Interview with Oscar-Nominated 'Nickel Boys' Writer and Director RaMell Ross and Editor Nicholas Monsour

When covering the 2024 New York Film Festival for this publication I highlighted Nickel Boys, and since then I was eager to chat with RaMell Ross one-on-one. Our conversation did not disappoint and in fact, the bonus for this interview was speaking with Ross together with his editor Nicholas Monsour. We delved into their collaboration, discussed the film’s nontraditional structure, the unconventional screenwriting process, point-of-view, and so much more.

Directed by photographer and Oscar-nominated documentarian (Hale County This Morning, This Evening), RaMell Ross, and co-written by Ross and Joslyn Barnes, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys chronicles the powerful friendship between two Black teenagers navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida. Whitehead’s book is inspired by the Dozier School, a Florida reformatory in business for over a century with a brutal history in the Jim Crow South. After it closed, authorities discovered 100 unmarked graves of boys, mostly Black youths, subject to horrific treatment.

Kouguell: First, congratulations to you both. To date, Nickel Boys is on many top ten lists, and garnering many nominations and awards. RaMell, you just received Best Director at the Gothams and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, and the Spotlight Award at the African American African-American Film Critics Association (AAFCA), among other accolades.

Was this the first time that you two have worked together?

ROSS: Yes it was. Nick came highly recommended. After working with him, I definitely understand why.

KOUGUELL: What's your collaboration process like?

ROSS: It's a lot of asking Nick to do things that he thinks are good ideas. Follow the script as best as possible and if something's not working, to make adjustments, but kind of simultaneously ask him to adapt the sort of Hale County aesthetic within the context of the script we had.

It's very much a process of one foot forward in conversation, two feet back in practice, and then five feet forward in practice, and then two feet back in conversation. It’s almost like trying to walk in quicksand and in a direction you don't quite know you're going, but you know that if you stay moving long enough, you know there's something in that process that could be generative.

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MONSOUR: I love all these metaphors because I think the more we talk about the movie and think about it retrospectively it does seem like whatever metaphor you use, there's this thing where you keep moving from one space to its kind of opposite or reciprocal space. When it's on a big enough scale, you have to figure out how to take it out of your emotional, intuitive space, and think about it, and talk about it, map it out, and then you can take it back into your kind of really intimate, intuitive space.

I just love the challenge. My favorite part of editing is trying to understand someone else as an artist, their sensibilities and aesthetic as best as I can to sort of nudge it in the right direction rather than work at cross purposes.

KOUGUELL: Nick, your background is also as a writer and filmmaker, and you've done video installations and sculptures.

MONSOUR: The scale of this project is enormous, considering how much it rests on artistic impulse. I've never been anywhere close to that. I've worked on other projects that have shades of that, but this did feel gratifying. I got to actually access some of the deeper, more inspirational kinds of things that I was interested in film in the first place on this project.

KOUGUELL: RaMell, tell me about the adaptation process from Whitehead's novel to the screen. You co-wrote the screenplay with Joslyn Barnes.

ROSS: The writing process was fun; that's where the majority of the concepts became really manifest and organized and what we wanted to get towards. It's great to work with someone like Joslyn, who is brilliant and genuinely kind, well-read and as well-versed as Nick. Joslyn is like her own version of a Wikipedia, has read a bunch, and has a global sensibility.

Starting with images, we made a treatment as an edit, as the first process. Going from images to script was a joy with her because we were able to work with the density of what it means to look and see, and then retroactively go to language.

I think normally in the filmmaking process, it's a kind of an imagination script, and then you go to images, and that reversed order allows for the language to be more in service to the image, as opposed to the image being in service to the language. Basically, we wrote this script visually.

KOUGUELL: POV is a vital element of the film.

ROSS: The idea of point of view is not radical to me. It's just the way that human beings see the world. To me, it is a more natural camera use than third person. And that's not scripting, that's not the script, but just to show you the way.

KOUGUELL: The film challenges the viewer where and how to look and takes us inside the characters; we see what they see. It did not feel gimmicky that the actors were wearing the cameras; it served the sensibility of the film.

ROSS: There are ways to edit even the dialogue scenes that would make the POV feel gimmicky. It’s another place to give hats off to Nick, because he's deeply fluent in the traditional and conventional languages of cinema in general, and the editing structures.

We could rely on Nick to find ways to make a scene feel like its POV and also give the audience what it wants, but also maintain the truth of what the intention of being in their perspectives are.

MONSOUR: I just love hearing how you describe this process and what you were saying about going from working from the image to sort of inverting that common paradigm. You never quite know if you're seeing it the same way as someone else.

I didn't have to start totally from scratch, but I still had miles to go in terms of learning when, where and how you, RaMell, wanted to sort of dial-up, calling attention to a shift in perspective. The material allowed that because of the way you captured it in this very visceral, raw way. It had this fundamental integrity in the image. It really felt like we got to dial up or down or accentuate in almost kind of a musical way.

