‘Nickel Boys’ director RaMell Ross on his revolutionary filmmaking choice: ‘I don’t know if I could have told the story any other way’

RaMell Ross’s feature directorial debut “Nickel Boys” is unlike any mainstream release in recent memory. Rather than adapt the Colson Whitehead Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Nickel Boys” with a traditional approach, Ross instead chose to shoot the project largely in first-person perspective. That means actors speak to the camera and ostensibly interact directly with the audience.

“I don’t know if I could have told the story any other way,” Ross, an Oscar nominee for the documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: Film Directors panel. “I’m fortunate to have been supported by producers who didn’t question the idea, and we head into the writing process with that in mind.” Watch the video interview above.

Produced by two-time Oscar winners Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner (“12 Years a Slave,” “Moonlight”), David Levine, and Ross’s “Hale County” producer Joslyn Barnes, “Nickel Boys” is set in the Jim Crow South. The film focuses on a young Black teenager Elwood Curtis (newcomer Ethan Herisse), who is falsely accused by the police of being an accomplice to a car theft. Despite his innocence, Elwood is sent to a segregated reform school called Nickel Academy, where he befriends another youngster named Turner (Brandon Turner). Meanwhile, in the film’s present timeline, an older Elwood (played by Daveed Diggs) looks back at his life at Nickel Academy and grapples with the violence and racism Elwood and the other inmates faced. (While the film and source material is fiction, Whitehead based his book on the real-life and notorious Dozier School for Boys.)

“The book is incredibly rich, incredibly rigorous. One of the first things I thought or recognized was just myself in the characters – and obviously, Elwood,” Ross says. “He is a young Black man, and he goes to reform school and eventually runs into another young Black man. And it’s quite easy to imagine myself as them, specifically Elwood, because I grew up like Elwood, with a lot of love in a suburban household. And you’re always terrified of something happening that sends you off on the wrong path – not that there is necessarily a right path, but where you know a single mistake determines the rest of your life in a way that’s tied to sort of racism or systematic oppression.”

For Ross, the single-point perspective was an extension of his own experience with the book and its characters. (While Elwood is the main character, the film sometimes shifts its perspective to Turner’s POV.)

“There’s something almost religious about the camera,” Ross says. “I think the camera is sort of Christian. It does something that intensifies objectification, for lack of a better word – it fundamentally separates you. But I always wondered what would have happened if the camera was born into Buddhism, or Taoism, in which the world is more fluid. Maybe the only thing that’s consistent across religious contexts is the idea of self. And maybe the idea of self needs to be dissolved eventually. So I wondered what happens when you bring the camera into your body and you allow people to be as approximately synchronized with your point of view?”

“Nickel Boys” premiered at the Telluride Film Festival to passionate reviews and has remained a top contender in the Oscars race for Best Picture ever since. In the wake of its strong critical response – plus the potential for “Nickel Boys” to perform well when major critics groups start giving out their annual awards next month – Amazon MGM Studios shifted the film’s release date from October to December 13.

But as a result of its festival run, “Nickel Boys” has already been shown to a wide variety of audiences so far. Asked if he has found younger viewers have proven more accepting of his single-point perspective approach – particularly because so many social media videos are presented in the first-person – Ross says yes. Well, maybe.

“You know, I want to say yes. I wish I had the bandwidth to have done genuine research,” he says. “But I do find that a lot of the older generation, for lack of a better word, they always say it took a little time to adjust to the approach, and once they adjusted, they really fell into the film. And very rarely do the younger viewers say the same. I don’t know what age ‘younger viewers’ would even start, but I very rarely get that comment [about taking a little while to adjust]. For the most part, people recognize that it is something that’s out there already and they seem like they appreciate that it applies to this story.”