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| Nickel Boys |
Enjoying nominations in almost every major set of awards this season, RaMell Ross’ bold and experimental adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys is one of those rare works that really tries to do something different with cinema. It opened last year’s New York Film Festival and on 3 January it will be on cinema screens all across the UK.
Inspired by real events, the film follows the story of two African American boys, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who meet in a brutal reform school. I recently had the privilege of attending a Q&A session in which RaMell – also known for 2018’s remarkable Hale County This Morning, This Evening – spoke about the film, his approach to his craft, and influences such as the legendary photojournalist Gordon Parks.
“I love Gordon Parks,” he said. “What an influence he's had on culture at large! He popularised [the idea] that the camera is a weapon. I want to contribute to that, that it has mainly been a weapon used against Black people, and I think that it's nice to use it as a weapon in our favour. I'm anti violence, guys, but sometimes you have to use the master's tools.
“I came into photography and film when I was in college and I was supposed to go to the league. I was a scholarship basketball player. I kind of lost basketball and my mother at the same time, and then photography and film becomes a place where you have control over the world. I needed that at that time.”
His experience in basketball – particularly as a coach – may have influenced the way he operates as a filmmaker, he says.
“I think as a director, you kind of see yourself as a coach in some ways, trying to bring out the best of everyone that's a department head and those who are working with their peers in their departments. But I think for me, what’s most interesting about basketball and photography in film is just the way that they analyse and look at space. As a point guard, you're required to make analysis and kind of read the future and predict the future, and you're very aware of micro gestures and how they're misleading. It's all about behaviour. And that is what a film set is. That is what the visual field is. So it became an easy transition. And then, of course, coaching really transitions over into working with people to try to get the best out of them.”
The most striking thing about this particular film is the way that it’s shot mostly in the first person, sometimes from one boy’s point of view and sometimes from the other’s.
“There's many reasons for it.” he explains. “One thing about the film and making films is it's an opportunity to make a ton of meaning, as opposed to giving a specific narrative. It's a film that's really full of the most profound meaning. The most revelatory meaning in doing POV [point of view shots] is you think about films and the way in which they're organised around death and the drama that happens and the drama that's related to it. And one thing that the Dozier School boys were robbed of was life, right? And so how do you make a film that is giving them life? How do you make a film that is more about them living? Maybe the context of the film is their death, but the process and the execution of the film is their life.”
For him, he says, what is central to the film is the relationships between the characters and the way that one of them ends up carrying forwards the legacy of another.
“There's something about photography and film. It's kind of conceptual, but, you know, it's true. The camera intensifies objectivity. It fundamentally objectifies people into things. And it also has a beautiful way of expressing humanity and connecting us. It's an unprecedented technology that we haven't fully grasped. But at the same time, what does it look like for the camera to be inside us? I like to say that human beings are the real documents of civilisation. It's in us. And that's, I think, the core reason why it's POV.”
There are several points at which the first person narratives are broken up with clips of archive footage and material from Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones.
“It's more fluid with this archival,” RaMell says. “I knew that that was going to be essentially the bones of the film. One thing that I've been interested in is, you know, what happened to the Dozier School boys is not something that could not have happened without photography and film producing blackness in a certain way, right? Like, the camera goes into communities, it takes people out, and then people have racist ideas, and then the image reaffirms that in their minds. And so my co writer Joslyn Barnes and I wanted to use the archival footage to show the different ways in which blackness has been produced over time. Cinema news footage, Black family archive, which bell hooks would say is the only site of resistance.
“There's also this interesting idea that if we think about the power of the camera and the way in which the camera goes into communities, either for government reasons or whatnot, in which people could be said to be only like visual statistics... Right? Their whole person is impossible to come across in those moments. Can you go into the archive and deep archives and find moments when the person is walking and they don't even know they're being filmed, or they do and they look back at the camera and you see them for a second, like, that's maybe closer to the real person. Bringing that into the film and having that be a moment of revelation in relationship to the dramatic story, but also kind of rescuing them from that stock footage use of their person. So there were many other reasons as well, but those were the larger ones.”
