“I think about the film as a place to do, as I like to say, make an experiential monument,” says Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross of the Oscar-nominated the Florida-set Jim Crow-era drama adapted from Colson Whitehead’s 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name.
“To elevate the those your schoolboy story to a place of historical reckoning for an audience where you guys have an experience that’s like, as visceral as you smelling something, smelling the air after a storm, or you rolling in the grass or feeling the sun on your skin,” the filmmaker asserted. “Where it’s something you try to explain to someone and they’re like, dude, you were just rolling in the grass and you’re like, but you don’t understand.”
With acclaimed actors Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson onstage with him and Deadline Executive Editor Dominic Patten moderating, Ross was speaking on a rainy Thursday at an enthusiastically attended screening of Nickel Boys at the London West Hollywood.
Watch the conversation here:
Ross’ first narrative feature project, the Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor co-starring Nickel Boys is nominated for both Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture at the 97th Academy Awards next month. While fiction is brand new territory for Ross, who wrote the Nickel Boys script with longtime collaborator Joslyn Barnes, he was actually previously nominated for an Oscar in 2018 for his searing documentary Hale Country This Morning, This Evening.
A National Society of Film Critics winner, the strikingly original and inventive Nickel Boys from Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios also scored BAFTA and Spirit Awards nominations on the road to the Academy Awards.
Scroll through some photos from the February 13 screening in Los Angeles here:
(L-R) Brandon Turner, RaMell Ross and Ethan Herisse at the Deadline x Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios ‘Nickel Boys’ FYC Event
Rich Polk for Deadline
Brandon Wilson, RaMell Ross, Ethan Herisse
Rich Polk for Deadline
Brandon Wilson, RaMell Ross, Ethan Herisse
Rich Polk for Deadline
Brandon Wilson
Rich Polk for Deadline
RaMell Ross
Rich Polk for Deadline
Ethan Herisse
Rich Polk for Deadline
In a film that often literally takes the perspective of its main characters, Herisse and Wilson had to go to unknown places, figuratively, playing boys sentenced to an violently abusive and racist 1960s Sunshine state panhandle reform school – a process that required a lot of trust, on all sides of the camera.
“There was just so much trust and so much joy, really,” Wilson told the audience at the screening. “I mean, I know there’s it’s a heavy subject matter, but, yeah, I think we felt safe.”
“That joy and that kind of trust just makes it so much easier for us to get into these more vulnerable spaces and explore these subject matters that might be harder for us to reach if we felt like we were more inhibited because we didn’t trust the people we’re exploring with,” Wilson, who won the Gotham Independent Film Award for Breakthrough Performer revealed.
“We’ve been talking about trust a lot, but I think because of that trust and also just excitement to work on the project, that was felt like everywhere,” Herisse, the When They See Us alum, added of the unique POV of Nickel Boys.
“So, you know, it takes a moment to kind of find your footing,” he noted of the experience of being on the set. “RaMell got a pretty good feel of when it felt like we were looking into the camera versus it felt like the camera melted away and we were actually speaking to, you know, to each other.”
Having its debut at Telluride last summer and in cinemas December 13, Nickel Boys can now be purchased on Prime Video. The 97th Academy Awards will be broadcast on ABC and streaming live on Hulu on March 2.
