Brad Pitt Talks to Director RaMell Ross About How His Basketball Career Unexpectedly Influenced ‘Nickel Boys’

Editor’s note: Following “Nickel Boys” receiving two Oscar nominations, for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, Academy Award-winning actor and executive producer Brad Pitt, who leads Plan B Entertainment alongside nominees Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, sat with writer/director RaMell Ross over Zoom to discuss the filmmaker’s origin story and unique approach toward adapting Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed 2019 novel into an arresting, immersive feature.

Read an excerpt of the pair’s conversation below and watch the full video, an IndieWire exclusive, above.

Brad Pitt: Thanks so much, man, for taking time out to talk about “Nickel Boys.”

RaMell Ross: Pleasure is mine, man. Pleasure is mine.

I haven’t seen anything like it. It’s so original. And I have some questions.

I’d love to field them. I’d love to field them.

Well, first starting with “The Nickel Boys,” it’s based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name. Tell me about the pressure, the responsibility, the joy of interpreting this, what you co-wrote with Joslyn Barnes.

Yeah, it’s a lot of pressure, but I think the real pressure, honestly, was not messing it up to the point where this opportunity wouldn’t be afforded to others. I think it’s pretty unprecedented that companies like yours, and this isn’t a promo for Plan B, but you guys support some pretty wild ideas, like how do you make a film that is so reflexive, but also in conversation with Black visuality and also supporting Colson’s narrative and elevating the Dozier School boys to the annals of film? These are big ideas. So the pressure was, I think, to satisfy the concept, to give life.

Did you try it on ’em at any point, or did you just wait for the film to be made?

I mean, just wait for the film to be made. Yeah.

‘Nickel Boys’MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection

Yeah, smart. Listen, I mean, your background, it’s art, it’s photography, it’s writing, it’s documentaries. I think even sports, I think academia, I mean to me, without tipping how this thing is constructed, it is just so beautifully calibrated. And to me, it seems like you were drawing from all of these disciplines to tell this story. Were you aware of that in any way, or was this all instinctual?

Yeah, I think it’s a bit of both, right? You have life experiences and you file away wisdom and insight from each thing that you’re kind of curious about. And then I think when you fall into art or you fall into acting, or you fall into whatever you’re passionate about, you try to take all those insights and those bits of wisdom and use those to make the thing that you’re doing as authentically yours and authentically emotive and communicative as possible.

And without basketball, I wouldn’t be able to think about the visual field in the way of freezing time and prediction, and without teaching, I’m unsure if I’d be able to direct and without making images for 15 years in Alabama, I’m unsure if I’d be able to sort of frame and come up with the ideas for images that I think can be in conversations with a very experiential and symbolic and metaphoric way of participating in life and narrative. Just a collage of ideas. It’s almost like kind of the Chris Marker thing where this guy’s a philosopher, he’s a writer, he’s a filmmaker, he’s a photographer, and all of those things are why “La Jetée” and “Sans Soleil” are these brilliant and forever giving pieces.

Well, I mean this one certainly is authentically yours. It’s so daring, and its construction, as I said, beautifully calibrated.

To see the full conversation between Pitt and Ross, watch the video, an IndieWire exclusive, above. “Nickel Boys,” an Orion Pictures release, is now in theaters nationwide.