One of 2019’s Most Acclaimed Books Is Now One of 2024’s Most Acclaimed Movies. It Took a Huge Risk.

In 2019 RaMell Ross' impressionistic documentary of Black life in rural Alabama, Hale County This Morning, This Evening , was nominated for an Academy Award. It's a gorgeous film—part of Slate's Black Film Canon —but its vision is so doggedly personal and noncommercial that it seems remarkable that Ross' next film is one of this year's major Oscar contenders, Nickel Boys , an adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel . For his narrative feature debut, Ross took some big risks—none bigger than shooting the entire movie with a direct point-of-view perspective. The camera serves as his characters' eyes or, in the case of Daveed Diggs, who plays one of the movie's young heroes all grown up, hovers behind the back of his head.

I spoke to Ross about how he ended up directing a movie like this, how hard it was for a photographer to give up control of his camera, and how much this former Georgetown swingman misses playing basketball.

Dan Kois: Hale County is not the kind of movie that once upon a time would typically give its director access to a big literary adaptation.

RaMell Ross:Yeah.

How did you make this opportunity for yourself? What were the practical steps that you had to accomplish? Or was it just that things kept happening, and all of a sudden one day you were on set directing Nickel Boys ?

I made absolutely no moves whatsoever. I turned down every offer … Well, I didn't "turn them down," because I wasn't offered the opportunity to necessarily make anything. But all the inquiries that come in, and the scripts to read and the treatments to look at—I just said no to everything, didn't take any meetings at all. I'm relatively hard to reach because I'm just not necessarily interested in fielding calls for my entire life.

Did you have an agent or a manager for people to get a hold of?

No, no one. And then Plan B, Jeremy [Kleiner] and Dede [Gardner], called Joslyn [Barnes, Ross' producer on Hale County ] to get in touch with me and asked us to come out to L.A. And the only reason why I took that meeting was because Dede made The Tree of Life . How could I not hear what she had to say?

At least you could hear a bunch of Malick stories.

And she has stories.

Was it a general-interest meeting? Or was it "We have this very specific project that we have been thinking of you for"?

It was very mysterious, because the meeting's supposed to be for an hour, and an hour and 45 minutes into it, it's like, "I guess we're hanging out." And then at the end they bring up that, oh, Colson Whitehead just wrote this new novel Nickel Boys . And then we leave, and Aziz Ansari is in the lobby, like an hour late for his meeting, like, Who could possibly be in there pushing my meeting back an hour? It was just little old me.

What was your first impulse on hearing they were interested in you adapting it? Was it to turn them down?

I guess the conversation led me to actually read the book and consider it. But, I mean, after the meeting, I wasn't like, I cannot wait to adapt this book . It was more Yeah, I guess I'll read this . I just have a very comfortable life. Making a movie is not easy, not something you do for fun. To me at least.

You've described yourself as a "liberated documentarian," and said you believe that traditional documentary methods and ethics just aren't suited to deal with the complexity of Black life and Blackness. Once you realized you were making a narrative fictional film, how did you think about transferring that philosophy to this different mode?

Well, going to Hale County, I immediately became aware that I needed strategies to just deal with the hang-ups of making images of people whose images precede them.

Being a liberated documentarian is less about making specific decisions and more about ignoring traditional modes of making. I don't care about those other ways, and I'm just going to approach it as someone who wants to express something, and that's by any means possible. And then you just make decisions, as opposed to trying to work from a blueprint, which is, I think, traditional filmmaking.

Watching the movie, you definitely get the impression that it's the product of a number of decisions about what feels like the right way to represent a certain moment or scene at the time. But also there's a pretty rigorous aesthetic plan behind it. I thought a lot about your athletic background when I was watching it, because the filmmaking is really physical. It's so embodied. Like, it's literally embodied. You operated the camera, right?

Yeah. But alongside Sam Ellison and Jomo Fray. I was one of the operators. I think if you were to count the images on-screen, we probably split it, a third each.

Why did you decide to do that, and did anyone try and talk you out of it?

