RaMell Ross estimates he read a grand total of one screenplay before collaborating with producer Joslyn Barnes on the adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Nickel Boys.”
“I have absolutely no problem walking into the woods and walking straight,” the first-time feature director says, with a sheepish smile, about his relative screenwriting inexperience. “I got my compass, make sure I got a couple landmarks, I know where the sun’s going to set. I didn’t do research — I’m not interested in three-act structure — but I’ve watched amazing cinema.”
Since “Nickel Boys” premiered at Telluride, much has been made of its innovative first-person point of view, which moves between its two main characters, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson). But the focus on the film’s technical mastery risks obscuring Ross and Barnes’ dazzling, emotional script, which received an Oscar nomination for adapted screenplay. Below, Ross sheds light on the movie’s most indelible scenes and how they evolved from script to screen.
Scene 1: The Rev. Martin
Early on, a young Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp) is quietly affected while watching the iconic civil rights leader speak on television. King’s speech is from an actual broadcast — his estate rarely gives permission for films to use his words — and later in “Nickel Boys,” teenage Elwood is astonished to see King at a local grocery store, only to realize it’s just a cardboard cutout.
Ross and Barnes had no idea if they’d be allowed to include King’s speech. “I mean, we put [the 1958 drama] ’The Defiant Ones’ in [the script too],” Ross says. “[The producers] were like, ‘Write your best film,’ so Joslyn and I approached this as trying to make our ideal project — not thinking about money or if it could be done.”
Still, he had a backup plan: If King’s estate said no, he’d go with a Harry Belafonte cutout. (The TV scene could add whichever speech in postproduction.) “Two days before we were shooting the MLK [cutout] scene, we got permission, so we went ahead with that. But we had Harry Belafonte’s there just in case.”
Did Ross still shoot a version with the Belafonte cutout, just in case the King estate changed its mind? “[The producers] asked me to, and I said no,” he replies with a grin. “Roll of the dice.”
Scene 2: Elwood runs into Chickie Pete
In adulthood, Elwood (Daveed Diggs) unexpectedly reunites in a bar with Chickie Pete (Craig Tate), who has struggled since being sent to the Nickel reform camp. Broke and sleeping on a couch, Pete is a shattered soul. When Pete goes in to hug Elwood, “Nickel Boys” cuts away for a moment, and then we suddenly see Trey Perkins, the young actor who plays Pete at the Nickel Academy — that wounded child still so present in the man.
The script doesn’t mention this actor switch, but according to Ross, “That [decision] happened in preproduction. Actually, the original idea was to have when Chickie Pete goes to the bathroom, the younger [actor then] comes out — and then you just run [the rest of the scene] like normal.”
Ross ended up shooting both versions, ultimately opting for the brief, post-hug appearance by Perkins. “It was more powerful to have the punch [of just the hug] than to have [Perkins] come back and do it all. But the other one was f— interesting.”
There was ample debate about which take worked better. “Joslyn, [editor Nicholas Monsour] and I, we each had swords, and we’re just fighting in there,” recalls Ross, laughing. “We had a voting thing where, if two people thought it was something, then you go with that. It was almost democratic, but I could override it.”
Scene 3: The trip to the White House
Nickel’s Black students dread the so-called White House, the dank room where they’re savagely beaten. In the script, Ross and Barnes establish the space like this: “The stench is fierce. Urine, feces and fear are soaked into the concrete.”
“When you add smell in [the scene description], you force someone out of their head and into their senses,” Ross explains. “It was important to remind the viewer that this place, it’s not the way that it looks — it’s the way that it exists in time and space and connects with the way that a person senses the world. And what better way to do that than with smell?”
Notably, however, Elwood’s beating is never shown — instead, Ross marries the sound of whippings to harsh cuts of a series of distorted, grainy images of faces of students from the real-life Dozier School, which provided the inspiration for Nickel Academy. The script indicates that we would see these students as boys, then as adults, but during the edit, the director changed his mind. “We didn’t want contemporary images there,” Ross says. “We wanted to stay with an abstract representation that’s also literal of them.” The strategy was in keeping with his insistence, from his first meetings on the movie, that violence against Black bodies would not be depicted.
“You’re pushing up against urges that you have allegiance to that come from a tradition of cinema — a tradition of storytelling — that quite often just imports defaults, because that’s just the way that people have done it before,” says Ross. “And you’re like, ‘Well, why? We could actually show not one ounce of violence and that doesn’t necessarily take the power away.’ If this was a story about the Dozier boys and about moving on, it would be a lot easier. But this is actually about remembering, so we tried to find other ways to remember.”
The post RaMell Ross takes us inside the pages of the ‘Nickel Boys’ script appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
