This episode is brought to you by Hay Day. Looking to escape all the festive chaos? Turn holiday hecticness into harmony with Hay Day, the mobile game that helps you harvest calm one crop at a time. Reclaim your me time, relax, decorate and enjoy farming bliss as you tend to your animals and harvest crops as part of a welcoming, stress-free community. Join over 20 million players. Just tap or click on the banner now to download Hay Day for free today. This is Pop Culture Confidential, and I'm Christina Yerling Beru. Hey everyone, welcome. Thanks for joining me. Nickel Boys is not like anything else you'll see at the theaters. Beautiful, bold and visionary. It's adapted from the Colson Whitehead novel and revolves around Elwood and Turner, two young black men at an inhumane reform school in Jim Crow, era, Florida. The movie is almost entirely shot through the eyes of our main characters in first-person POV. I was honored to have a conversation with director Ramel Ross and cinematographer Joe Mofrey about how their powerful visual approach made this film such an emotional and visceral experience. Director Ramel Ross graduated from Georgetown University where he played basketball for the Hoyas. He later earned a master of fine arts in photography and he teaches photography today as well. In 2018, he released the incredible documentary Hill County This Morning This Evening. Joe Mofrey is an award-winning cinematographer whose work includes the film All Dirt Road's Taste of Salt. Nickel Boy is stars Ethan Harris' Elwood and Brandon Wilson as Turner and Anjynu Ellis Taylor in an incredible performance as Elwood's grandmother. [MUSIC PLAYING] - Manum. - Elwood. [MUSIC PLAYING] - It's been a long wait for some good news. - Ah, good news. Good news, Captain. Things is changing. - Nana, what is it? - I'll let you down. - Hey, Elwood. - I'm OK, nah. - El, I'll let you down. - No. - No, I'm OK. I'm hanging in there. - Thank you so much for joining me and thank you for this beautiful, immersive movie and the privilege to see through someone else's eyes as we can in your film. - Yeah, thanks for having us. - I want to start here. Mel, you teach photography, and I understand that you have an assignment that you send your students out to photograph different people, and you ask them to ask their subjects how do you want to be represented. And I was wondering, sort of, in general, what are the answers the students bring back to you? - Whoa, I'm first interested to know how you got that deep information no one knows my syllabus but me. (laughing) - Yeah, I kind of love hearing it. I'm like, oh, I know that. (laughing) - The challenge of it for them, which one student articulated to me was that I make them hunt for different people. I make them hunt for a certain race of person to, like, essentialize them in that way. And then through that really, sort of, damning way of approaching someone be forced to be in conversation with them about the way that they see themselves through photography, through this kind of assignment. And the responses haven't, you know, often been about the conversation more about the student negotiating just that threshold between being, seeing people in an almost predatory way. And then having to kind of, like, dance around the problem of all of that in their head while they're engaging. And I think most of them find it very unnerving. And I try to put them in the headspace of an image. You know, it's not practical. It's very conceptual and maybe problematic. (laughing) - No, I think there was something interesting about it because it forces them to have to contend with projecting their own narrative onto another human body and using, essentially objectifying them even benevolently so. It forces the other person into the conversation of their own capture, which I think is so important. It's a step that I think most people skip. - But that leads me to ask you, Ramel, first, if this was part of your approach to Colson Whitehead's novel and Elwood and Turner, and what you guys I understand call sentient perspective, but so the listener will understand is basically POV. Is this sort of part of that? Can we connect those two things? - I think we can, but I think we can in a way that's way more historical and built into the language of cinema, observation, camera, technology, and mostly the meaning-making process for human beings across cultures. I think the connection isn't one that I think is most would make and so I appreciate you putting me on the spot here and asking for a relatively articulated connection, but yeah, I think it's there. I feel like the way in which a Nickel Boyz is approached has to do with freeing someone, the viewer as best as possible from that space of capture, what I like to call the sort of the death that happens when you're photographed. Yeah, I think I'll leave it at that only because it's early in the morning and I'll have a tendency to think later and regret everything I said. - That won't happen, but I have to continue with you, Joe Mobit on this question. Of course, life is so much about trying to understand people's reactions to us, right? And if that old adage is true, that acting is reacting, you and your camera operators are basically actors in the way that you guys made this movie. Can you talk a little bit about that process, how you work technically and what that was like for you? - Yeah, you know, there's something where Mel would kind of often use a pattern, kind of ask and perhaps even rhetorically ask is what would the world fundamentally look like if every photograph taken was taken as if the person taking the photograph was taking a photo of their like brother, their mother, their sister, their friend, like, you know, there's a way in which we shoot differently, we capture differently when we're capturing someone. We know someone we love, someone we have a relationship with. We see past essentializing them and I think that there's a way in which we find different images, we find different images. And so, you know, and then thinking about the moments when either Romel or Sam Ellis and our camera operator or me were operating the camera, imbuing the camera with ideally that consciousness of the character we were in, of thinking about the cameras in Oregon and the body rather than a tool that floats outside of us, you know, all of a sudden you are kind of playing essentially scene partner, like you