Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I am grateful you are here. The new film, Nickel Boys shows us the dreams and nightmares of a young man as the film is shot almost entirely through the first person POV, that means we get to know our protagonist Elwood through what he sees through his eyes. We see his happy childhood growing up in Florida with his grandmother. We see the promise he shows at school, and we see how in one moment he is offered a ride by a man driving a stolen car and everything changes. Elwood is sent to Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school that uses young boys for labor. When those boys make any wrong move, they're taken to the White House where they're beaten. At the school, Elwood meets Turner, a kid who is back at Nickel for the second time, and is then that we finally see Elwood through Turner's eyes. The camera goes back and forth between the two boys as they attempt to make it out of Nickel with their lives and their sanity intact. Nickel Boys is adapted from Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, which is one of our first Get Lit with All Of It book club selections. This film is nominated for a Golden Globe for best Drama Motion Picture. RaMell Ross won Best Director at the Gotham Awards recently. The film is opening in select theaters on Friday. I'm joined now by the film's co-writer and director, RaMell Ross. Nice to meet you.

RaMell Ross: Hello, Alison. Nice to meet you too. Thanks for having me.

Alison: Thanks for coming. This is your first narrative film, but before this you were a photographer, you were a documentarian. In fact, the folks, the producers behind Hale County This Morning, This Evening, the documentary thought you might be a good fit for this project. What part of your documentary background was useful to you on the narrative feature?

RaMell: It's a good question. I think it's is the by any means necessary? I think when you're making a documentary, you're interested in figuring out how to tell a story. You'll pull from family photos, you'll pull from news footage, you'll pull from cinema, you'll pull from absolutely anything, including making footage yourself. That approach, I think, allows one to consider letting what you want to say produce a form. A lot of films are made thinking about the form, capturing what you want to say. We brought that approach. Jocelyn Barnes, my co writer to Nickel Boys.

Alison: What about your work as a photographer?

RaMell: My work as a photographer, I think underpins the aesthetic. This film is shot from the perspective of its two main characters. My DP and I, we give them a photographic sensibility. We allow them to turn their head, which is the camera, look around the world and look at each other in the way in which we all look at the world, which is photographically. Photographs are so inscribed in our reality. We leave our house, no one will be photographed. We build buildings to see how they look photographed. With that, it's built into the way in which we engage with the visual field.

Alison: When you read Nickel Boys, the Nickel Boys, what did you see as the potential challenges when adapting it?

RaMell: Wow. The potential challenges was the adaptation process. You've had Colson on here, you've heard him speak, you know his other books. He is a genius amongst geniuses. The ecosystem of his book, the novel, his meaning making process, it's impossible to take that over to film. My co-writer and I decided to distill his book to its essence and then allow those totems to move into the film medium and then talk to film and see what film wants to do with that essence. I think that allowed us to pay homage to the book in a respectful way. We won't try to replicate you or allow you to be a novel.

Alison: When did you realize you were going to use the first person POV?

RaMell: That came right away. I read the book and the first thought was, "Wow, I wonder what the world looks like from their eyes in 1960." I made this film Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which you mentioned. It essentially is a first person film without my hands being in it. The way the camera moves, I like to call it observational logic and use the camera as an extension of consciousness, a lot of concepts to try to align the viewer's view of reality with the camera movement. There's nothing better or more interesting to me than thinking about what's missing from the archive, specifically from Black visuality in the 1960s. We could populate that with first person point of view, poetic images.

Alison: What do you think the audience gets that we are looking at through a character's eyes, a person's eyes. What do you think we can extract from that?

RaMell: So beautiful. It's so beautiful. It was a concept that came to life with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Brandon Wilson and Ethan Herisse, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, when you look with the love that you look at your child with, if you're filming that from the third person camera, which is most cinema, you're watching two characters do it. You're a voyeur fundamentally, and you're watching their behavior and you're seeing that love. When they're looking into the camera, into you with that love, you're touched by it. You are a scene partner. You get a sense for that ineffable power that is the gaze of a loving one. You also get the opposite, which is as a character, as Elwood and Brandon, you get to see how the world looks at them and how Hattie does not look at them. Wow. It's a huge contrast.

Alison: It's wild. I think the scene that you really understand what it comes to me, it's early on, is when the grandmother hugs the boy.

RaMell: Oof.

Alison: She comes right into the lens. At that moment you're like, "Oh, wait. This is what this boy is feeling. The warmth of this grandmother."

