At a time when Hollywood recycles the same genres and tropes ad nauseam, it’s hard to reinvent what a movie can be — unless you’re RaMell Ross. The director’s second feature, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, teaches its audience in real time how to process it. Ross calls the film “anti-narrative,” not because there’s no plot, but because it eschews most of the structural conventions people have come to expect from movies. The gutting saga about a college-bound Black teenager named Elwood (Ethan Herisse) who gets tossed into a brutal Jim Crow–era reform school after a mix-up with white police unfolds almost entirely from the perspectives of Elwood and his friend Turner (Brandon Wilson). For the most part, the camera shows us only what they see, and Ross intercuts some of the action with ancillary photos and movie clips that together foster a profound immersion. He expands and reframes what the viewer is experiencing without making Nickel Boys feel like some highfalutin art gimmick.
Ross, who played basketball at Georgetown, considers himself a late bloomer when it comes to movies, though it’s clear from his reference points that he is plenty astute. His own first film, the 2018 documentary Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, went from Sundance breakout to Oscar-nominated critical darling. Nickel Boys, which opens in select theaters in December before premiering on Prime Video at a later date, gives Ross a much bigger platform. It’s an instant Oscar front-runner that’s already earning him directing prizes. Ross has been offered a stylist to shepherd him through awards season, but he tells the Cut he’s hesitant to accept. “What did Kanye say?” Ross asks. “We won’t bring up other things he’s said, but ‘hard to be humble when you stuntin’ on a jumbotron.’”
Hale County had a very organic rise, whereas Nickel Boys comes with a built-in profile. It’s not IP in the cynical Hollywood sense, but it is a known property, and also an immediate Oscar contender. How does that change your experience of the film as it’s entering the world?
We finished Hale County, This Morning, This Evening a couple weeks before Sundance. We were like, “Great, we’re probably not going to get in. This is going to be the type of film that someone finds in ten years on the shelf of a library at a school, and it’ll be influential for them because of the poetics and the anti-narrative.” Nickel Boys didn’t have that esoteric nature. We have really big actors, and the ideas are a lot more accessible. Some can claim the topic is difficult, but the work is very geared towards social enlightenment. I can’t believe that something with this origin source can be elevated to a space where it has millions of viewers. It’s not organized around the three-act structure. It’s not organized around having people feel certain things at certain points. It’s like a language that evolves during the process.
We’ve seen first-person POV in films, usually involving a shaky camera and a limited perspective, like found footage. Here, it’s poetic and shapeshifting — the world as two central characters experience it. Were there any precedents or models you thought of as you were constructing that approach?
It sounds very pretentious, but for Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, people were like, “Where did you get this form from?” I made it up. It’s a portmanteau of The Tree of Life, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, and Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy. It’s those films collapsed with the idea of cinema and Black imagery being intentionally more musical and more geared around an orchestra than a three-act structure. There are five visual movements in Hale County — roving image collages and consciousness streams that are upended by a scene. But I don’t know that narrative films usually work like that. Terrence Malick is not afraid to cut to something that you would never expect to be beside something else. You learn that’s possible because all images speak to all images. They’re supposed to build the language of the film.
How much of the imagery was written into the script, and how much was selected during post-production?
The form of the film is in the script. If you read the script, it would say “Archival footage.” I made a list of really random things that I wanted to see in historic footage. One was a kid or a person falling or tripping on the street out of nowhere and then catching themselves — these types of moments where we really get to see how a person moves. The film is built around integrating elements like that to swing us into the real world and then swing us back into something that’s experiential. Of course, that doesn’t always work when you get to the edit. The challenge, then, for Nick and myself was to make the film feel like it’s staying true to these ideas. Just like Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, the film does not work until the end. You need the whole process.
The Defiant Ones is part of the Whitehead novel as well, but it feels more pronounced here because we actually see clips from it. What, if anything, does that movie mean to you?
Sidney Poitier is just a pioneer of acting in Hollywood and the African American experience as it elevates into popular consciousness — the things he had to endure in the movies and the roles he played just because there were no other roles for him. He is a mainstay in thinking about the production of Blackness, or the way that Hollywood has produced our understanding of it. When I read the book, I rewatched The Defiant Ones, and I don’t know if there’s anything more powerful than that scene of Sidney Poitier singing. The producers went to bat to get The Defiant Ones in the film. We had to go through the Poitier estate because we were employing his image. They don’t usually do these things.
