Content warning: This article includes mentions of physical violence.
One of the 10 movies competing for the highly-coveted Best Picture title at the Oscars this year is Nickel Boys (2024)—a visually stunning, gut-wrenching epic directed by Georgetown alum RaMell Ross (COL ’05).
Adapted from The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Nickel Boys tells the story of Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), two Black teenagers living in Tallahassee, Fla., during the height of the Jim Crow era. After being wrongly accused of abetting a car theft, Elwood is sent to the Nickel Academy, a segregated school where troubled boys can supposedly avoid incarceration and reform their wayward ways before rejoining society.
There, Elwood meets Turner and the boys discover Nickel’s nefarious underbelly: the instructors regularly beat students believed to be violating the rules, and a number of boys have disappeared, slaughtered by the very institution that promised to uplift them. Horrifically, the Nickel Academy is based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys, a now-closed Florida reform school responsible for abusing hundreds of children throughout its lengthy history.
Though Nickel Boys is fictional, the film incorporates archival footage from databases such as the Florida Memory Project and the African American Home Movie Archive to provide critical historical context. Following a harrowing scene in which an instructor beats Elwood, photographs of Dozier schoolboys flash across the screen—a juxtaposition between historical fiction and cold, hard history that is nothing short of chilling.
“When you put those together you’re having a conversation that you can’t have with words, you know?” Ross said in an interview with the Voice. “When you connect it to the narrative, I think you’re, I hope at least, you’re speaking to the inability for these boys to be treated the way they are without considering the way that they’re visualized.”
During our interview, Ross described his journey to becoming a filmmaker as a “bumblebee path.” Born in Germany and raised in Fairfax, Va., Ross studied English and sociology at Georgetown while playing for the men’s basketball team.
“I learned how big the world was by going to Georgetown,” Ross said. “I was a local kid, grew up in Northern Virginia, born in Germany […] I knew how big the world was, but I didn’t know how big the world was in terms of other people’s experiences.”
In 2018, Ross released Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, an Oscar-nominated documentary showcasing Black life in Hale County, Ala. According to Ross, the producers who owned the intellectual property rights for The Nickel Boys reached out personally to gauge his interest in adapting Whitehead’s novel after watching Hale County. It’s clear to see how Ross’s work on Hale County inspired Nickel Boys—both projects speak the same visual language, one of patience and steadfast observance.
“One of the working concepts with my co-writer was what if Elwood and Turner had their own cameras to make their own Hale County?” Ross said.
Ross is acutely aware of how racism has textured filmmaking’s history; in his brilliant essay “Renew The Encounter,” published in Film Quarterly in 2019, he declares that “the God of the camera is a colonizer.” He embeds within his work a hope to “renew the encounter” between the individuals on-screen, behind the camera, and in the theater seats.
A specialty of Ross’s style is his image-first approach. Rather than rendering the visuals second fiddle to the story, Ross elevates the image to paramount importance, understanding that a film’s visual and narrative landscapes are indivisible. During our conversation, Ross encouraged aspiring filmmakers to resist the temptation to sideline cinematography by simply “outsourcing” it to a director of photography. Instead, he urged young creatives to nurture their own “personal poetic”—a unique visual perspective reflecting the distinct lens through which they view the world.
“I think taking a photographer’s approach to making films is a way to embed or import a little bit more meaning into the image, into the narrative, than the traditional narrative use of images,” Ross said.
Ross’s experimental and fiercely empathetic sensibilities are obvious in Nickel Boys’ first-person point of view style, which invites the viewer to see Tallahassee through Elwood and Turner’s eyes, heightening our attachment to these characters tenfold. For instance, in the beginning of Nickel Boys, we only catch glimpses of young Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp) in reflections—in a silver iron gliding across a shirt or in a TV store window. And yet, by showing us a visual tapestry of his childhood—lying in the grass and gazing up at a sun-polished orange tree, letting a balloon climb skyward and collide with a ceiling fan, and watching Christmas tree tinsel fall like moondust upon his head—we come to know him even more intimately by experiencing life alongside him.
Though Nickel Boys is saturated with beautiful cinematography from start to finish, Ross cited the balloon scene as his favorite shot.
“The balloon one is particularly meaningful,” Ross said. “Almost all the images are from my childhood anyway, but that one I just have done so often in my life. It was really nice to make that cinema.”
By leaning into his own “personal poetic,” Ross has created films adored by critics and general audiences. In addition to its Best Picture nomination, Nickel Boys is also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. Regarding the awards season buzz, Ross described his feelings as “both good and strange.”
“It makes me realize the relationship between the awards and the attention of the public,” Ross said. “If this film wasn’t being awarded, I wonder how many people would be coming across the story in the cinematic form, and then you realize, ‘way less,’ and it makes you want even more.”