RaMell: It's interesting. Photography and film, they're built from theater, or at least film is, and they have their mainstay way of being used. First person is the way that we are in the world and who would think that in that hug moment we could somehow escape that we're sitting in a chair and we're looking at a screen and you can move in for a hug. If you're open enough while you're watching, that can remind you of every hug you've ever given or gotten.

Alison: How did you talk to your actors about reacting to a POV? The first person POV.

RaMell: I didn't talk to him too much about it. I think acting is not my forte. I think working with actors is something I'm interested in. I believe that whatever the actor does is essentially the right thing. It may need to be nudged a bit or influenced, but their behavior feeling authentic, them being surprised, them having to adjust in the moment, that is what human beings do, and adding that to the space of fiction and acting, I think just offers that fundamental integrity, allows you to believe. We didn't talk that much about the process of filming. They knew we would film point of view. What that looked like, they found out on set that day.

Alison: I was going to ask about the logistics of it, never mind the creativity of it. Did they have to stand a certain way? Did they have to behave a certain way?

RaMell: They didn't have to behave a certain way but they had to always look down the barrel of the lens, have a brilliant friend and DP, Jomo Fray, who built out two custom camera rigs and brought forth a couple different camera systems that would allow us to work with neck movement and to have the camera be part of the body of Daveed and part of the body of Brandon and Ethan when needed. It really varied. There was a lot of genuine invention and tweaking. Jomo's rig team made things on set for us. They were welding, they were buying Home Depot supplies.

Alison: That's interesting because I would imagine you as a director, have to make observations about the way a person moves their head or how a person looks at somebody's feet or somebody's hands, because it may not be the same in reality versus on this set when you have your camera crew and everybody around.

RaMell: The trick to this film or the key to this film is that I'm lucky to be a writer and the director. The film is written visually. The original script was like camera movement. We're actually trying to explore the world from the way that the boys look at it. The order of operations of looking in a room produces a narrative of meaning. I'm taking that into the pre-production process with Jomo.

We start to build out the key elements to what vision feels like, not what vision is. We don't want a wide frame of view because the large scope allows the eye to wander. What vision does is, vision is very specific. It feels like it's attention-based. The directing was as much writing and as much the camera movement.

Alison: My guest is RaMell Ross, director and co writer of the new film Nickel Boys. It's based on Colson Whitehead's novel. It tells the story of two boys sent to an abusive Florida reform school in the 1960s. When you co-wrote your script with Jocelyn Barnes, I read somewhere that you put drafts, you put images in your first drafts.

RaMell: Yes.

Alison: How did you go about translating those images or were they just for you?

RaMell: It's interesting. The mythology of the filmmaking process, it's like the game of telephone. It continues to shift depending on who's talking. We all use different words. It was that the treatment we made was an edit of the film. Of course, the edit is the last thing you do, but in our case, because the film was so visual, we wanted to allow for the language of the film and the dialogue to be servant to the image and not the other way around. Basically the film was written out visually.

It gives you an image of something. These things are called adjacent images that have their metaphoric, symbolic and experiential. They're not just strictly narratively driven. Then there's another image that we would write out and we wrote the entire film that way. Then we would take that and go into that image and then try to articulate what dialogue would participate in it. I think that gave that richness that I think you felt when you watched.

Alison: The film uses so many images, sometimes creating almost a collage of ideas, so that you can get to the idea that you want, I think. Did you know what images that you wanted to use or did they come along the way?

RaMell: It was lovely reading Colson's narrative because I saw myself as both Elwood and Turner, as he has said that he is. The conversation is between himself. Almost all the images are just from either my imagination or my childhood. I just think about what I did when I was a kid. Oh, I used to sit down and let a balloon slowly go up to the ceiling and hit a fan. I used to lie down on the grass and twirl a leaf. These types of things just align with the narrative because I see myself as them. I think it gives authenticity to the images you're seeing. They don't read as hyper fiction. They just read as pretty banal and pretty quotidian. I like to call the images the epic banal.

Alison: The novel is based on a true story of the Dozier School for Boys. Did you do any research into the school?

RaMell: Oh, man, so much. Carlson did a bunch of research for his book, of course. Jocelyn and I went to his index or glossary and went through all the books and articles that he had read. There was one in particular that was really powerful. It's the Dozier document. It's like 156 page forensic report of the findings at the Dozier School for Boys. There's also this incredible book called Boys of the Dark, which is a nonfiction account of the Dozier School trials. That was a huge resource for us.

