“What happens when you disassociate? What happens when you’re separate from yourself? What happens when you’re no longer yourself? Is there a camera language that can embody that, that can execute that? In the film, when Elwood walks into the white house, he looks left he sees the sawhorse thing that they’re beat on. He looks to the right, he sees Hamish [Linklater, who plays Spencer]. And then when he looks to the left again, he’s in front of the camera because he separated from it. He’s having an out of body experience,” says director and co-writer of Nickel Boys about his unusual technique for shooting his protagonist Elwood’s point of view.
On today’s episode of the Write On podcast, we speak with RaMell Ross about his new film Nickel Boys about two young Black men who get sent to a reform school in 1960’s Jim Crow South. The film is heartbreakingly beautiful and already getting plenty of Oscar buzz.
In the interview, Ross admits he didn’t know how to write a screenplay when he decided to adapt Colson Whitehead’s book Nickel Boys, so he began the process by using written storyboards to visualize the scenes, which were later converted into a screenplay with the help of co-writer Joselyn Barnes. We also discuss his decision to limit the violence depicted on screen.
“It’s a tough space because on one hand, you want people to understand the things that happened and their horror. But I feel as a culture, we’ve been overexposed to it and specifically overexposed as it relates to people of color because we don’t have so many iterations of visuals of people of color. If that’s most of it, then how does that work on the culture and psyche?” says Ross.
Ross also shares his take on writing a movie with historical elements.
“I don’t think that what we understand to be history is history. I think that it’s a collection of familiar ways of analyzing or engaging with the past that fits comfortably in the socio-political language of reflection. I don’t know what it’s like to be a person in the past. And I know that a lot of the narratives that we have these days are guided by a person’s either nefarious unconscious or they have another type of motivation behind them. And so I want people to think about the past as something that has the freedom of interpretation, that we would like to be given to all of the things that we’ve done in our lives. I just don’t believe in historical reproduction,” he says.
Listen to the podcast to find out more about Ross’s unconventional filmmaking process.