RaMell Ross Interview
Nickel Boys (2024) is the searing debut feature fiction film of RaMell Ross. After his documentary Hale County, This Morning, This Evening which earned him a Peabody Award and a nomination for Best Documentary Feature at the 2019 Academy Awards, Ross, in collaboration with Plan B Entertainment and Orion Pictures, has adapted the 2020 Pulitzer Prize winning novel penned by Colson Whitehead. The film, shot largely in a dizzying and effective point-of-view perspective, follows the story of two boys, Elwood and Turner, both sent to the segregated reform school of Nickel Academy in Florida, a fictional school evoking those in reality (such as Dozier School for Boys), where scores of children were abused, far from inquisitive eyes and institutional accountability.
Through using archival footage from the Jim Crow Era, the film grounds this hauntingly beautiful story in our present, sparking a dialogue that reminds us that these historical accounts of abuse and trauma at their core involved people, people who had dreams, and aspirations, and emotions, as deep and tangible as our very own. TNBFC’s Mojola Akinyemi sat down with Ross to discuss the inspiration behind his mode of filmmaking, and the process that resulted in the final film.
TNBFC: With the first person POV framework in the film, particularly in the ending where it strikes you in a specific way, how early on in the process was that decided?
Ross: It was the first idea that came to mind after reading the novel. It was foundational to the adaptation process, and the entire thing was built from that initial idea. It’s kind of interesting because I can’t imagine what it would have been like if it had been made without it, or if my co-writer Joslyn Barnes had questioned the idea. It was just immediately, “that’s interesting!”, and then going from there.
TNBFC: I’ve noticed some documentary filmmakers that go into making fiction, such as yourself and recently Payal Kapadia with All We Imagine as Light use this approach of incorporating instances of the real into the dramatic narrative. How did it feel sublimating the real into the fictional with the story of these two boys?
Ross: It felt vital and necessary and natural - whatever natural means. It built itself up in that way. I can imagine another version of the film that doesn’t have that in there, as I’m sure most people can. But, I find that hard to believe that someone could come across the Dozier Document, this 150-page document that examined the evidence forensically and illustrated what was found, such as when they exhumed the bodies and laid out the grounds, and not want to honour this source material, or find that more powerful than anything they could do. The fiction film process typically uses that information as just inspiration, something to recreate, but there’s nothing more powerful than the portraits of those boys that were actually at the Dozier School. It seems almost unfaithful to the actual thing to ignore that when we have evidence, and proof, and images of them. And also, if you make images that are traditional fiction, if you tether them to these real images, then it has a power that you can feel - though, it will always feel unprecedented given the relationship between the real and the fiction in general.
TNBFC: Yes that’s true, these narratives aren’t just stories, they are examples, their voices have been lost to history and they’ve been denied the ability to tell their own stories in their own words. This is all we have.
Ross: It’s almost as though the film body is recreating time, filling out the actual timeline and creating some sort of proxy body for the experiences with the boys. There is something somatic about the process. Maybe the archival images are the tattoos on the body of the film.
TNBFC: Yes, it’s deeply visceral. You want to reach out through history and talk to these boys but you can't. I also wanted to ask about your phrase used in an earlier Q+A, of the “technical death of the Black body” when it comes to being photographed and archived. In terms of rescuing them from the archive, what does it mean to revive them and make them seen in our present day?
Ross: It’s a complicated question. The gesture starts as an intuition or impulse, and there’s essays to be written about the philosophical implications and/or the practical manifestations of a new version of these images. I like to say that when Black folks are photographed, they die a particular death of the imaginable. But I think there’s a way in which they can be reimagined, and it opens up a Pandora’s Box of possible future conceptual iterations. Opening up the possibility for them to be reimagined doesn’t mean that they can’t be reimagined in a negative light - they can be re-murdered or re-killed in a visual way. But, I think opening up to the natural world gives us something biodegradable about the image. It stops it from being as fixed, as is usually expected in the photographic process, particularly with the context of the power dynamics of the original capture. I would definitely lean on Saidiya Hartman’s Critical Fabulations because she has been the most articulate and the most clear about recontextualising, and the need for it. It’s something I need to think about a lot more.
TNBFC: I haven’t read that though I have read some of Sontag’s work, where she talks about the nature of the image being inherently voyeuristic, particularly in the context of war photography and images captured in conflict.
Ross: You should read Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts. It’s an essay that I think will actually change your life. When I read it, I thought, everything is different now.
TNBFC: I will, thank you! So with your background, you’ve worked as an educator and are also a photographer. When it comes to your experience with young people and children, do you think it affects the respect and gravity you provide them, particularly in this film?
Ross: Yes, definitely. The foundation of my critical practice, my photography practice and my film practice, comes from working in the Hale Country community in Greensboro, Alabama, and being confronted with making images of my students for my own desire, and being unable to show them and be satisfied with them because of their lack of reflexivity. It’s that problem of photography. and what I was talking about with the overall problem of the archive. These are at-risk youth and I’d think, this person is way more than I see them in this image. Now, if I’m feeling this with them, what’s the relationship of everyone else that has ever been photographed, and the dynamic of the photographer? It can send you on a spiral. Maybe by default you’re part of the problem. Maybe the problem isn’t as bad as I make it out to be! But it’s something that I care about.
TNBFC: How would you open that door to that reflexivity? Or is the dynamic inherently imbibed in the nature of taking a photograph?
Ross: I think it is imbibed in the nature of taking a photograph. But I think what we need at large is cultural literacy. We need to be aware of the problems of a straight photograph, and should be aware of strategies that can upend our natural inclination to stereotype, place judgements, and project onto the image. The first thing I came up with: I would take them with a 4X5 camera and it would produce an image, a very large one, and I would have them write one word that described themselves on the image, anywhere they wanted. It would create two versions of the image, the way that they see themselves, and the way that I see them. Just that tension there, between photographer and subject, was enough to undermine that fundamental ability to see the thing as one. It’s about strategies.
TNBFC: How do you think you can do that with the archival footage in this film, when you’re not able to get these historical people, the boys of the images, to write down what they see in their photographs?
Ross: Well I think here, it’s that they’re organised in a project that is producing new meaning by means of the juxtaposition between what came before and what came after. Archives typically are closed capsules, thumbnails on websites, or maybe unseen in a hard drive. But here, they are part of the stream of consciousness of a character, and of me as the filmmaker. It’s like the images are folded into the brains of our characters, and we can see how they are thinking of and imagining the world. Hopefully the way they are used in this film is open-ended. I’m interested in the ambiguity of the photograph, not the certainty of it. And when we’re giving them this play and multi-dimensional analytics point, I think that they are free. I wonder, what is an image that has free-will? What is an image that can go and do what it wants because it is unable to be captured by someone’s certainty? That is what I want for Black people in images.
TNBFC: Amazing. I just wanted to ask a wider question of the process and working with Plan B, who have a legacy of producing incredible films highlighting Black narratives, did you feel safe in this collaboration?
Ross: I was hesitant at first. I had never taken another meeting with a producer after Hale County, This Morning, This Evening. It didn’t seem to me that studio processes were for folks like myself. But despite everything that I had assumed, they were the opposite of everything I had heard. They were deeply supportive. When it came to the needs of the story, they genuinely believed the vision. A lot of conversations can become hard because money is involved, and you can’t do everything you want because certain things have to take priority. But, what was beautiful was that, unlike how I might have thought, all those decisions were actually at my discretion. They weren’t forced, they were suggestions. Kindness begets kindness. They were also just really smart. There is nothing better than talking with someone who understands.
Nickel Boys is released into UK cinemas from Friday, January 3rd.