So RaMell, how did you set up the filming between the actors to create this visual approach?
Ross: The film is conceived as all one-ers. In one scene, we shot everything from Elwood’s perspective, and then everything from Turner’s—one from the first hour, and then the other for the second. Very rarely did we shoot both perspectives on a scene, though, because of the way it was written and scripted. We don’t always go back and forth. So it’s shot like a traditional film, except the other character is not there. They’re just asked to look at a specific point in the camera.
Typically, the other actor is behind the camera, reading the lines and being the support to make the other person feel like they’re actually engaged with something relatively real. Because they’re all one-ers, though, the choreography is quite difficult. The challenging part was nailing the movement of the camera to feign what it would be like for a person to look, but not to overemphasize the concept of looking. If you try too hard to be POV, it’s impossible. That becomes the focus of interest to the audience, then you lose their connection. It’s why we shot entirely on long-lenses, 50mm and 80mm; this is not a GoPro thing.
Herisse: We’re being asked to do something that you’ve always been told not to do.
Ellis-Taylor: “Don’t look at the camera!” [Group laughs]
Herisse: And it is intrusive, so to kind of unlearn that and make it become the person that you are talking to—Turner, usually—was new and a challenge. But I found it exciting because of that. With time, it got easier. You can still be free in that, it just looks a little different.
Wilson: It felt physically restrictive. I didn’t realize until I was allowed to move—like when I was walking on the beds—like, I haven’t been moving!
Ellis-Taylor: RaMell was really good about saying it, but not saying it. I think about the scene where young Elwood is looking in a storefront, and it took us forever to get that, because the shot had to align. I can only say you have to lean into it and be like, Okay, this is going to take a long time, but I’m going to trust the process. In the scene where I visit Elwood, we were talking about where she was at that point. I was a little more disheveled and RaMell, you’re like, I don’t feel it. It felt like a technical thing, but I never felt inhibited by it, oddly. I should have felt, like, What the fuck? [Group laughs] Oddly I didn’t.
You continue the approach you’d introduced in Hale County in a lot of ways, this time by also visually honoring the book’s POV structure. How did it come to you with Nickel Boys?
Ross: It is the way I shot Hale County. There are three scenes in that movie where the camera is used the same way, and that was unconscious proof-of-concept to myself…. I’ve long had a POV film in mind, an art film, and then Dede [Gardner] comes along with this book. I thought, “At one point did Elwood realize that he was Black?” That’s a visual thing to me: Looking around the world, people are this; something isn’t weird then, but it’s weird in hindsight. That was the first mode of making the movie that I thought of. But I didn’t think that anyone would make the movie. I made the treatment. I asked [Joslyn Barnes] to cowrite. We built it out. When we finished the script, we weren’t like, “We’re going to make this movie!” We were like, Yo, I really love this script. What do you want do next? Because there’s no way that MGM/Amazon are going to make a POV film with these archival images built out. And it was greenlit.
