Deadline’s Virtual Screening Series welcomed MGM-Orion-Plan B’s acclaimed awards contender Nickel Boys, with director/co-writer RaMell Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray joining me for a screening followed by a Q&A. The film, which debuted at the Telluride Film Festival, is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Colson Whitehead novel about two young boys who endure hardship, racism and horror, as well as friendship, in a 1960s Florida reform school. Inspired by the real-life Dozier School for Boys, the film uses an unusual first-person POV “sentient perspective” to tell much of the story and bring the audience closer to the actual experience of the boys, who are played magnificently by Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, as well as such veteran actors as Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.
Nickel Boys has already won several awards including the National Society of Film Critics‘ Best Picture, and numerous critics awards from New York and Los Angeles to Chicago, Toronto, the African American Film Critics and countless others who recognized Ross’ direction and Fray’s cinematography. It is also up for five Critics Choice Awards and two Independent Spirit Awards including Best Picture at both.
Ross started off the season winning Best Director from the Gotham Awards and this week was nominated for Best Film by a First Time Director at the DGA Awards. It also has been named one of the AFI Awards’ Top 10 Films of the Year.
Actually this isn‘t the directorial debut of Ross since he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for his stirring Hale County This Morning, This Evening in 2018, but Nickel Boys represents his narrative directorial debut.
I asked Ross in our Q&A following the screening if he had any idea Nickel Boys would strike a nerve and become this kind of awards magnet? “You know, absolutely not. It’s kind surreal. It’s very much unbelievable,” he said. “And it’s really funny when I’ve seen other interviews and people get asked about their success and I’m like, ‘You knew it. What do you mean?’ Well we did not know it, and we just tried to do our thing, and people seem to be appreciating it and we couldn’t be more appreciative.”
As for the inspiration to take on Whitehead’s prize-winning book? “It’s story about two young Black men in in the South, and I’m a Black fella who’s been working with youth in Alabama, and there’s a direct tie to the way in which I think about imagery coming from this objective experience of people of color, and my relationship to just trying to access even imagery from that time,” he said. “But I think largely it’s Colson’s narrative that is right for, like, my art practice, like it’s right for the types of images that Jomo and I have been thinking about for a while, the ones that as Jomo likes to say, the type of cinema that you would want to see when you were young that would kind of give you a head start or let you be in conversation with your subjectivity in cinema. And what a joy to be able to imagine that in a Pulitzer Prize-winning book. It’s kind of unbelievable.”
For Fray, one of the biggest challenges was making that imagery, particularly in the way Ross saw it with POV, actually work on film.
“Well, what does point of view mean In the context of telling this story, and also, why is it important in viewing the story in this way? And I think that two things kind of came out of that conversation,” Fray said. “I think it was having an image that was deeply immersive, that pulled the audience into the experience in a different way and ideally formed a different form of intimacy with our protagonists, a different form of intimacy with kind of watching them navigate their world.
“You know, there’s a way in which, I think with all cinema, there’s an aspect where the viewer is just naturally a little dissociated from the image, like we are sitting in a dark room, we are watching it play on the screen. And I think for us, it was just the hope that we could just puncture that membrane between image and viewer slightly, not tear it down, not rip into it, but just puncture it slightly to ideally, try to create a gateway, a path or a channel, to have us as viewers, again, have a more intimate experience with the subjectivity of these boys moving through this system, moving through this space and moving through even their own lives. So, yeah it’s an incredible challenge as a cinematographer, because you’re truly being asked to kind of almost unlearn everything you think you might know to a project totally anew.”
Watch the conversation above.