After debuting at the Telluride Film Festival to great acclaim, RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys quickly became one of the most buzzed-about films this year. Adapted from the novel by Colson Whitehead (The Underground Railroad), Nickel Boys tells the story of two boys at a reform school in north Florida and the challenges and tribulations they faced while there.

We at FandomWire spoke with Ross about the film, its unique point-of-view approach, the urgency of this story (and the true story that inspired it), and more.

Nickel Boys RaMell Ross Interview

FandomWire: Many films attempt to capture empathy, but very few films have done so as literally as Nickel Boys. Why did you set out to take this approach to these themes and this story?

Ross: I’m surprised that no one else has taken this approach as seriously as I have. And I think that, you know, Lady in the Lake and Hardcore Henry and Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void are very serious attempts, but there’s so much space for the camera to be in our bodies and to be point of view. Everyone’s making point-of-view content on the internet. It’s almost the norm for the younger generation. Why has cinema not truly embraced it?

Ethan Herisse stars as Elwood and Brandon Wilson as Turner in director RaMell Ross’s NICKEL BOYS, from Orion Pictures. Photo credit: Courtesy of Orion Pictures. © 2024 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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FW: One of my favorite quotes from the book is a passage about Griff. “Most of those who know the story of the rings in the trees are dead by now. The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep in the heartwood. Testifying to anyone who cares to listen.” And I think this really encapsulates the importance of this film. Why do you think people need to remember stories like the Dozier School that inspired Nickel Boys?

Ross: I think that the stories are important because everyone knows about them, but they haven’t experienced them. And it’s not that we expect people to have gone through those things, but we have so much information these days. And there’s obviously and generally so much tragedy around the world. Information goes in one ear and out the other. So if we can find ways to tell these stories that not only affected so many but will affect many in the future because they are reoccurring, give them some sort of experience for people, maybe they can stick, and maybe things can change.

FW: The film is set in the past, but the educational system today — particularly in Florida — is being criticized for practices that are hostile to marginalized communities. Why do you think the story of Nickel Boys is still necessary today?

Ross: I think we look at history as the past and not as the present or the future. Which it sounds almost rhetorical, or seems like a game of rhetoric or semantics to say things on those terms. But you know, ideas of time, at least in the Western world, are based on space. How many times we’re going around the sun, how many times the moon’s going around the Earth? It’s not something that is well known and understood.

And when we think of tragedy happening in the past, it affects the way that people make decisions in the future. So then, what is time, as it relates to trauma, telling these stories in experiential ways and giving them a sight? I think it’s Henri Bergson who talks about the thickness of the present — it allows it to have a reach into the future and a reach into the past. We can hold more complicated things about society simultaneously.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor stars as Hattie in director RaMell Ross’s NICKEL BOYS, from Orion Pictures. Photo credit: Courtesy of Orion Pictures. © 2024 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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FW: The cinematic medium allows freedoms that a written format like the novel doesn’t allow. How did you approach adapting the source material in a way that is both faithful to its themes and narrative but interpretive of its prose?

Ross: Yeah, I think you balance it by not trying to be faithful. I think if you’re trying to be faithful, then you’re making decisions based on outside pressure and not truly letting the medium do its thing. One technique that Jocelyn Barnes, the co-writer, and I decided to do was to try to distill Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys to its most fundamental. And then I think once we did that, we were able to do anything, as long as we were staying true to what we had purified.

Nickel Boys hits theaters on December 13.
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