Nickel Boys director and co-writer RaMell Ross, and cinematographer Jomo Fray, explained their innovative approach to the film, which was shot in a first-person point-of-view. Watch above.
Nickel Boys is based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two African-American boys, Elwood and Turner (played by Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson), who are sent to an abusive reform school in 1960s Florida. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Hamish Linklater co-star.
Explaining the first-person approach, Ross, making his fiction feature debut on the project, says: “The core idea was: ‘what if we gave turner and Elwood their own cameras? What would they see and how would they make meaning if they were using the camera as an extension of consciousness?’”
Fray adds: “To build what RaMell was looking for necessitated unlearning everything I think I know about cinema. We wanted to build an image that didn’t look like sight but felt like sight, that felt like memory, that was jazz-like.”
Nickel Boys premiered at Telluride and was released in North America via Amazon MGM Studios. It was nominated for best drama at the Golden Globes, and was named one of the top 10 films of 2024 by the American Film Institute.
