Write On: 'Nickel Boys' Writer & Director RaMell Ross

On today’s episode of the Write On podcast, we speak with RaMell
Ross about his new film Nickel Boys about two young Black men who
get sent to a reform school in 1960s Jim Crow South. The film is
heartbreakingly beautiful and already getting plenty of Oscar
buzz.


In the interview, Ross admits he didn’t know how to write a
screenplay when he decided to adapt Colson Whitehead’s book
Nickel Boys, so he began the process by using written storyboards
to visualize the scenes, which were later converted into a
screenplay with the help of co-writer Joselyn Barnes. 


We also discuss his decision to limit the violence depicted on
screen. “It’s a tough space because on one hand, you want people
to understand the things that happened and their horror. But I
feel as a culture, we’ve been overexposed to it and specifically
overexposed as it relates to people of color because we don’t
have so many iterations of visuals of people of color. If that’s
most of it, then how does that work on the culture and psyche?”
says Ross. 


Ross also shares his take on writing a movie with historical
elements. “I don’t think that what we understand to be history is
history. I think that it’s a collection of familiar ways of
analyzing or engaging with the past that fits comfortably in the
socio-political language of reflection. I don’t know what it’s
like to be a person in the past. And I know that a lot of the
narratives that we have these days are guided by a person’s
either nefarious unconscious or they have another type of
motivation behind them. And so I want people to think about the
past as something that has the freedom of interpretation, that we
would like to be given to all of the things that we’ve done in
our lives. I just don’t believe in historical reproduction,” he
says. 


Listen to the podcast to find out more about Ross’s filmmaking
process.