RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys” unearths the haunting realities of two boys, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), as they navigate a brutal reform school, blending visceral storytelling with an experimental approach.
In adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, production designer Nora Mendis explains Ross’ vision came from a conceptual place. She says, “It was more about looking at contemporary artists, photos, content and what the justice system means throughout history.” Mendis adds, “Our conversations were based in a higher space of art, and he would trust us to go and do what we would do.”
Throughout the film, which is now in theaters, Ross uses archival footage to juxtapose Elwood and Turner’s abusive experience at Nickel Academy (which subs in for the real Dozier School for Boys in Florida, where more than 100 students died from abuse) with the social and technological advances of the ‘60s, like the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race.
He tells the story though, through a first-person point of view. “’Point-of-view’ was a term we dropped. What was wanted to build was called a sentient image,” cinematographer Jomo Fray explains. “We wanted an image that felt like it was connected to a real person in a present tense fashion, and was tied to a real body, a real consciousness, moving through space.”
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Ultimately, Ross wanted an aspect of immersion for the audience to experience what the two boys Elwood and Turner were going through.
As Ross and Fray were shot-listing, Fray pulled out a small DSLR to do some camera tests to see how this world would look.
Here Fray and Mendis discuss how they helped deliver Ross’ vision for “Nickel Boys.”
The film is set in 1960s Florida, but the film was shot in Louisiana. Nora, how did you begin to build this world?
NORA MENDIS: We filmed mostly around New Orleans. I’m such a research nerd, so there was a lot of pulling references and figuring out what Florida in the 1960s looked like. Louisiana and Florida are not so far apart in terms of look necessarily, but it’s the period and making it feel correct to the time.
I felt like spaces tell stories, so in Hattie’s house where she’s raising her grandson, tells a story about her morals and ethics. That’s all reflected in how her house and kitchen are set up. My grandma is 99 years old and I sent her a picture of Hattie’s kitchen, and I said, ‘Does this look right?’ and she said, ‘The JFK calendar. Was perfect but the phone was for rich people, switch that.’” So, it was little details like that.
It was also about creating a counterpoint in spaces. Landscape plays a big role, so the sugarcane fields at the end and what we see at Nickel Academy was very important that they be correct to the time and place.
This is your first time working with RaMell, so what was that like to be working with him?
JOMO FRAY: Working with someone like RaMell who is so powerful in a conceptual sense, is like all of a sudden you have to question every aspect of the filmmaking process. What is an establishing shot, what is an insert, what is a cut, what is a transition? All of those things become real questions. So, it was exciting to sit down and talk about cinema at a subatomic level and look at the molecules that make up an establishing shot.
I would constantly be talking about how to take traditional cinema and the things that we really love about deeply evocative image-making and break those things and rebuild them into this other language.
We also wanted to try to get rid of as much artifice as we could. So almost all the lighting was done from outside the spaces with mirrors and larger units pushing in or building them into the set. It was also about meticulously building a shot list on every gesture and pan tilt that you see.
MENDIS: RaMell would look at the bleachers in for the boxing scene, and he said, ‘How did you age that down?’ That whole scene was a build, none of it was vintage. So it was about pulling research, having conversations, and talking about details, but also grounding those conversations in detail. Details mattered because, in this film, you’re seeing them in a way that you don’t normally see them.
The film shifts when we change point-of-view, talk about how that visual shift and executing that vision when we see the world go from younger Elwood to Turner’s, what changes did you make?
FRAY: RaMell and I would watch the rehearsal, and he would be rehearsing with the actors, and I’d watch how they moved, where their eyes went. So when we stepped in as operators, it was about imbuing the energy that we had been watching in the rehearsal. If we were operating, it would almost be cheek to cheek with the actor, so that there was as close an eyeline connection as possible and that haptic connection, so that they could reach out and touch the other actor in the scene.
MENDIS: I wanted to try to have their perspectives feel different visually because it was important to remember that for Elwood, what he’s seeing is happening in real-time. With Turner, it’s a memory. He’s in the future, thinking back to his time at Nickel. So it’s not clear what is real and what is clouded by memory. There are certain points in the design where things don’t exactly match up. In Turner’s POV, the clocks have no hands, so it shows that memory changes the way you experience trauma.
This interview has been edited and condensed.