Why RaMell Ross insisted on a distinct POV for ‘Nickel Boys,’ his feature debut

No two filmmakers travel the same path to their chosen profession. RaMell Ross has traveled one unlike that of almost anyone else to direct his lauded feature debut, “Nickel Boys.” Before adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, he was a documentarian, and before that a photographer. Daringly, the film is largely told from Elwood’s perspective — literally, as the camera serves as the character’s point of view, the audience experiencing almost everything through his “eyes.” Ethan Herisse, left, and Brandon Wilson star in director RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys.” Measuring 6-foot-6 — Ross played college ball at Georgetown — he has a quick sense of humor. “‘We understand what you guys are doing, but we need to share this with department heads,’” Ross recalls her saying, “‘and they need to be able to imagine the world — not the world through his eyes but the world that is outside of their bodies.’ So then we had to go back to do it a little more traditional.” The result is a film whose formal audacity is matched by its moral seriousness, examining America’s Jim Crow era through casually searing images interwoven with poetic reveries and archival footage, our nation’s raw-wound present connected to an inescapable past. “I think vicariousness is more powerful than empathy, because ‘empathy’ implies ‘you’ being other than ‘them.’ I think ‘vicariousness’ is maybe a ‘we.’” With “Nickel Boys,” Ross has crafted a vital new way of seeing.