RaMell Ross's Oscar-nominated film, Nickel Boys, centers on two young Black men attempting to survive a brutal Florida reformatory school in the 1960s. He says he's sees the rural South as a "meaning-making space." Ross spoke with Tonya Mosley about his photography and performance art, too. Also, John Powers reviews the new season of HBO's The White Lotus.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is RaMell Ross and what is 'Nickel Boys' about?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. And today my guest is filmmaker Rommel Ross. His adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Nickel Boys, is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and for Best Picture. It tells the story of two black teenagers in 1960s Florida. as they attempt to survive and escape a brutal reformatory academy.
The story is loosely based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys, which was a notorious place for its brutal treatment of students. Ross's approach to this story is really unlike anything most viewers have ever experienced. The film is shot almost entirely from the perspectives of the two protagonists, Elwood and Turner.
Ross turns the camera into what he calls an organ by attaching body-mounted cameras and filming the scene continuously with unbroken takes. The outcome for the viewer feels like being both Elwood and Turner. Now, I introduced Rommel Ross as a filmmaker, but really this title is too narrow. He's also a photographer, a Brown University professor, and a writer.
A former Georgetown basketball recruit sidelined by injuries, Ross pivoted to sociology and English before honing his visual language rooted in what he calls liberated documentation. His 2018 Academy Award-nominated documentary,
Hale County This Morning, This Evening is an ethnographic story told through fractured vignettes of Black Southern life, and it won a Peabody Award for Documentary in 2019. Rommel Ross, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much. Elwood Curtis, who is played by Ethan Harisi, is a bright, idealistic teenager who lives with his grandmother, played by Anjanue Ellis-Taylor.
And while on his way to college, he gets caught up and wrongfully accused of something and sent to Nickel Academy, which is this reformatory that he'll soon learn is really a house of horrors. And the scene I like to play, Elwood is in the infirmary recovering from this beating at the hands of the school's corrupt white administrator, Spencer. And he's punished for trying to stop a fight.
So Elwood is arguing with his cynical friend Turner, played by Brandon Wilson, about whether the civil rights movement will bring about change. Let's listen.
If everybody looks the other way, then everybody's in on it. If I look the other way, I'm as implicated as the rest. It's not how it's supposed to be. Don't nobody care about supposed to. The fix has always been in games rigged. That's what I'm telling you. It's not like the old days. We can stand up for ourselves. Man, that shit barely works out there. What you think it's going to do in here?
You say that because you got no one out there sticking up for you.
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Chapter 2: How does RaMell Ross use the camera as an 'organ' in filmmaking?
What was it about that time and experience that captured your imagination that made you say, no, I need to pick up a camera for this?
Yeah, what a decision in hindsight. I moved there in 2009 and I was freelancing in D.C. and just I couldn't really afford to live. And my roommate had a connection to an organization called Project M, which is a design build organization. organization out of MICA that was doing workshops in Hale County, Alabama. And he was like, I'm going to go. Do you want to come?
And so I there was an opportunity through chatting with folks to teach a two week photography course there. And so I go to teach photography and I'm like, whoa, this place is incredible.
What was incredible to you about it? Do you remember what really during that trip?
Mostly the sense of time. You know, when you go to the historic South or any place that is storied in that way, that I like to say that. The iconography of the South is so spread out where you can have dreams and you can have more dreams and nightmares in between icons than you can in the city.
Because in the cities, especially because stuff is always refreshed and they're always doing renovations and there's so much money and so much people and it's so dense, you're always engaging with people.
things and it's just way faster but in the south there's just these huge fields and then you have this church that was built in 1800 that's what you mean by the icons yeah then you have this huge field and then you have this weeping willow tree and so you're just like out in the middle of this expanse essentially a desert for metaphorical reasons and then you come to this thing that holds this meaning culturally and so like what a meaning making space that's why like time feels different there
And it makes you question what time is, which is on everyone's mind, maybe has always been on everyone's mind, but there in which the architecture doesn't change. Then what else does not change?
You're coming from a city. So like what did what are some things you had to unlearn to actually be able to like get that lesson you're talking about?
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