'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'

Fresh Air

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🗓️ 13 February 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

RaMell Ross's Oscar-nominated film, Nickel Boys, centers on two young Black men attempting to survive a brutal Florida reformatory school in the 1960s. He says he's sees the rural South as a "meaning-making space." Ross spoke with Tonya Mosley about his photography and performance art, too.

Also, John Powers reviews the new season of HBO's The White Lotus.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and today my guest is filmmaker Ramelle Ross.
0:06.2	His adaptation of Coulson Whitehead's Polar Prize-winning novel, The Nickel Boys, is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and for Best Picture.
0:16.4	It tells the story of two black teenagers in 1960s, Florida, as they attempt to survive and escape
0:22.6	a brutal reformatory academy. The story is loosely based on the real-life Dozier School for
0:28.3	Boys, which was a notorious place for its brutal treatment of students. Ross's approach to this
0:34.9	story is really unlike anything most viewers have ever experienced.
0:39.3	The film is shot almost entirely from the perspectives of the two protagonists,
0:43.4	Elwood and Turner.
0:45.1	Ross turns the camera into what he calls an organ by attaching body-mounted cameras
0:50.4	and filming the scene continuously with unbroken takes.
0:56.2	The outcome for the viewer feels like being both Elwood and Turner. Now I introduced Ramel Ross as a filmmaker, but really this
1:02.8	title is too narrow. He's also a photographer, a Brown University professor and a writer.
1:09.1	A former Georgetown basketball recruit sidelined by injuries, Ross pivoted to
1:14.0	sociology in English before honing his visual language rooted in what he calls liberated documentation.
1:20.8	His 2018 Academy Award nominated documentary, Hale County this morning this evening, is an ethnographic story told through fractured vignettes of Black Southern Life, and it won a Peabody Award for Documentary in 2019.
1:35.5	Rommel Ross, welcome to Fresh Air.
1:37.6	Thanks for having me. Thanks so much.
1:40.0	Elwood Curtis, who is played by Ethan Harisi, is a bright, idealistic teenager who lives with his grandmother, played by Angenu Ellis Taylor.
1:49.7	And while on his way to college, he gets caught up and wrongfully accused of something and sent to Nickel Academy, which is this reformatory that he'll soon learn is really a house of horrors.
2:02.2	And the scene I'd like to play,
2:07.7	Elwood is in the infirmary recovering from this beating from at the hands of the school's corrupt white administrator Spencer. And he's punished for trying to stop a fight. So Elwood is arguing
2:14.1	with his cynical friend Turner, played by Brandon Wilson, about whether the
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