ seriously.
Additionally, if you think about the way in which violence across cinema and imagery in general has depicted its relationship to people of color, you realize that, yeah, there's maybe enough of those images, or not everything needs to be shown. Like those images exist in our heads. And you wonder what other ways there are to get to the impact, like we tend to focus on the moment and the visualization of the violence and it's way more interesting, I think, specifically in this case, to think about its ripple effects and it's more uncanny and distilled and spread out relationship to a person's life.
Wood: The two main POV characters throughout the film, they have very different outlooks or ideals about how to deal with their situation or the civil rights movement in general. They had several dialogs throughout the film. How did kind of their two different perspectives and outlooks impact how you shot their different POV segments?
Ross: Yeah, it's a good question, because I remember when first conceiving the film, the idea was to have me shoot one character and have Jomo shoot the other character in order to explore the different way that they saw the world through our different shooting techniques. But we kind of dropped that idea fairly early because, you know, weren't sure how readable that would be. I think it's interesting then in the writing process, to try to illustrate the way that someone thinks through, the way that the camera moves through, the order in which they come across objects in the frame, or how they're looking down or, you know, or they're looking past someone. And I think those types of gestures, of course, is how the film is written. But I think really hones into the almost unconscious way in which our lives are organized by our previous experiences, and they're in some sort of like cycle, or some sort of feedback loop.
Wood: One of the sequences in the film that I thought about a lot, and this might it's not the most bombastic thing, but kind of the dichotomy in the comparison between the two classroom sequences in the movie. I felt the POV segment before Nickel, when there was that mentor figure, that teacher figure for the student, the attention in the classroom, it showed the admiration, kind of like a positive direction.
And then when you go to Nickel, it showed, really, aside from the violent nature, just how it just inhumane, not nurturing, environment that was based on this hierarchy that is unjust and wrong. And just watching the film, I think how throughout those different aspects of the film, it was really showing that the violence and the abusive side, just the very idea that that type of school and that type of institution was based on was wrong and wasn't nurturing. And I think it was communicated really well with just how those two classroom environments were shot.
Ross: I really love that observation. And I'll say that no one has mentioned that contrast. And it's, you know, obviously very intentional in the writing process. With my writing partner, Joslyn Barnes, in thinking about comparison between outside of Nickel and inside of Nickel, we were like, very keen to say, like, “Wow, look at the different ways that we're treating the classroom environment.” And as you mentioned, how attentive and how much people are in this space of learning, and it feels like there's a community. And then we go into Dozier, , I'm sorry, Nickel,
Wood: Well, both.
Ross: Yeah, both, yeah. Like you're saying, I love it, like the violence in the mundane architecture, light space, relationship to the teacher and general frenzy of the classroom environment.
Wood: You touched on this a little bit already but you used a lot of archival footage. You used a lot of the photographs from the Dozier School for Boys, a lot of the images of when they were excavating the bodies. Used a lot of Martin Luther King archival footage. One of the things I found interesting is you used a lot of the space moon landing footage as well. Can you kind of talk a little bit about why you decided to add those to the film?
Ross: I love the space imagery so much. Oh man, it's just so generally beautiful, especially when you're when you have sound artists and composers as talent is as Scott Alario and Alex Somers, they really pull the unexpected out of the kind of expected. The archive was vital to the process, as mentioned with the 4:3, it was woven into the script to the point where we had links in the original script where you could go to and you could see what, where we were sourcing some of the images from.
There's many, many reasons why the archive is in. I think two main ones is to draw comparisons between the way in which people of color, Black folks in particular, in the U.S. have been imaged with cameras over time, and to bring all of those images in conversation with each other. If you look at the way that it's filmed, its point of view, it's 4:3, it's essentially Black subjectivity.
In the altar of cinema, as the default entryway, like that's not something that existed previously. In art and in museums yes, but not in the commercial space. And so, if you think about that notion of representation, poetic Black images from the inside, and then you have the Defiant Ones. You have Sidney Poitier you know, exploration of his character and Hollywood's idea of Blackness. And you have the Black family archive, and then you have news footage, you have all of these different modes. You kind of get to see the visualization people of color over time. And then maybe someone can get to the idea that the way these boys are treated is related to the way in which they're seen, and the way in which they're seen is related to the way in which we're represented.
Wood: You’ve done a lot of interviews about your film. What is one thing that you wished more interviewers like me would ask about your film but haven't?
Ross: Man, I've done so many, people get to most of the things, I think I would, I would always put it back on the interviewer in that to ask questions that are deeply particular to them as people or to you all as individuals. I think that the film insights, subjective responses, because it's really, you know, kind of idiosyncratically built. But I feel like in a lot of the interviews, the questions are geared towards the audience and not necessarily geared towards the inner desires of the interviewer. And I don't think that's necessarily fair. It's like a generalization. But like, if we were on a desert island and no one would ever hear the conversation, like, what would you ask about the film like it? Does one think that a question is not complex enough so they don't want to ask? Or is it practical? But kind of, I want to satisfy the deep, unconscious questions that people have, or at least, I want to know what they're thinking, like, I want to know how the film is really getting or burying into someone.
Wood: I would say, like, when I was sitting and watching, this isn't the first film that's been out that has depicted, you know the horrific history of aspects of America, especially towards African Americans and slavery in America. With this film, sitting and watching it, for me, the experience was so personal and grounding. If it was a film where there's that climactic moment where someone stands up and they give a speech about the message of the thing. I feel like that's something that some people write off a lot. I couldn't imagine if you sat anyone down and watched this movie to have them understand what happened. I don't see how an experience that is as encompassing as this is something that anyone can write off because it speaks to people in more ways than just saying words.
Ross: Thank you. That’s the ultimate goal, I think, to do it beyond words. Make a film that is genuinely experience. That's a thing that we know so well because we've experienced it our whole lives. We think that when we're encountering something, we're having a visceral and perceptual experience before we're having a conceptual experience. But I think mostly we have conceptual experiences, and that we're processing language and we understand and we're not forced to decipher. I don't remember who said it, but most films think for you. You don't do the thinking while you're watching. Maybe an M. Night Shyamalan, you know, a Sixth Sense. You're trying to figure it out. But that's a different type of thinking. That's like a puzzle. It's not actually confronting lived experience, your own lived experience simultaneously. I appreciate you saying that it was doing something beyond words.
