The cast and director of “Nickel Boys,” the Amazon/MGM Studios and Orion/Plan B film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, gathered for a conversation and audience Q&A following a Saturday evening screening at the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study in Los Angeles. Moderator Carla Renata spoke with Oscar-nominated director RaMell Ross (“Hale County This Morning, This Evening”) and stars Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson about the importance of telling Black stories, the impact of the themes explored in “Nickel Boys” and why the actors were cast in their respective roles.
Adapted for the big screen by Ross and co-screenwriter Joslyn Barnes, “Nickel Boys” tells the story of two teenagers — Elwood (Herisse) and Turner (Wilson) — living in Jim Crow-era Florida who become friends while enduring physical and psychological abuse as wards of a juvenile reform center called the Nickel Academy. The academy is a fictionalized version of the infamous Dozier School for Boys, which was run by the state of Florida from 1990 until 2011. Over years of investigations, forensics documented nearly 100 deaths at the school and discovered almost as many unmarked graves on its grounds.
The film’s ensemble cast also includes Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Daveed Diggs, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger and Jimmie Fails. Ethan Cole Sharp portrays young Elwood.
Finding two capable actors to lead the movie was a top priority for Ross and the creative team. The filmmaker detailed why Herisse, who previously starred in Netflix’s “When They See Us,” about the Central Park Five, and Wilson, whose past credits include “The Way Back,” were right for their parts.
“I see [Brandon] as a spiritual person who is really interested in feeling and experiencing the world, and that may not necessarily rhyme with who Turner is in Colson’s narrative,” Ross said, describing Wilson’s initial reading of the character as “perfect.” “He just read as an authentic Turner and everyone else [who auditioned] read as someone who was trying to be Turner.”
“[Ethan] has an optimism and a joy for life, and also a desire to be in communion,” the director noted. Herisse auditioned through a self-tape and was brought in late in the process, “which is, I want to say, the sad part because it would have been great to have him earlier because we moved on to other things to look at a million tapes. But I can’t imagine the film without these two.”
Making “Nickel Boys” required Herisse and Wilson to break the fourth wall and look into the camera lens, with Ross choosing to utilize a subjective, first-person point of view (first Elwood’s, then Turner’s) to chronicle the abuse the characters experience and witness. That meant Herisse and Wilson had to break typical acting conventions and recalibrate their approach.
“It was definitely a lot of unlearning during the process because it’s one of the first things you learn: You’re not supposed to look at this thing that’s kind of intruding in the scene and in the moment you’re having with your scene partner,” Herisse said. “But RaMell believed in what he was doing and he trusted us, and we felt that trust and that confidence in us very early on. So when it came to doing it, it was just about diving in and believing in him as well.”
Ross didn’t have macro discussions with the actors prior to filming about the “super high concepts of the film,” instead letting them organically discover it during the process of making it. “We weren’t like, ‘Okay, when you’re looking [at] the camera, you’re really looking at the audience.’ We didn’t ask very much because you guys came in so open and we didn’t need to over-explain or try to convince you all. You guys came to play, which made it fun because it felt like a genuine experiment.”
The stylistic choice of bringing the audience directly into the characters’ POVs drove home a larger thematic point for Ross. “Cinema hasn’t necessarily given that agency to people of color’s perspectives. We haven’t allowed for whatever that power is from the silver screen to be distinctly Black, for lack of a better word.
“It’s also distinctly universal,” he said. “If you don’t even know that Elwood is a person of color, I imagine every single one of you have at least vague memories or emotional impressions of being young looking up at towering figures who are your family members. We wanted to put the camera where the child would be and in that, provide the viewer access to the life gaze that Elwood had, which we hoped was an emotional connection to him and gave you a little peek as to how he saw the world, which was quite beautiful.”
One line of dialogue spoken by Ellis-Taylor’s character, Elwood’s grandmother Hattie, is directly lifted from Whitehead’s book: “Your portion is your pain.” It prophesizes the suffering that her grandson will endure as a young Black man living in the South of the early 1960s.
“We talk about the cards you were dealt in this situation, that you’ve been confined within,” Wilson said. “I think for myself, and to speak on Turner a little bit, there’s this idea of believing in the confinement which we’ve been put in. And Turner very much believed in the reality of his portion of the universe. This idea of being trapped, being an animal; he very much believed in these walls and that his portion of the cake was only pain.
“But within that, he had the intelligence and the wit in order to figure out how to make this piece of cake a little more colorful,” the actor continued. “In meeting Elwood, the relationship helps each other to recognize that they have more than just this piece of the world. They can break out of this confinement and that the world can be much bigger than these limiting beliefs that constantly are put upon and that we adopt as our own.”
Herisse credits Whitehead’s book and their adaptation for bringing awareness to crucial points in Black American history that deserve to be told, otherwise it could “easily be swept under the rug.”
“The way people have been experiencing this movie and talking to me, RaMell, Brandon, other members of the cast and crew, has brought about a bit of hope in humanity overall and the knowledge that people do care,” he said. “[I] can only hope that this movie continues to be watched by people that care and people are able to share with others, and hopefully lead to the change that we want to see, that we imagine.”
Watch the full discussion here.
“Nickel Boys” opens in theaters Dec. 13 in New York and Dec. 20 in Los Angeles.
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