Screenwriters RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes explain how they introduced a surprising first-person perspective to their adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s award-winning novel.
RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes had a conundrum on their hands. The production company that owned the film rights to Nickel Boys had approached the director and producer about adapting it. An elegant and brutal mystery-thriller mostly set in a segregated Florida in the 1960s, Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel centres on Elwood (Ethan Herisse), an innocent African American teenager who is sent to Nickel Academy reform school, and his friendship with Turner (Brandon Wilson), a fellow detainee. It was a critical success and a New York Times bestseller. Ross, who directed the Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County, This Morning This Evening (2018) says he had ‘no intention of making a fiction project at all’. And, as Barnes puts it, ‘the nightmare is to make the bad movie of the brilliant novel, right?’
Nickel Boys (2025)
Ross and Barnes, who had collaborated on Hale County, took a chance and decided to try their hand anyway. ‘You pray, and you dream. Not in that order,’ says Ross, laughing. He and Barnes are clearly kindred spirits. ‘This novel is so economical,’ she notes. ‘When you read this book, it’s like you’re going into this forest and the leaves are becoming like pine needles, because everything is getting more tense, more spare, more perfect in its form.’ The story moves back and forth between the teenage Elwood’s harrowing experience at Nickel Academy, and the adult Elwood, who now lives in New York, and has discovered via a news article that nearly a hundred bodies have been exhumed from a series of unmarked graves at the school. ‘It is the quintessential story of Black suffering, but it doesn’t feel like anything I’ve ever read before about systemic racism,’ Ross adds. They felt the book had to be interpreted into what Barnes describes as ‘a different language’ – one that was visual – and set to work on writing the film’s scenes, firing an online document back and forth.
'Our first draft was all images and camera movements, with dialogue dispersed throughout. “Elwood looks down at his arm; his gaze lands, soft-focus, on his goosebumps,”’ Ross explains, describing the film’s opening scene, which takes place during Elwood’s childhood. ‘That’s not the language of a script,’ he continues. ‘That’s the language of the shot list.’ When they sent the initial version of the script to Dede Gardner, one of the film’s producers, the visuals were ‘so heavily articulated that she said it was unreadable’, Ross admits. ‘We had to go back with a more literary approach.'
Nickel Boys (2025)
Ross, whose background is in photography, had had the idea to shoot the film entirely from a first-person perspective, and so wanted to include the details of how that would look on screen. The action unfolds through Elwood’s eyes, and later, as per the perspective switch in the novel, through his friend Turner’s. ‘With Nickel Boys,’ says Barnes, ‘you enter through the nervous system before you get to the heart and the mind.’ However, inhabiting that point of view means ‘you’re not seeing the person talking most of the time’, she explains, and it’s true that the audience doesn’t often see Elwood’s face (Ross finds creative ways to depict his reflection).
To help root the viewer in Elwood’s experience, Ross had the idea to comb through film archives, as he had done with Hale County, to find ‘surprise moments’ that they could ‘riddle’ the film with. ‘RaMell and I looked at hundreds and hundreds of images as we were writing,’ says Barnes. These included photographs of the real-life Dozier School for Boys in Florida, on which Whitehead had based the fictional Nickel Academy, as well as documentary footage from 1968, the setting of a key chapter of the film. ‘It was the year the dark side of the moon was discovered, the year that Dr Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated,’ says Barnes. What kind of clippings would Elwood’s grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) be sending him in the mail? she wondered. ‘You don’t have to understand them exactly – they just amplify your experience, and open portals to thinking about something beyond just the immediate.’
Though the film is faithful to its source material, it interprets, rather than recreates, the events of the novel. In one of its darkest scenes, Elwood receives a beating. But Ross and Barnes were adamant that they didn’t want to show the character being brutalised. Instead, they depict the experience of dissociation, using clever sound design and a black screen. In the film, Elwood looks at the teacher about to deliver him the first blow. Then suddenly, he can see himself. ‘The camera’s no longer “in him”,’ says Ross. ‘Then it goes black before the beating starts.’ Ross says he wanted to use the imagination of the audience as the scene of the crime.
Nickel Boys (2025)
In the script, Ross and Barnes wrote that they would insert the faces of the real victims of the Dozier School, distorted and made abstract, instead of their actor being beaten. ‘What you decide to put next to each other influences how your mind opens, and perceives,’ says Barnes. Cinemagoers, she says, are ‘conditioned to sit back and receive’. Part of Nickel Boys’ project was to challenge this. ‘The way I’m talking to you, and you’re looking at me – you make me conscious of who I am in a different way.’ Putting the audience in Elwood’s shoes, through his first-person point of view, was their attempt ‘to help people see in a new way’, she says. After watching it, they might feel in a new way, too.
Watch Nickel Boys in cinemas