[ Laughs. ] You're asking the good questions. Well, I mean, the original plan was to shoot the entire thing myself, because: How could someone else shoot the film? It's impossible.

Right.

But Jomo is really eager to, as he would say, unlearn traditional modes. And I realized that I can give direction to frame. And I didn't know how to light anything, I can outsource all of the lighting, but I just have to make the frames, because it's impossible for someone else to. The only reason why I could be a camera operator at all was because of Louisiana's right-to-work laws. Otherwise, I would have to have been a member of the union. The whole thing wasn't easy. I don't know if that answered the question.

I mean, the answer is, it felt impossible to you for anyone else to frame those images, and that's a real photographer's answer. I have to imagine that other photographers who've made the move into film directing have felt similar ways. Not all of them end up operating the camera, but they still seek that level of control.

It's the most important element of the film. The film is written visually. Literally the first treatment was all images and camera movement. It's impossible. It's impossible to do unless it's me.

Tell me about Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, the two young men at the center of the movie. What was it like working with them?

We got lucky, because they're genuine good souls, and they came happy to put a 40-pound custom camera rig on their body and let me direct their hands. That's not what actors necessarily sign up for. But then also being one-to-one with the camera and kind of learning really fast that this wasn't going to be like what they'd done before, so they're going to have to adjust. We didn't have time to rehearse. We made the film really fast.

How did you talk to them about performance? Was that a skill you had to learn?

The first thing I did was I went to YouTube and I typed in how to direct actors . This is true. I watched this one guy's videos, and I was like, I can do that .

He was explaining about motivation and stuff, basically?

Literally, yeah. Making sure you don't tell them what to do, but you give them a reason to do it.

If only more directors did that.

Right? In documentary, you're directing with your camera even if you're not saying anything. So I was familiar with working with a person to nudge them towards something that I was interested in. But I'm not the type of director where I'm like, "I need you to do this specific thing." If you're chosen to do it, I want it to be as natural as possible, and I'm not going to spend eight hours having you do something unnatural to get it right. I just want you to do it as yourself.

So you're not trying to bend them toward a specific vision of the character that you already have. You're trying to figure out how to make the version of the character they're playing fit what the story is telling.

Exactly.

When you pitched Daveed Diggs, at what point did you say, "And we'll only ever see the back of your head"?

I'm like, "Yeah. Do you know you're not going to be seen?" And he's like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "OK, hear me out." But he said what he liked about it was that it's nothing he'd ever done before, nothing he imagined that he would do again. He didn't even think it would work, necessarily. But he thought it was ambitious and he respected it. And I'm like, "Thanks for being honest, Daveed. That's really cool."

I'm talking to you from suburban Virginia, and you grew up in Fairfax County.

Oh, are you local?

I didn't grow up here, but now I'm raising kids in Arlington. My daughter's high school plays Lake Braddock, where you played ball, most seasons. I just checked how the Lake Braddock team is doing, and they had a rough year last year. I don't know if you know, but they were 3 and 20.

Damn.

You got any words of inspiration for those kids?

Jesus, that's really bad. I feel like talent must be being poached. Private schools and AAU and stuff. I haven't been back in so long.

Do you still play? Do you have a regular game?

I don't. I've had so many injuries. I can't play without hurting myself, honestly. It's kind of sad. And I'm not even that old.

Do you miss it?

Oh, I still dream about it. I haven't got over it. I haven't got over not doing well in basketball. I think maybe my efforts in filmmaking is still trying to compensate for that failure.

Well, it wasn't a failure. Your body failed you .

Yeah, my body failed me. But also what it feels like is never what it is, you know?

Do you really feel like filmmaking is the thing that scratches that itch, the one basketball once scratched? Or is there something else in your life that does it?

I just started flying planes, which is cool.

Really?

Yeah, I'm like halfway. I have 20 hours, and I think you need 40. I'm halfway through that. I think I'm trying to find something that's not tied to money to do that for me. I think filmmaking and photography were the things earlier on, but now that it's become a sort of career, I kind of want to detach it from that type of passion, or that type of enjoyment. I think that's a dangerous mix.