‘Nickel Boys’ — how a prized literary work became a game-changing movie

SAN FRANCISCO – The instant RaMell Ross finished reading Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Nickel Boys,” he knew he wanted to bring the powerful, truth-inspired story about boyhood, resilience and Jim Crow-era racism to the screen from the viewpoints of its two primary characters — Elwood and Turner, Black Florida teens stuck in a horrific juvenile reformatory known as the Nickel Academy. (See the review here)

Then he read it a second time and the idea can even further into focus.

“I think on the second time of reading it, I (said to myself) I want to do this,” he recalls during a recent interview in San Francisco. “After the first reading, I thought about POV and what it would look like for me to be in their shoes and that type of exploration. But after the second read, I realized the imagination space that Colson had left open for the visualization of their lives and what it is like. but he’s not overly descriptive.”

To say Ross’ ideas for the film jelled successfully would be putting it mildly.

“Nickel Boys,” with Ross as director and co-screenwriter, opens in Bay Area theaters on Jan. 3 as an innovative visual elegy on Black American identity that is gaining traction in the Hollywood awards conversation.

Told with dreamy impressionistic flourishes that create a unique cinematic adventure while managing to remain faithful to Whitehead’s acclaimed story, Ross’ film recalls the creative storytelling effect of revered filmmaker Terrence Malick.

Although “Nickel Boys” represents Ross’ directorial feature debut, it’s not the first time the dynamic 42-year-old movie-maker who is also a visual artist, photographer and Brown University associate professor has turned heads in the film world. Ross nabbed a 2019 Oscar nomination for the evocative documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” — another piercing immersive experience, one that ebbs and flows through the lives of Black residents in that Alabama county.

Ross’ outside-of-the-box ingenuity also fueled a project by the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans that found Ross shipping himself in a freighter crate that journeyed from Rhode Island to Alabama. The reason? To illustrate “the concept of reverse Black migration and return,” he’s quoted as saying in press materials.

All his work encourages viewers to bear witness to both the joy and the tragedy from the eyes of someone else. Ross saw an enlightening power in accomplishing that in the mostly 1960s-set “Nickel Boys.”

“The real difference I think between a lot of other pieces of media and this one is that you genuinely get to see the way that (San Francisco native)  Aunjanue (Ellis-Taylor) as Hattie looks at her grandson,” Ross said, referring to Elwood. “That gaze as we know comes from our parents and our loved ones but in cinema traditionally, however close the camera gets to the eye lines — and sometimes they break the fourth wall — that love gaze is something that we’re a voyeur to, and it exists between the chemistry of the characters.”

Elwood’s gaze jumps from the beautiful (looking up at the sky while he’s sprawled out on grass) to the bone-chilling and haunting (a truck driving by with a big wooden cross hanging out of its bed and emitting a scraping sound as it drags along on the road).

Given this is a tough story tied to the atrocities committed at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, where 55 bodies of young people were exhumed on the grounds and documentation and where relentless abuse occurred, showing moments of beauty and love were essential, Ross said. And he went to extraordinary lengths to portray them.

To lend the film authenticity, Ross used actual photos of some teens who were killed at the Nickel Academy and features various real items from that era, including a cartoon postcard featuring a Black baby in the mouth of an alligator with the words “Alligator Bait” emblazoned on it. It was a practice that actually happened in the South.

“The film is so full of ideas, but this one is vital,” he explains. Yet it was important to show that characters are “more than the way society is treating them. They’re more than the trauma that happens to them. They have a rich, rich inner life and see it as beautifully as we see it, as you see it.”

Oakland native Daveed Diggs, who costars as an adult Elwood, admits he had a hard time initially getting his head around Ross’ vision.

“I couldn’t understand it when he was describing it to me and how he wanted to do it,” he recalled during a Zoom interview. “I had to get out there and see it for myself. Then when I watched it for the first time, I was blown away. I think it worked better than I imagined. It’s a great and exciting way to tell the story and it’s just so beautiful. I’ve seen it three times. I like it more every time I see it.”

The scenes that Diggs appears in finds the camera shooting from the back of his head so you don’t see his face often, allowing audiences to observe conversations Elwood has with others from that advantage point, including with girlfriends, coworkers and an acquaintance he meets up with in a bar — one of the film’s most haunting exchanges.

“It was exciting to shoot that way,” said Diggs, who shot to stardom as one of the two leads in the 2018 Oakland-set buddy dramedy series “Blindspotting” and being a Tony Award-winning sensation in “Hamilton.” “It was cool to be, even in a small way, responsible for how we get to receive these other great performances, more responsibility than I normally have as an actor.”

To better inform what an adult version of his character would act like, Diggs studied dailies of actors Ethan Herisse (Elwood) and Brandon Wilson (Turner) at work in Louisiana so he could pick up on the actors’ mannerisms. “The result of that was I became a huge fan of Ethan and Brandon,” he said.

“I was watching at the time raw, unedited (along with) whole takes of scenes, and God they’re so stunning in the movie. It made me excited and nervous to be a part of it, wanting to do something that would visually fit in with all of that.”

Diggs also appreciated the way Ross’ direction immerses viewers in the story.

“No matter who you are, you’re experiencing the story, the body and perspective of one of these young Black men who were at the Nickel Academy,” he said.

“It was a staggering thing to try and pull off,” he said, adding. “It’s amazing.”