Oh, I assumed you’d just get the rights from the studio.
Well, even if the studio has the rights, they want a good relationship with the estate. It’s a lot of risk. When’s the last time you’ve seen an image of Martin Luther King in a movie? They don’t let anyone use it. The film is built on grand ideas that Joss and I wrote, and then people going to bat for months saying, “Trust us. If this comes together, it will be something.” It’s meant to bring in the complexities of race and society into our film.
What were the films that made you want to be a filmmaker?
It’s so weird to say, but I genuinely feel that I’m less of a filmmaker and more of an artist. I only use “artist” because it means so many more things than “filmmaker.” There are tons of pieces of art that I’ve encountered where they could not have been done in any other medium. That’s kind of what I want all my work to feel like. There are filmmakers, like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who, to me, signals the evolution of film in that the films are so deeply authored and mysterious that I call them an analog for human consciousness. They’re kind of unknowable in the same way that a friend is familiar but also unknowable. You can go back to a film and you know it well, but you’re also always surprised if you’re in a different mood or you bring a little something else to the moment of watching. I get that from Tree of Life. I get that from Killer of Sheep. I get that from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” I get that from Arthur Russell. I get it from Toni Morrison.
Do you have a favorite piece of art that you own?
I don’t own much art. I think a lot has to do with just not being able to afford it. I would buy a lot if I could. I have a lot of my friends’ work. One of the composers, Scott Alario, who also composed on Hale Country, This Morning, This Evening, I met in grad school for photography. I love his art. His wife’s an amazing artist, so I have a little set of witch magic-potion things that she made that is genuine art. I have one of Scott’s first books. If I could have an art piece, I think my favorite photograph is Jeff Wall’s A Sudden Gust of Wind. It’s based on a painting by Hokusai. Its un-fucking-believable.
Do you listen to music while you’re writing or on set?
I haven’t been on set enough to have habits, but when I’m writing, I do listen to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue on repeat. This has been since 2004. Never put on anything else.
You describe yourself as someone who doesn’t make escapist experiences, so I wonder if sometimes you need to seek out a comfort watch.
Not at all. Because I played sports so hard-core throughout my life, I feel so behind. I talk to people who have been reading voraciously and watching voraciously since they were kids, and I was literally in the gym almost through college. I’m like, I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about, but they sound great. I have a need-to-catch-up mentality. But my go-to-when I was a kid was The Lion King. No joke: I think my sophomore and junior years of high school, I used to watch The Lion King before school every day. I need to rewatch it to know why. It’s kind of embarrassing. But now my go-to is La Jetée. Sometimes I put it on in my pocket and just listen to the soundtrack and words while walking.
Oh, I’ve never thought about doing something like that.
Most films don’t work that way, but it’s so discursive that it just works. It’s so bizarre. I love it.
Other than Nickel Boys, do you have a favorite book-to-movie adaptation?
Now, it would be Dune. I’m so head over heels for the Dune movies. People have praised Denis Villeneuve, and will praise Denis for the history of language, but the minimalist nature of that sci-fi is unreal.
What other books have you loved recently?
I love Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time. I listen to that often. It’s recited by Benedict Cumberbatch. I love Tracy K. Smith, and Sarah Lewis’s newest book, and anything by W.G. Sebald. I just picked up Salinger’s Nine Stories again. I wish that my films could function image wise with the clarity and precision of his vocabulary. I don’t think I’ve felt an ounce of fat reading him. He’ll use, like, “garrulous,” and it’ll just be like, How did you make that work and not like you’re just dropping that word in? It’s so cool.
You said in an interview earlier this year, “As a person who works at my own pace, super slow, I don’t like to answer emails.” I realize in that context you were referring to producers and other people asking for updates on your work, but it’s also a very relatable sentiment to anyone who is just tired of looking at their inbox. So, what is your email style?
My email style is getting back to the person as if they just emailed, but it’s been a year and I’m not acknowledging that it’s been a year. You know, someone being like, “I really need this. It’s urgent. I need it by the end of day tomorrow.” And then eight months later, I’m like, “Here you go, thanks.”
Do you have a go-to sign-off?
I love to say “toodles.” And “indeed.”
Oh, “toodles” is good. You don’t see that one often.
Sometimes, if I’m in a good mood, I’ll do a “blue skies.” But it’s hard — everyone is supposed to be accessible. I mean this respectfully, but another person’s priorities are not my priorities.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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