were living concurrently with the other actor in the scene, in that moment, in the emotion and like need to make yourself vulnerable to that emotion at the same time. And also as you're just channeling these characters, headspace, it's like if you are playing Elwood and you're hugging Addy, you know, it's not that it's Romel hugging on Geno Ellis Taylor, like it's kind of us thinking about Elwood. So then that hug actually becomes hugging our grandmothers. And then when we release that hug, seeing that person as our grandmother across the camera, I think slightly changes your orientation of how you make an image, where you make an image and what you compose. So there was a really incredible way in which, you know, I'd like to hope that in my past work, I have always kind of been fascinated by this idea of channeling vulnerability into the cameras and apparatus. But this film kind of, you know, took all of those thoughts to it and completely other place of, you know, there's a weird way in which like, you know, it took a lot of maybe my conceptual thinking on it and had to make it practice. Because like we were quite literally inside the scene and we had to be open and vulnerable to be able to shoot in those ways that ideally have a certain quality to the image that feels more immersive than simply shooting what these boys were seeing. But ideally shooting what sight feels like, what thought feels like, like what meaning creation feels like and that's what kind of the consciousness of Alwood and Turner felt like and brought you in as a viewer is, yeah, again, a very different process. - I was so taken by how visceral this year process was and how much I could feel that the beautiful hugs that Anjanu gives and that it really was striking. What was it like for the actors to basically be filming such emotional scenes looking directly into the camera? - Yeah, I think it's difficult. I think it's deeply difficult. And I think that that difficulty maybe was felt by a lot of people on site in the sense that, you know, what Rummel was looking for, what Rummel was searching for our images that fundamentally make you have to unlearn everything you think you know about cinema and actually re-approach the form in a different way to find some of the things that he was looking for. So I think that there's a way in which there's a natural discomfort with that. But I think that, you know, I don't know, I think that I was excited for those moments and I would say the actors probably were too because you know, watching movies like "Hail County" this morning, this evening, you know, I've spent my entire life looking at images I've spent my entire life watching and studying Cidaba. And yet the images in "Hail County" I've never encountered anything that looked like that. So all of a sudden it's like, okay, well, you know, if someone like Rummel has got to come into the room and talk about jumping, I think it then becomes a question for every serious artist in the room to ask themselves, hi, hi, you know. So I think that it's like, there was a level of like, artifice to looking into the camera, but also it was like, you know, on a technical level it was all about our teams, the technical staff to like kind of try to pair back as much of the artifice as we possibly could to the rest of the production process. So a lot of the lighting was done with mirrors and larger units kind of pushing inside of the space and lighting spaces not faces and not giving the actors any marks. And also another big one was like, you know, doing everything essentially in a wonder. So that once the scene started, the actors could start that emotion, have the entire arc of that emotion and the scene so that we weren't shooting traditional coverage and we weren't putting a part or blocking up the scene. So they could truly feel that emotion. We knew we were going to edit, but we wanted to maintain that continuity of time for them to experience those emotions, to again, just try to pair back any of the artifice that we could knowing that, yeah, looking into the camera is artifice that they've been trained their entire lives as actors. Anchenu Ellis Taylor has trained her entire life with a certain process. And this fundamentally was, you know, the only rule people say, don't look into the camera, don't look into the camera. And it wasn't just that they were looking into the camera. I think actually their task was much more profoundly hard because when just looking into the camera, they needed to project love down the barrel of the lens. Like when Anchenu looks into the camera, it isn't just looking, her eyeliner isn't in the middle of the lens. She needs to not look past the camera. He needs to channel all of that emotion directly into the lens, which is profoundly difficult, profoundly difficult, but I'm not sure if every actor in the world, even great actors, could necessarily do that. Like it is, I think it's a part of thing that it seems on paper. - Yeah. - Truly, I mean, truly throughout the entire cast, I think that everyone was so giving up themselves in a profound way. - When you share your food, you share your heart. So what's on your table this holiday season? Save on your festive feast at King Supers with delicious deals on all the holiday classics or wow, the crowd was something new, like a quinoa stuffed butternut squash. It's sure to add a pop of color to your spread. How about a sweet potato casserole with a crunchy oat streusel topping, made with care for the sweet tooth and the savory tooth? With King Supers, fill your table with love and watch as your guests' hearts get as full as their bellies. King Supers, fresh for everyone. - So, Nickel Academy is based on the real Dozier school, but just to orient the listeners, Ramell, what was this school? - Yeah, definitely not a school at all. I think it may have been a line from Nickel Boys, Colson's, of course, mythology of the Dozier school, but it was an institution that was founded in 1900 and it closed in 2011, and bodies began to be exhumed in 2013. It was an institution where they sent young boys, black and white, from the community and community at large, who had, you know, issues in school, but you find that lots of kids, black kids specifically were sent there for stuff like encourageability. They were sent there for things like, you know, back talking, just really, yeah, of course, unfair and not equal things to some of the