Filmmaker RaMell Ross on adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel | Canada Voices

American filmmaker RaMell Ross first read Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set in the not-too-distant past of Jim Crow South about two Black boys in a Florida reform school, after he’d been asked to adapt it into a film. The book hadn’t yet been released when Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, co-presidents of Plan B Entertainment (Brad Pitt’s production company) approached him – soon after the debut of his own Oscar-winning documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening in 2018.

Published in 2019, the book was only “two or three months out” when he first read it, says Ross.

“It was all new. It didn’t have its cultural prestige yet. But obviously, when you read it, you know it’s something special,” he says. “I’ve never read anything with the idea of adaptation, which I would not recommend – because you don’t think you’re allowed to be free in it. You’re directed and guided, thinking about translation.”

Nevertheless, Ross ended up reading the book so many times that he was able to think outside its potential as a film, and “feel the book as a literary piece.” Listening to it as an audio book also helped, he adds. Nickel Boys isn’t overtly descriptive; Whitehead chose to be more explanatory in telling the story of Elwood and Turner, whose friendship grows out of their shared experience of racism, injustice and abuse at Nickel Academy, an institution based on the infamous, real-life Arthur G Dozier School. As a result, conversations between the characters produce personal images in the reader’s mind.

“The dialogue between yourself and the text is more integrated into your fantasy. When you hear the audiobook, you’re guided by someone else’s voice. And then that, kind of, opens up whatever bandwidth your voice was taking, ” says Ross, leaning forward. He’s sitting elbows to knees, hands clasped in front, on a couch in a room at the Shangri-La Hotel, a short walk away from TIFF Bell Lightbox, where Nickel Boys had a press screening last November.

You get the sense he’s tall. But it isn’t until he stands up at the start and close of the interview that you fully appreciate how Ross physically towers in his 6-foot-6 frame. It’s no coincidence he was once a basketball player, a point guard specifically, before injuries cut short a career that was on track to play for the NBA. The skill set he developed pursuing the game he calls his “first love” now informs his work with images – whether still or in motion.

“You’re always controlling the ball by your proximity to it, and you’re thinking about how things are moving. It’s this prediction and time travel essentially,” which is how he also thinks about holding a camera, he says. While dribbling professionally in Northern Ireland for a year, Ross was also dabbling in photography, working for a peace organization. During an awards ceremony, an ESPN photographer happened to look over some of Ross’s photos.

“He said I had a good eye. ‘What does that mean,’ I asked him. And he was like, ‘You know how to see; like you can see with the camera.’ That was the first time I thought that I could actually do [photography] as a life thing. Before, it was just something I always did … I became crazy obsessed and started studying by myself. Started teaching photography.”

One of those teaching gigs led him to the subject matter for his documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening. That film has been celebrated for its poetic depiction of a Black community in Alabama. It came about from his almost decade-long engagement with the residents of Hale County, after Ross moved there in 2009 to teach photography and coach basketball. The documentary follows the lives of two young Black men Daniel and Quincy, depicting “quotidian moments and the surrounding Southern landscape,” according to the film’s synopsis, and offering up a lyrical version of portraiture that’s “historically constricted the expression of African American men on film.”

It all started with photographing community members, and thinking deeply about the meaning of the images he was capturing while working with students enrolled in an at-risk program. By the time he got around to taking their photos, Ross had become proficient with making beautiful images. But they were not true to how Ross saw his students outside his camera’s gaze.

“All of the images were such reductions of the complexity that I knew them to be. [They] reminded me of images that anyone would take of them … I would analyze how [the images] bastardize them, just completely push them into a stereotype regardless of how sensual, how close and how beautiful the image was. It always misrepresented, which is something everyone knows.”

Working with the students, Ross started to develop a strategy to undermine that facile exposure, asking the viewer, instead, to complete the work. That approach also informs Nickel Boys, he explains. He was still thinking about the language and technical aspects of image-making, and ways to get closer to the truth or subjective authenticity of the person being photographed.

“And to me, you want to get as close as you can to them – to the point where now you think about bringing the camera into their body, and making the camera an organ. So instead of looking at them – what is it like to look from them? You are the thing that’s making meaning about them,” says Ross.

“I like to say, not only do we need a new language, but the language of photography – and film at large – needs to adapt to the complexity of race. Needs to adapt to the complexity of the moment.”

Nickel Boys opens in select theatres Jan. 10.