How do you adapt an "unadaptable" book? Today, host Brittany Luse finds out with RaMell Ross, director of the Oscar nominated adaptation of Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys.The story, set in the Jim Crow South, follows two Black boys doing everything they can to survive their tenure at the abusive Nickel Academy in Tallahassee, Florida. The film brings us a new perspective on Black life and complicates the discourse surrounding Black films.Support public media and receive ad-free listening & bonus. Join NPR+ today.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the focus of the podcast?
They told us we wouldn't get here.
These are the images that history books and Hollywood have made the calling cards of an era. And that is a pretty accurate interpretation of the time. But missing in all that conflict and struggle is the mundane, the quotidian, the average everyday life of Black Americans simply trying to live. And that's something director Rommel Ross hadn't seen. The story of Black people through our own eyes.
You know, Bell Hooks says that the only site for resistance against the slew of images made by other people of the Black community was the Black Family Archive.
Chapter 2: How does the film Nickel Boys reinterpret the Civil Rights era?
That's Rommel Ross, director of the film Nickel Boys. It's based on the book The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, a book that's sometimes been called unadaptable because of its unique mix of perspective and metaphor. Now, the film adaptation is nominated for two Oscars, including Best Picture.
What happened to that one kid? I used to hang with all the time. You don't remember? Remember what?
The film follows the lives of two black boys, Elwood and Turner, who meet at Nickel Academy, an abusive reform school in Tallahassee, Florida. The entire film is shot in first person, which I will say takes some getting used to, but within the first few minutes of watching the movie, I felt immersed in a way that felt deeply personal.
The poetry that existed in life and the lyricism and the sheer beauty of whatever we want to call Black life during that time was unfortunately just not visualized. Like in terms of popular images, like what's missing is the ambiguous and the open-ended. Yeah.
Maybe the most refreshing thing about the film is the way it depicts violence. As audience members, we're so used to seeing the horrors of that time period and brutality against Black people, but Nickel Boys takes a different approach.
When I've had pain happen to my body, I'm not looking at the wound itself. I'm looking at the person's feet who is coming to help. I'm staring at a cloud or a leaf. I'm trying to cope and get through the moment. And we took that approach in writing.
Today, Rommel Ross joins me.
Pleasure is all mine.
to get at the core of what makes Nickel Boys a profoundly new portrait of Black life in the Jim Crow South. We talk about the legacy of Black trauma films and how a different point of view, behind and on camera, made all the difference.
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Chapter 3: Why is the first-person perspective significant in storytelling?
But I think the way in which Jocelyn Barnes, who's a producer on the film and also a co-writer, she was born in North Africa, understands perception and the world to be ushered in as a starting point from Black subjectivity.
And with that, you're graced with, especially in a conceptual way, you're graced with the open endedness with which we actually view each other or it's possible to view each other. Most people who are making movies are, like myself, are programmed and indoctrinated in the same visual language as everyone else.
It's entrenched.
Yeah. Yeah.
But also for those of us who are not filmmakers, who are simply film goers, and there's way more of us, we also understand that language and it becomes cultural shorthand for all of us. And it also kind of goes out of your control as a filmmaker once it hits the audience as well.
As a maker, I realized this from like photographing for in the South for so long. it took me three years to make an image that was unique to me because I had to work through the images that I knew were good that had programmed the way in which I photographed. Like our imaginations are curated. We think that we're free thinkers. We are, but you can only output what has been input, you know?
And so you have to, you have to work at imagining, you know, you have to practice and flex aesthetics and,
Right. And that makes sense then, shooting Nickel Boys and POV, showing these not just Black people, but Black children who are in this extremely vulnerable position in this so-called reformatory school in the South in the 1960s. There's already so much in that setting that is working against these main characters that
And when you consider the visual language that a lot of Hollywood or a lot of filmmakers rely upon when showing Black people in this way, it seems like this film is a really interesting intervention for that. Thinking about that, I also want to talk about The way that you and your crew chose to depict violence in this film.
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Chapter 4: What is the role of Black subjectivity in filmmaking?
But the reason why it's shown is because it's sort of easy empathy and it's never really we've never been required or asked to explore the other imagination space. But I think even more so if you take point of view seriously, if you if you truly make the camera an organ, you ask, like, where is a person looking during these moments? Right. Like when I've had pain happen to my body.
I'm not looking at the wound itself, right? I glanced at it when it happened, but then I look away. I'm looking at the person's feet who was coming to help. I'm staring at a cloud or a leaf. I'm trying to cope and get through the moment. And we took that approach in writing. But I think to see someone go through those things is a type of voyeurism that's unique to cinema.
There's a voyeurism to being a human being, but I think that's unique to the reproduction of reality.
That's such a good point. I guess you're trying to show the audience something, but I feel like you really pushed past that to get me into feeling like the character in a way that's much different
Yeah, it's like people need to see it to believe it. Like, did it happen? I didn't see it happen. Did it really happen? It's like cinema shows it to you so that you get a sense for the fact of it. The photograph, when it first came into existence, was a document at first. It was about fact. It was about fidelity. It was the closest thing to reality reproduction possible. And with that...
You know, it became a way to document movements. It became a way to prove it was evidence of suffering. It was evidence of culture. And with that evidentiary underpinnings of the image, it moves into cinema. And then we show it so that the audience has a true feel for its fact.
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Chapter 5: How does Nickel Boys depict violence differently?
Coming up, why do we see certain kinds of Black stories at the Oscars year after year?
I think it's more to do with the way or what white audiences elevate to awards, per se, because it seems like it's more that, you know, 12 Years a Slave or this film gets there, and then why not another one?
Rommel Ross's take on Black trauma films and why the conversation is necessary.
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I imagine you're aware of all the never-ending discourse about Black trauma films, this idea that most or even all theatrically released films about Black people are stories about racist violence. And by the numbers, this obviously isn't true. There are still plenty of Black movies telling happy or contemporary stories. Yeah. Talk right now.
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