Interview: Director RaMell Ross on Lessons from ‘Nickel Boys’ and Photography
In Maker’s Dozen, we ask folks in and around the film industry 12 questions and have them ask one of us.
RaMell Ross is a filmmaker, writer, and photographer best known for his 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening. His new film Nickel Boys, based on the novel by Colson Whitehead, releases in theaters on December 13.
In this interview at the Chicago International Film Festival, we spoke with RaMell about lessons to take away from Nickel Boys, how photography influences his filmmaking, whether Hamish Linklater can be trusted, and more.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
1. What’s the 30-second RaMell Ross origin story?
The first 15 seconds would be music. It would be some MF Doom song over Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. Born in Germany, military kid obsessed with sports. Lost basketball and mother at the same time. Found literature and photography simultaneously. And pursued them with familial, athletic motivation.
2. Bring me back to the moment you read the last page of Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys. How did it make you feel?
I was frustrated and a bit disappointed for not seeing the twist coming, and, within the tale, how powerful going through that process was. And then a little bit of questioning. Like, what am I missing about the world? If I read this entire book and it’s all been in front of my face, what else am I missing? And then very shortly after not making it about myself, it was “Wow, what a tale.”
3. The line “If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it” kinda felt like the thesis of the film. What’s another lesson people can take away from it?
I love the line “nobody cares how it’s supposed to be.” I feel like that is such a deep, deep, deep truth, which is paradoxical because every person has their own ethics. And with that, the way we think it’s supposed to be is never the way someone else thinks it’s supposed to be. When Turner says that, he’s pushing back against Ethan/MLK’s “the arc of the universe bends towards justice.” Which also strangely can incite someone to hunker down on their belief of this universal good, because no one cares how it’s supposed to be, but yet I believe so and this is how it’s supposed to be.
4. As a film director and photographer, do you compose shots in your mind’s eye while reading books? And did Nickel Boys turn out the way you first imagined it?
The first book I ever visualized was J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. I think it’s Zooey who opens with the line about a knee island, which is the image of Hattie in the tub, and I’m operating the camera at that moment before I go over to her hand. Aside from that, I’d never read anything visualizing and thinking about cinema, which was why reading this book was a strange task. The camera movement and the framing I did visualize, but the sort of volume and richness that Jomo Fray was capable of rendering was definitely an elevation. The one thing he said he wanted to do was to match the texture of my large-format photography, which I didn’t even think was possible because I shoot 8x10 with Deardorff slide film, which is such a long, arduous old-school process.
5. The film’s first-person POV framework was pretty magical and made the film feel almost like flipping through a photography book, which I’ve never felt with a movie before. How does the fact that you’re a photographer influence your films visually, aesthetically, or philosophically?
If you watch my first film Hale County This Morning, This Evening, this film will make sense. You could say literally that’s what that film is. Photography is deeply important to my sensibility. The photo book becomes the closest formal comparison to the type of filmmaking language that I’m interested in. When you make the photograph, you’re not thinking about the one that goes beside it or to the left or above it. It’s everything you can possibly do in that one frame, and in that sense I like to say that cinema skipped photography, that singularity, for narrative continuity. It’s fine because it’s going to amount to something later on. But when you go back to that single image, you’re capable of building something that’s bigger than you can imagine.
6. What’s another character in film history you’d like to follow in first-person POV?
Damn, what a question. I’d probably go to Malcolm X in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. His relationship to coming from “the streets” and then moving through different contexts of society I think would be deeply powerful for the time period.
7. Midnight Mass and now this. Ease my worries: Can Hamish Linklater be trusted?
I haven’t seen Midnight Mass, but I’ll tell you one thing: Hamish is so sincere and lovable and deeply sharp and funny. I was surprised by where he went. He came to me the first day and was like, “I want to bury Spencer.” He really went there. So yes, he can be trusted—and also he can’t.
8. What’s the hardest thing about transforming a set to another time period?
You’d have to talk to our production designer Nora Mendis because I think her task is harder, which is to have the sets and the world feel as alive as it does today, but with the markers of that time period. Which is not what most historical films do. They’re so focused on rendering the past that they forget that it wasn’t the past to those people. So how do we get people here closer to feeling like then?
“When you go back to that single image, you’re capable of building something that’s bigger than you can imagine.”
9. Describe Ethan Herisse in three words.
Sincere. Comforting. Intelligent.
10. Describe Brandon Wilson in three words.
Porous. Present. Traveling.
11. Is there another Colson Whitehead novel you’ve really responded to?
I love The Underground Railroad for how fantastically realistic it is, in that it does history in a way that’s both playful and more devastating, which is a strange combination of things.
12. Basketball and photography have been a large part of your life. What’s your favorite basketball photograph?
I love this question. It would probably be a wide shot of a three going in, with everyone in the stands with their eyes suspended, the person with their hand coming up through the bottom, and the ball going through. Just that time between the let-go and the whoosh.
+1. What’s your question for us?
What do you think cinema’s highest calling is?
Kevin: You kind of find that answer at a film festival like this, because you’re given all these new voices. Robert Zemeckis has a film this weekend, which is great, but we’re familiar with the language of Robert Zemeckis. We’re getting a chance to see stories told from all these new voices and cinema from all around the world. So I see its highest calling as essentially changing the way that you think about people, about the world, and about everything that goes into the human experience.