'Nickel Boys' Director: 'I Figure Out Ways to Shock People'
Inside the wildly original film with RaMell Ross and star Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. Plus: My insta-take on Critics Choice noms
Happy Thursday and congratulations on making it through the most breathless part of awards season yet — that is, until the second week of January brings five different awards ceremonies on two separate coasts. Nobody said awards season was gonna be easy!
Today’s batch of Critics Choice nominations isn’t even the last gasp before the holidays. Tuesday will bring the announcement of the Oscars shortlists, determining which titles can move forward for nominations in 10 different categories, including international feature and original song. I’ll have more on that next week, but I expect further good news for Emilia Pérez, which netted 10 Critics Choice nominations following its strong Globes showing, and ought to compete in several of the shortlist categories as well.
I’m a voter in Critics Choice and was gratified to see yet another big day for The Substance, which earned a whopping seven nominations, including for best picture, best director for Coralie Fargeat, and acting nods for stars Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. The supporting actress race, as I’ve written before, is one of the least predictable, and Qualley showing up here as well as at the Globes suggests she might be a dark horse surging just in time for Oscar ballots to arrive.
I was also thrilled to see Critics Choice give five nominations to Nickel Boys, including one for Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in that ever-shifting best supporting actress race. Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel set at a brutal Jim Crow-era reform school, is one of the year’s most critically acclaimed films, but its innovative, expressionistic style has been polarizing as well. Some of us had worried it might not perform as well among larger voting groups, where consensus picks tend to have the edge. (See the full list of Critics Choice nominees here.)
Perhaps I’m tipping my hand a bit, but I’m giving over most of today’s newsletter to my conversation with Nickel Boys director, RaMell Ross, as well as Ellis-Taylor, held a few weeks ago over coffee in Los Angeles. None of us live in L.A. — Ross, who grew up in Virginia, is a professor at Brown, and Ellis-Taylor lives in Atlanta. We all talked for a while about how the film tries to break away from traditional ways of depicting our shared home region of the South.
That’s just one of many things Nickel Boys does differently than any film in the race this year — or maybe any film, ever. It has dazzled critics, winning the best director and best cinematography prizes from the New York Film Critics Circle as well as editing and cinematography prizes from the Los Angeles critics.
But as Ross knows well, his movie is operating in a form — and presenting big ideas — that are rarely seen in Hollywood productions, and have made the film divisive as well. When we spoke, Ross seemed to be reveling in his opportunity to surprise and open people’s minds, even if it also makes some of the big awards season events “by no definition fun.”
‘Everyone Was Up For the Challenge’
When Ellis-Taylor first saw the 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning This Evening, she rushed to get in touch with its director, RaMell Ross. It could have been a typical Hollywood process of sending praise through agents and managers, but as you learn very quickly talking to Ellis-Taylor and Ross together, they don’t do many things that are typical.
“Honestly, I’ve never gotten a stronger smoke signal in my life,” Ross said, sitting beside Ellis-Taylor and recalling that initial outreach. “I walked outside and I was like, it smells different.”
At the time, Ellis-Taylor wasn’t yet an Oscar nominee for her performance in King Richard, and despite Hale County’s own Oscar nomination for best documentary feature, Ross was primarily a visual artist and a professor of art at Brown. It took a few years for Ellis-Taylor and Ross’ professional paths to converge, and when the opportunity arose for them to work together on Nickel Boys, Ellis-Taylor didn’t hesitate: “They said that there was a possibility of this, and I was like, I don’t care. I just want to do it.”
Their resulting collaboration in Nickel Boys, Ross’ first narrative feature, is one of the film’s many miracles. In the film Ellis-Taylor plays Hattie, the grandmother of a teenage boy named Elwood (Ethan Herisse) who is sent to a brutal reform school in Florida in the 1960s.
