In adapting Colson Whitehead’s novel to make the historical drama Nickel Boys, director and co-writer RaMell Ross quite literally reinvented a form of cinema. That’s because Ross approached his fiction feature debut with a singular vision in mind: to tell the story through the eyes of the protagonist. This means that what the viewer sees in watching Nickel Boys is exactly what the main character, Elwood (and, later, another character, Turner), sees as he navigates a racist, abusive reform school, Nickel Academy, in Jim Crow-era Florida.
This decision — to shoot entirely from a first-person point of view — necessitated an upending of the traditional writing process.
In this scene, Elwood gets transported to Nickel Academy after being accused of having stolen a car.
While in the script this sentence seems like a quick, simple moment, in the final cut of the film, Hattie’s cutting of the cake lasts longer than the writing leads the reader to expect. As RaMell Ross began to shoot his script, he “became aware that the tempo of the moment as it connects to the page, as that connected to what we envisioned the length of the film to be, was all over the place.”
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“One reason why we wanted to have this cake scene [lead into] the police car was the way in which someone thinks back on their life — what are the moments that someone remembers?” Ross notes the transition highlights how “[Elwood] has agency, but ultimately he just ends up in places. That speaks to larger systemic momentum.”
Courtesy of Orion Pictures
Ross, who began his career as a photographer, says he “had an idea of a first-person film from the perspective of a Black person in 2012. After reading the book, it’s the first idea that came to mind.” In this version of the script, the approach is signified through “Elwood POV.” “As you can see, we don’t emphasize it again because we want people to read, and so it’s easy to forget,” he says.
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In describing the school for the first time, Ross calls the place a “perversion.” A question Ross and co-screenwriter Joslyn Barnes continually asked themselves was: “How do we show the violence by showing the beauty and the upkeep? It’s all a mask. This place is actually murdering people. But if you were to come and visit, you would think that everything is fine, and that’s perverse, right? It’s almost like having an electric chair in a garden, where you’re like, ‘Guys, just put it in a white room.’ ”
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By the end of the film, the audience has learned that hundreds of students were tortured and murdered, evidenced by the discovery of unmarked graves in the modern day. Setting those images as Elwood arrives at Nickel proved to reveal too much information too soon. “We realized it didn’t allow you to experience Nickel as Elwood [initially] did, which is that it’s just a school and everything can be fine.” This scene, showing graves on a computer, was moved to much later in the film, after Elwood has been brutally beaten.
Courtesy of Orion Pictures
Nickel Boys also deviates from traditional filmic language through the interstitial placement of archival footage. While in this draft, the camera cuts to images of unmarked gravestones, in the final cut of the film, those images were used elsewhere and here we pan to the opening credits of Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones, starring Sidney Poitier. It got moved to this part of the script because “the overlaps between Elwood in the back of that car and Sidney Poitier in the back of that van were so poignant, and it also set up an implicit relationship between the school and [Poitier’s] prison.”
Because we’re seeing the entire movie through Elwood’s (and, later, Turner’s) gaze, every tiny detail onscreen is recontextualized. “These smaller moments don’t have power, necessarily, in a traditional film language,” Ross explains. But in this film, the moments we see a cop eating fried chicken or a boy in a cop car playing with a shark tooth “are way more poignant, because whether or not you think the POV is working, you still know you’re in point of view, so you’re forced to consider that angle as your own angle because you’re the character.”
This story first appeared in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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