kids who had maybe more genuine problems like some of the white students, and the typically the punishments that were most harsh were the ones given to the people who had the least amount of power in the community were toward the black ones. - You, Joma, was talking about how Anjanu was projecting love into the camera. Can you talk a little bit about how you, Ramell, thought about showing violence or not showing violence in the film? - Violence, well, the desire not to show violence, yeah, comes from the relationship between black culture and the reproduction of the needs and the essence of black culture across cinema and photography, and maybe every genre of documentation, you know, as black culture emerges from the transatlantic slave trade, it's not one that seems to be in charge of its destiny. At least then there's way more agency, obviously, that communities have now, but still there's an imbalanced power dynamic and with that, the desire for the community, the black community to explore the ills that have happened over time and bring those to popular attention as kind of resulted in a really not, in like a B line or some sort of wiggly line way, and the over-indexing of images of people of color that have violence happening to their bodies. And so, yeah, that's very shorthand and a little bit scattered. It's also really tough to talk about because embedded in there, which is why I said, like it's a needed thing. Most people don't have access to black communities. They're not interested in having close relations with people of color. And so, if it's not a natural occurrence and of course, that's super general. So, one needs to show what's happening across the world and one needs to show what's happening in our close communities, but that results in almost foreclosing the possibility for understanding the community as something other than that. And with this film, we were interested in maybe just exploring the way that violence exists over time and it's different contortions and the way in which it becomes sound and the way in which it becomes light and the way in which it becomes a hunched over shoulder as opposed to focusing so much on the moment it happens. - I've interviewed photographer Kristen Johnson a few times who I know you've referenced and actually had a powerful interview with her where she sort of changed my way of seeing a photo of my mother, which is quite, that's some story for another time, but I remember her talking about making a film and was filming her mother who at the time had all simers and how that felt like a betrayal. And then I heard you talk about the photographer being the technology of racism. What do you mean by the technology of racism? - Yeah, shout out to KJ. I typically show a camera person in my film class and my photography class the first day. I don't know her so well that I can call her KJ, but it's very important to me as a filmmaker. - She would almost request that you take that intimacy upon yourself and speak to her as if you're a friend, at least in your mind. She's very kind and generous. But I remember I wrote this essay called Goodbye Pluto and the idea of goodbye Pluto comes from the sort of re-categorization of science. And oh, Pluto is not a planet. And maybe thinking about race as being not a thing, eventually, though obviously will always be a thing. And I write in there about what would happen if how terrifying it would be if a photo of my mother escapes the family album and blew out of the window and off the balcony and landed on the street. And after a tattered after a day's traffic, someone picked it up and what the American stranger would read in that image. And they wouldn't read the image as I would read the image. Obviously, I think that the way in which they would project onto it would be as this anonymous family portrait or this anonymous image from what seems to be a family portrait album. And from that sort of started to just really consider the sort of, I haven't articulated it in any depth, but like what the visual constitution of the US is. Like what is the visual ideology built into the language of perception? You know, like I wrote in this essay that, you know, nothing is understood until it's adjusted. It always comes through your cultural, you know, meaning-making language and symbolic relationships. And with that, you realize that what photography and film do, at least essentially, and maybe generally, but at least essentially, is offer something to be projected upon. It's very not like, you know, a photograph can, you know, display humanity and reinforce inferiority in the mind of the viewer. You know, it's not necessarily something that elevates someone to a place of equality. And that's kind of a terrifying thing to think about and to consider given the not close relationship that most people around the world have had with other people around the world. - I'm curious, Joe. How do you feel about where photography is today? Like Instagram and AI and how much we use POV and gaming and things like that? I mean, people can sort of represent themselves how they want to now with the filter on Instagram. Is it positive, negative? - You know, I almost feel like I don't necessarily project a moral framework on it. I feel like it is the current evolution of how humans think about image-making and think about themselves. I think there is absolutely a connection there between how we create images of ourselves and how we think about ourselves and how we think about others. And I think that all of these things change certain aspects of what we traditionally or have traditionally thought about ourselves, our own bodies, our own bodies in space, our interaction with other bodies. But I don't necessarily think there's a moral thing. What I'll say is that, you know, I think that in the last, let's say 18 years, I think that kind of the rise of the iPhone and kind of consumer cameras attached to necessary technologies, like a cell phone, I think has created a certain surplus of images and also a way in which most people feel connected to images because they're just so steeped in them constantly. There's a visual literacy in a certain way. Right now, that is like never existed in history, like profoundly never existed in history. And there's also, you know, kind of a double edged sword in my mind about that, where all of a sudden there is a natural devaluation of images because the