A year after RaMell Ross finished filming “Nickel Boys,” he learned to fly.
Ross doesn’t know if he became a pilot out of post-big-project depression, his desire to try new things or maybe just ennui. But after adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Black boys sent to a reform school in the Jim Crow South, Ross had found, in the air, the feeling he had hoped his characters could achieve in his film: freedom.
“As Black people, we know that one of the fundamental things we’ve been robbed of is free time — where we’re not worried about poverty or we’re not worried about dying,” Ross told me in early October over lunch at a French restaurant in Lower Manhattan. “Flying to me is an American luxury that offers a unique and singular relationship to society and the world.”
“Nickel Boys” starts with the camera staring at the open blue sky. Then the view appears to turn sideways, lingering on a nearby orange grove, only to return upward. The sky is now captured in a fairly limited frame, as if filtered through the perspective of a person lying on the ground below.
In these first few seconds, Ross establishes a point of view that is as much about seeing our country through the lens of two Black male characters, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), as it is about feeling like we are the boys. This seamless conflating of the art of looking and the act of being challenges how we watch movies and gives us a new way of experiencing Black people’s humanity onscreen.
WHITEHEAD’S NOVEL ITSELF partly informs the experimentation. Told in third-person narration, “Nickel Boys” the book is set in the 1960s at the Nickel Academy, a fictional reform school based on the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida (initially called Florida State Reform School). Known for torturing, sexually assaulting and even burying its Black students in unmarked graves, the state-run school was open for over a century, with more than 81 children dying there between 1913 and 1973. Despite the school having a majority Black population, when Whitehead came across the story in 2014, the newspaper accounts and the survivor website focused mainly on its white students. Moving him to ask, “Who were the black students? What were their stories?”