He had a radical idea. Here’s how RaMell Ross and his team got inside ‘Nickel Boys’

Cinema’s most transcendent promise is that it can put us in another person’s shoes. Told mostly in the first-person point of view, director RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys” is an experiential — and experimental — adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel from 2019. “Nickel Boys” is Ross’ first foray into scripted fiction following his Oscar-nominated, nonlinear documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” which observes moments of modern-day Black life in Alabama. Ethan Herisse, left, and Brandon Wilson look up at a mirrored ceiling in the movie “Nickel Boys.” “To take point-of-view very seriously and bring the camera into their bodies,” Ross says, “we needed to know how they look at things, how meaning is made for them, and how does that display the person that they are?” Throughout this transformation of the material, it wasn’t lost on Ross and Barnes that the film was being produced via major companies rather than in total independence. “What RaMell was always after was trying to make an immersive experience,” Fray explains, “to invite the audience not only into the idea of the hostility of the Jim Crow South but also invite them into the very bodies of Black youths, to feel what it feels like to go through the world as them.” Some of the references that Ross and Fray discussed were Terrence Malick’s breathtaking “The Tree of Life” and the grueling Russian medieval sci-fi masterpiece “Hard to Be a God.” The result was a rigorous shot list of intentionally designed maneuvers — “maybe 35 or 36 pages, single-spaced,” Fray recalls, “meticulously describing every single pan, tilt, gesture or move with the camera.” Each scene was conceived as a long take or “oner,” an uninterrupted and unedited continuous shot.