I know you said, Susan, it challenges the viewer, but I also think it sometimes invites the viewer, sometimes it challenges the viewer. We got to mess with that. That was really exciting; you just use your own intuition when something is feeling like RaMell was saying, not quite right by convention or what an expectation is. But that doesn't mean you don't do it. Like RaMell said, he and Joslyn are working from this kind of global perspective on cinema language, It's not like there's one set of rules for this stuff.

ROSS: Joslyn was with us in the edit room most of the time. It was good to have a brain trust of three because quite often it's like Joslyn and I would feel one way, Nick feels one way. Nick and Joslyn feel one way. I feel one way, and so on. It actually forces the other person to not push so hard and to be like, well, both of them think that, I guess we'll see where that goes, and that's a really good tension to have.

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KOUGUELL: We’ve been discussing structure. I recently watched Hale County, which is phenomenal. With both Hale County and Nickel Boys, you are successfully challenging the traditional narrative structure in film. As the viewer, it gave me enough room to breathe and impose my own ideas and insights onto the characters and stories. How did you decide on the structure for Nickel Boys?

ROSS: When editing Hale County I wondered how approximate you can get to consciousness with a film and with the edit. There's something about the images that exist and also human life in that there's something constant.

Can you make a film that feels like every moment you're walking around a corner and you don't know what image, what you're going to encounter next, but you're down for the walk, and you love it when you turn to it. There's something about that surprise that feels very sensory and very human real life, and not going for realism. I don't even think reality is real based in the way that fantasy and fiction are incorporated in the meaning-making processes across cultures.

With Hale County, the film is made up of five visual movements. It's edited from sunup to sundown. There are 12 days over the course of the film. There's these really stringent rules that force you to make decisions that produce a kind of new meaning. I knew in Nickel Boys that I wanted it to feel in the same way like Hale County – this sort of musical, almost consciousness-oriented thing; it almost feels like it's evolving. It's like making itself or it's thinking itself. It's in dialogue with itself. But it's not to the point where it seems navel-gazing, or it seems like everything is an inflection point, like it wants to be a conscious thing, but it doesn't want to collapse on itself.

KOUGUELL: You referenced how the inclusion of archival footage further enhanced the storytelling process; it was your way of depicting history – replacing or reproducing an archive that doesn’t exist. You worked with archival producer Allison Brandin.

ROSS: It's really interesting because I had these ideas of how I want to film and edit, based on the archival images that our amazing archivist Allison Brandin and her team found.

We're never cutting forward in a scene. We're never cutting in. Jomo Fray, our great DP, and I came up with this thing called a thrown gaze, which is like the macro shots that allow you to be hyper-attentive to these emotional moments, which allows us to jump time and maybe cut in. It was kind of a secret breakthrough in my openness to the way that the film could be edited because it worked so well. It opened up another language for us to play with eventually. Nick and I didn't have much time to talk because production was so crazy.

MONSOUR: It takes a lot of confidence to make it through the harrowing process of production and see stuff that you were not imagining. It just might be my Marxist bias, but there's a dialectical thing that's going on. Partially, it's the subject on the one hand, and then the society they're in on the other, and then other times, it's the music and the image, and it's like they're almost never in the same emotional register.

There's always this spread that sometimes we focus on, and I feel that structurally, emotionally. When you break it into themes, it does work in this kind of movement of gulfs; sort of dialectically opposed themes or complimentary themes.

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KOUGUELL: As a classically trained musician, to me, it felt similar to a symphony or chamber piece, with the different movements, and these movements informed the pacing and the rhythm of the film.

ROSS: I'm so glad you said movements. Hale County has five visual movements. In Nickel Boys, the first conception in the writing process was 17 movements. All of them had scenes at the end of them. Each of the scenes have poetic resonances and their plurality, etc., in terms of it being like some sort of ebb and flow of images. Of course, over the process, they're like, yeah, we can make that film, but it's going to cost $116 billion that's all. [Laughter] So eventually it gets chopped down, and it kind of lost the 17 movement structure, but we were able to get into the movements in the edit that are just a lot smaller, but still have at least some sort of ephemeral emotional impact that is equal to the original spirit.

KOUGUELL: The film addresses a dark history and the erasure of history in a way that's accessible and not pandering to the audience.

MONSOUR: I don't have these experiences of those characters and of the other people in this film, in my body, the way they do, or in my family. I watched very closely how RaMell and the filmmakers and the actors and everybody were handling certain parts of the history.

That was where I found the book useful. We're not making that book exactly or making this script in this movie, and they're different, but it did help me. Anything I could absorb, because that reflection of this history was useful for me. I don't have it in my every day, in my day-to-day experience in the same way as the characters in the film.

ROSS: I think of this film now as an experiential monument, in the sense that it, if we think about the source material in the Dozier School for Boys, it allows you to have an experience of history that's so strongly experienced-based that you take it into your body, in the way in which the camera goes into the body of the boys. That's not a history that someone can bury. It's an interesting way to deal with the complexity of the past where it's not a physical thing.

I wrote an essay, and one of the first lines is: ‘Human beings are the real documents of civilization.’ It's like taking society into us so that we are experiencing it in the way in which they did to therefore pass it on in other art pieces.

Nickel Boys opens in Theaters on December 13, 2024.