‘I Think Vision Is Emotion’: RaMell Ross’ First ‘Nickel Boys’ Script Was Photographs

So much of how director RaMell Ross adapted Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel “The Nickel Boys” grew out of his first nonfiction feature film “Hale County This Morning, This Evening.” With that film, Ross, an established photographer, wrestled with how to adapt his still image practice into a single moving image (“Hale County,” like “Nickel Boys,” leans heavily into one-shots for entire scenes), but also the complexity of the Black experience juxtaposed to the history of the Black image in the South.

While on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Ross talked about how adapting Colson’s novel presented an opportunity to expand on what he accomplished with his groundbreaking “Hale County.”

“One idea Joss [producer Joslyn Barnes] and I had talked about early in the writing process was, what if Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) had their own cameras to document their own lives at that time?,” said Ross on the podcast. “There’s not much visual poetry from Black folks perspectives that exist in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, at least popularly shared, so ‘What’s their life like from their eyes?’”

That idea became an important first step in cracking the novel, but starting with words and a written screenplay was the antithesis of how Ross’ mind works. Barnes, who produced “Hale County” and “Nickel Boys,” supported Ross unorthodox visual scripting process, and would step into a co-writing role as well.

“I think visually, and she was like, ‘Whoa, just do it that way then,’ and [so the first script] was all photographs, which was the only way I know how to do it,” said Ross. “The first treatment we made was an edit of the film, like an actual full edit and all of the cards in the edit are images.”

From the start, Ross imagined seeing the movie through the eyes of Elwood and Turner, the film’s protagonists, utilizing uninterrupted point-of-view shots with the actors, whose eyes the camera was simulating looking through. Ross used three shots from “Hale County” as a proof of concept to sell the idea to the producers. With this visual approach in mind, Ross was not done visually developing his script. Before adding words to the still photo treatment treatment, he would first add movement, which was a form of characterization and character development.

“We then developed that [still image treatment] further to every image had the camera movement, because Elwood looks through the world optimistically. That’s a very specific way of looking at people in the eye in certain ways, and looking at their body and things moving,” said Ross. “And then, of course, Turner looks at the world quite differently, more cynically, more strategically. You can execute that visually. I’ve looked at the world in both of those ways, and I know the way that I looked, and gave it to them.”

‘Nickel Boys’ ©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection

Ross took inspiration from hearing stories about how George Miller developed the “Mad Max” scripts in a similar fashion, and once his first stab at laying out the camera movement was complete, the visual script was adapted to the written language so as to be more accessible to producers and others who needed to read an early draft.

“And then we [began] to build the characters out with the emotional trends, or the emotional connections, that will be happening across scenes,” said Ross. “I think vision is emotional. And so, the emotional continuity we were looking for was something it took a while for us to articulate, which stems from ‘What is at the core of Colson’s “Nickel Boys”?’ It’s really difficult, because it’s replete with gestures and symbols and it’s a complex, complex thing. And what we figured out was that it was, for lack of a better word, love.”

While on the podcast, Ross also traced how love is transferred from character to character — Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) giving love to Elwood, Elwood being open to the love of Martin Luther King Jr., and continuing through Elwood and Turner’s complex and beautiful relationship that develops at the infamous Dozier School for Boys, a real-life reform school in the Florida panhandle where students were abused and forensic teams have uncovered 81 unmarked graves.

“[It’s an] intellectual and relational love that they never had before, and then it continues through the film, and with those pillars, then we’re allowed to organize scenes around ensuring that’s happening,” said Ross.

An Amazon MGM film, “Nickel Boys” opens in New York on Friday, December 13; Los Angeles on Friday, December 20, before opening wider in the weeks that follow.

You can subscribe to the Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the full interview below, or on IndieWire’s YouTube page.