supply is so high that like you'll look at images today of like, you know, a bear snapping and a salmon about to come through its mouth. An image that 30 years ago would have taken someone maybe eight months of staking out 14 hours a day to try to capture. And now it's like, you know, it's on my full TV as a screensaver image. And I think all of a sudden that image, there's just a deep devaluation of what that image kind of means because it has now become superfluous because you can close your eyes and you always already know that image, like even describing it a person can think about it. In a way that, you know, wasn't true when like, like when Dumas was writing and they paid 75 cents a page, like he's writing 30 pages describing the rolling fjords in the three basketeers, you know? And there's a different way but there's most people hadn't seen a fjord. And so all of a sudden like, there is this like created imagination and this need to express what do things look like. Now I do not think we have that. I think that, you know, I can close my eyes and most people, even if they've never left their borough in Brooklyn, could probably kind of visualize what New Zealand looks like or what a fjord would look like. So I think there's an aspect to it that's there. But I think that maybe the other side to that blade that I think is actually is really interesting and helpful within filmmaking is because there is a profound visual, let's say a narrative literacy to people. I actually think that viewers are more to actually see things that are maybe more of a guard in their structure and their form because we are so, so, so visually and story literate that, you know, like I think about this in the genre where it's like horror is almost an insulated chamber that is speaking to itself. It's constantly recursive. Like, you know, you're watching this scene in long legs and you know that it's gesturing towards Halloween. You know that it's gesturing towards this and that and there's a way that there is just a natural language that is created. And I think that now you have situations where the language is so quick that like instead of taking 40 minutes to create a character dynamic, you could do it in five minutes. You could genuinely almost in like an Eisenstein level way. You can do it in a montage and get the audience up to speed on something that 40 years ago would have taken 40 minutes to hit. So all of a sudden, I mean, two more hours of your film. You have two hours to go even further, even deeper than maybe a movie was able to in the past. Like I often think about this with people like, you know, Terrence Malick's early movies where, you know, people called them ahead of their time at the time. And there's a way in which it's like, I actually think that those movies made sense in the times that they were made, but the audiences weren't necessarily prepared to ingest them and take them in. And I think things like the internet and again, things like people's kind of just visual literacy, all of a sudden now it's like, there are ways in which sometimes images and days of heaven and sequences and did red line feel quaint, not because they're quaint, but actually because they were so, they were such fundamental building blocks to actually what the future of image making would look like in cinema. And now viewers are like capable of reading those and we have like taken those and kind of started running further off with them. So, you know, I also think that there's something exciting about that as an image maker where, you know, it is challenging to make images that people haven't really seen before, but also it creates an exciting challenge because actually you really, really, really need to dig down and drill down hard to try to show someone an image that they haven't quite interacted with. And also more than any other time in history, the audience is literate enough to actually be presented with different types of documents and to invest in them and to understand them and to run with them. - Ramel, just want to ask a last question about Elwood and Turner here at the end. For me as a viewer that in visually and viscerally that now and then are one, was that something you were thinking when you were writing and forming these two characters? - Yes, yes, it was a core principle of the script and of the concepts of their timelines and the way in which point of view would work across. I mean, just as a process in the film, if they're only seeing each other and one becomes the other, then how do you, you know, subtly gesture towards them already being one from the get-go and maybe the recognition of each other is the recognition of themselves. And yeah, the ability for each person to see each other and to use the camera or to use their perception as a visual tool is kind of what human beings want to do and the film language allows for that to be something that is almost unconscious and a bit seamless and maybe even quantum. - Thank you for, this was such an interesting conversation and I wish I had more time, but I'm so honored to get that I got to talk to you about it. - Thank you so much. - Thank you guys. - Bye, Christina. - Thank you so much to Ramel Ross and Joe Mofre, do not miss Nickel Boys. And thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. Pop Culture Confidential is a part of the Evergreen Podcast Network. See you next time. - Hello podcast fans, it is I, Bruce Valanche. For over 25 years, I worked on the Academy Awards, so you didn't have to. In that time, I've seen and heard things that should not be seen or heard or certainly felt. And now, for the first time, I'm sharing all my behind the scenes stories and firsthand knowledge about the Oscars, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the slap, all the things you didn't see. So join me as I use humor and insight to break down the Oscar Awards of the past to explain how and why your favorite movie didn't win, why some actors and some directors had to fire their agents and how the whole process works or sometimes doesn't work. This is the Oscars, what were they thinking? Available wherever you get podcasts. [BLANK_AUDIO]
Christina talks to director RaMell Ross & cinematographer Jomo Fray about their brilliant new move 'Nickel Boys'. A conversation about their powerful visual and emotional approach to the Colson Whitehead novel.
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