By Hanna Rantala
LONDON (Reuters) – Simply telling the story of “The Nickel Boys”, about two Black youths sent to an abusive reform school in 1960s Florida and finding solace in their friendship, would not have been enough.
Filmmaker RaMell Ross wanted the audience to experience the sensation of living inside the characters, which he felt reading Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, told in the first person.
The result is a film shot almost entirely through the point-of-view of its protagonists. Viewers see the world directly through the eyes of one of the boys, Elwood, or occasionally of the other boy Turner.
“The first-person approach was the first thing that came to mind. It seemed quite natural,” Ross, who co-wrote the film’s screenplay, told Reuters.
“As Colson Whitehead has said, he wrote the book with him being Turner and him being Elwood and the conversation being amongst themselves. I think a lot of Black folks can see their children as either of those two,” Ross said.
It’s a filmgoing experience that can be unsettling, or astonishing, when seemingly mundane details becoming intensely vivid as Elwood reaches down to pick up a penny from a street or looks up at a fan humming overhead. Every now and then viewers catch a glimpse of the boy whose life they are sharing, reflected in a shop window or on the metal of an iron.
The actors often had camera rigs attached to their bodies, or were positioned among members of the film crew. The audience ends up confined inside the characters’ heads, just as the boys are confined in Nickel, the reform school.
“We’ve kind of explored this idea that there was a lot of physical restraint, and I think that very much unconsciously would feed into this feeling that both of these boys are experiencing of being trapped in this world of Nickel and being stifled,” said Brandon Wilson, who plays Turner.
The Guardian newspaper, which called the film “transcendentally moving and frightening” said the first-person technique “produces a dreamy or anxious subjectivity almost as a byproduct”.
Ross constructed the movie’s vivid imagery from his own past: “They’re all my memories, almost all the images are just contrived or reconfigured from things I’ve seen on the street or just my imagination,” the director said.
“Nickel Boys” marks the feature film debut for Ross, 42, whose 2018 documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” was nominated for an Oscar. The movie has also earned award buzz since its launch at autumn film festivals.
“I’m still in awe at the film being received as well as it has been,” said Ross. “I’m really excited for everyone who’s been a part of the film to get their fair share of praise. It’s such a big project and so many people’s hands went into basically everything.”
(Reporting by Hanna Rantala; Editing by Peter Graff)
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