The school is inspired by real horror stories from the Dozier School for Boys, and while Ross doesn’t shy away from the brutality, he emphasizes the life within those walls. As he did in Hale County, Ross — working with cinematographer Jomo Fray — finds exquisite beauty in tiny, intimate moments, tracing the building friendship between Elwood and his school compatriot Turner (Brandon Wilson) as well as the impact of all of this on an adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs).
Much of that intimacy is accomplished by Ross’s decision to film almost entirely in first-person perspective, from Elwood and later Turner, bringing the audience quite literally into the eyes of Black boys who have been otherwise written out of history. As Hattie, Ellis-Taylor swoops in and out of the camera’s perspective exactly the way a real beloved grandmother might for a child. She’s captured as both a general presence — warm and maternal even when far away — and in the exacting details of memory; more than one person has told me the close-up shot of her scraping icing off a cake knife was the moment the movie stopped them in their tracks.
The first-person camera required Ellis-Taylor and the rest of the cast to do all kinds of things actors would never otherwise do, from looking into the lens to hugging the camera itself. For Ross, working with actors for the first time, it was the only process he knew. “I don’t have anything to measure it against,” he says. “It seemed to me like everyone was up for the challenge, and I mean, I think it’s obvious that they showed up.”
With Ross, Ellis-Taylor found the flexibility she craves on a set “to feel as free to try as much stuff as I can. This was the environment to do that.” But the scenes that required her to interact so directly with the camera found her leaning on Ross as well. “I would ask him quite often, ‘What do you think? What do you think?’” she says. “Probably more so than I would’ve asked another director. I had to.”
Ross knows he asked a lot of his actors; he’s also getting the sense that he ran his set differently in other ways as well. “I think maybe making an ask like that, which is for them to fundamentally do things that they have never thought of doing or didn’t expect to do, is easier when no one’s stressing them out and no one’s being demanding and people are being appreciated for being themselves,” he says.
Ellis-Taylor sums it up in one word: “Nice.”
The Fun Part
I had coffee with Ross and Ellis-Taylor the morning after the Academy’s Governors Awards, an occasion for a whole lot of fake nice — people rushing across the room to congratulate someone on a movie they may not have even seen, that kind of thing.
At the Governors Awards, Ellis-Taylor was resplendent in a royal blue gown, but she makes it clear she has little patience for the kind of nice on display at the event. “I kind of have to refuse that voluntary insincerity,” she says. ”I try to do everything I can just to be who I am, whether it’s there or whether I’m walking down the street.”
But with a film she believes in like Nickel Boys — or Ava DuVernay’s Origin earlier this year — Ellis-Taylor can accept the double-faceted part of her job. “I’m an actor, but in this sort of world, I am asked to be a politician. And I don’t like politicians.”
Ross describes conversations at these kinds of events more like being an “emotional contortionist,” trying to reflect someone’s experience of his film without tainting it. “People are like, Oh my God, enjoy yourself, have so much fun,” he says. “From the outside, I see how it would seem like it’s just a big kind of party, but it is a lot. It’s by no definition fun.”
That said, he swears that there is a fun part to all of this. Nickel Boys is an Amazon MGM production, made with $23 million and the imprint of one of Hollywood’s oldest studios. It’s also one of the most formally daring movies in years, not only because of its first-person camera perspective, but who that first-person comes from.
“When you start talking about ideas from the perspective of Black subjectivity, most white people have never considered it, have never read anything,” he says. He credits Nickel Boys producers, Plan B’s Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, for being forward-thinking and getting behind his bold idea. But also talks a bit like someone who has pulled off a kind of intellectual reverse heist, sneaking ideas into an industry that didn’t quite expect them.
“There’s something joyous about the idea that I get to be in places with really powerful people and share this story, and control a dialogue to some degree about Black representation,” Ross says. “I figure out ways to shock people with the language of having thought for many decades about Black representation. It is really fun to get to see in their eyes being like, ‘Whoa, I’ve never thought of that before.’ That’s the fun part.”