As filmmakers RaMell Ross and Coralie Fargeat made two of the most visually striking films of the year, it only made sense to pair them up for the latest installment of TheWrap’s longform video series Visionaries.
With “Nickel Boys,” Ross shot the Colson Whitehead adaptation from a first-person POV, allowing viewers to see the events unfold through each character — literally. The unique cinematography offers an intimate, striking take on the story of two young boys attending an abusive reform school in 1960s Florida.
“You bring the camera into the body. I like to say, make the camera an organ,” Ross explained. “I think the camera is just so violent, and I think it’s also so beautiful, and that tension is maybe one thing I’m trying to address with my work.”
He continued, saying his approach to POV was an attempt to address how racist imagery has been used to fuel racist ideologies throughout the history of photography.
“I like to call the photography in film the technology of racism. Like, you have this bizarre idea of racism, and you need to prove it somehow, because it’s not true,” Ross said. “So if you take an image of someone doing something, and you incept someone’s head and then they can project that onto the thing, then you pass that around the world and you tell people something, then what are they going to think? The camera is the truest thing in the entire world, and so POV was like a way for me to address that in an almost sort of backwards way.”
Fargeat agreed, saying “the camera is the eye of the world, the eye of society and our representations.” In her body horror film “The Substance,” she revealed the first scene she wrote — before she even knew the story or the character — was the burst sequence when Demi Moore’s character looks at herself in the mirror.
“It really came from a necessity to let it out in a very violent way,” she said of the film’s origins, noting that she didn’t start consciously exploring feminism in her work until after the release of her 2017 film “Revenge.”
She continued: “I felt like everything that I had lived, from a kid until now, about how I felt that I had to bother about my body, how my body was going to be judged, how my appearance was going to be judged, what it was to be considered a good little girl or a good woman or sexy, all this I realized had such a massive impact on my life and led to, I would say, a lot of self-hatred and a lot of violence towards myself that I felt I needed to blow this out.”
Watch the full conversation in the video above.