Alison: You said in an interview that while you were reading that book you wondered, "I wonder at what point Elwood knew he was Black? No, I'll say it better, at one point, Elwood knew he was raced." Why was that question in your mind?

RaMell: Because it's always part of, to me, the language of being a person of color in the US which is dealing with the fiction nonfiction of Blackness, the fiction nonfiction of whatever race a person is. In a time in which the Jim Crow laws were prominent, and thinking about the film from their perspective, having gone through this process myself. What markers of reality ensured Elwood that he was inescapably Black? What experiences showed him how he would be treated if he did x, y and x.

That's a visual thing. Largely it's clearly a conceptual thing. I can't imagine a more devastating realization specifically in a time in which you're seeing the space race, you're seeing these feats of technology, and you're incredibly young, I'm sure. I think it came into my life a lot later than it would for him because the consequences were starker during his time.

Alison: One of the most heart wrenching scenes in the book is where Elwood is beaten by the head of school. How did you decide you wanted to approach this scene? This is a tough scene.

RaMell: I think Jocelyn and I decided we wanted to approach it without showing the violence. I say that for those who are listening and think that the film may be too difficult for them, the film is a meaningful film that tries to forefront the poetry of life more so than the tragedy of the context in which life is existing. During this scene, we wanted to get away from the voyeurism that is the experience of watching people of color experience physical suffering, and also acknowledge that that's just the first act of the trauma.

There's way more trauma aside from that first initial act. While visualizing violence has been necessary to share it globally and to prove the injustices that were happening to people, at some point in time, it becomes a bit rote and becomes over indexed. You realize that maybe it has the opposite effect of saying that maybe it only happens to these people, or it's supposed to happen to these people.

Alison: You're talking to an audience that likely read the book Public Radio. Probably almost everybody has read Nickel Boys. I wanted to ask you about the sound design in this film, because in that scene, for example, the fan is very loud in the room. How did you and your sound team decide to have the sounds work with this first person point of view?

RaMell: We thought a lot about what consciousness felt like or what consciousness does and the way that it accepts in sound and music and everything sonic and make sense of it. The way that when you're going through trauma and situations in which you're hyper aware, there's often an overriding sound. Either some, hum or some tick that becomes some marker of time. We're always trying to cope in these situations and our defense mechanisms are conscious and overriding in a way. We wanted there to be that type of unpredictable yet fundamentally fluid dystopic soundscape. It's really hard to explain. I would love to have a musician or one of my sound guys, Dan Timmons or Tony Volante, come in here and use their beautiful language. I think you get the hint.

Alison: What was your biggest challenge in making this film?

RaMell: I think the biggest challenge was the edit.

Alison: Oh, interesting.

RaMell: Our editor is Nicholas Mansour. The film, it's collapsing so many different languages of the image and the camera, both still and moving, and a lot of different textures and formats of capture, that it's easy for it to feel like kaleidoscopic in an off putting way and not kaleidoscopic in a rhythmic stream of consciousness type of way. Making edits and leaping time in the way in which we did, and then working with a relatively underexplored use of the camera, which is point of view, it takes a lot of judging and trusting, putting things together and hoping that five minutes later when you make another gesture, that will justify in retrospect the one that you made before. It takes a long time. Takes a really long time.

Alison: [unintelligible 00:18:49]? You have to [unintelligible 00:18:50] it off?

RaMell: [unintelligible 00:18:52] a little sprinkle something on it. We were sprinkling. Everyone was coming in praying to someone.

Alison: This is a little bit of a generic question, but I think it's interesting considering the book and considering the themes of the book. What do you hope audiences leave the theater talking about or thinking about?

RaMell: I prefer speechlessness. I prefer for audience members to have an experience, unlike a roller coaster, but not as dramatic as a roller coaster in which it's visually and sonically so visceral that it genuine feels something along the lines of a dream, or it leaves some indelible impression in you that you're constantly trying to work out and understand as to why it was so powerful.

I think if you can provide something experiential and something experience based inside ideas of Blackness and inside historical narratives, inside the characters themselves, then I think you're actually changing the way that people relate to history. You're allowing them to absorb it into their physiology. I like to call the film an experiential monument. It's the type of history that you can't erase in the way in which we see history being erased in many states.

Alison: The name of the movie is Nickel Boys. I've been speaking with its co-writer and director, RaMell Ross. It is really nice to meet you. Thanks for being with us.

RaMell: Alison, the pleasure was genuinely all mine.