NICKEL BOYS PRODUCTION
“The process fundamentally asked me and every other crew member to unlearn everything we thought we knew about cinema. RaMell said he was interested in capturing images of Black life that he’s not seen elsewhere before. “It ultimately meant rethinking how we used our tools. I’m so grateful to our crew and camera team – every single one of these artists proved to be such aggressive problem solvers, both in throwing out the book on how we normally do things and in taking on the challenge of what RaMell was asking for. I also think this speaks volumes about RaMell’s leadership. He’s fun to problem solve with and gets super excited about seeing the solutions.” Fray and Ross looked at Lady in the Lake as a visual reference, which was one of the first films to employ a full POV perspective. “Besides that, we didn’t
EVERY ONE OF these artists WERE aggressive problem solvers ”
watch any other films that employed POV,” admits Fray. “We were primarily inspired by films that had left strong emotional impressions on us. Ida was a major reference, as were The Tree of Life , Hard to Be a God and Tarkovsky’s Mirror . Honestly, RaMell’s Hale County was also a big inspiration point. We wanted to drill down on the language and what made it so special, and then to modify that so we could scale it into this new narrative space.”
The story’s setting is based on the Dozier School for Boys in Florida, so the production team were very conscious of the fact that they were making a movie about real people who lost their lives there. As well as incorporating archival footage into the film, clips from the 1958 film The Defiant Ones are also featured. “RaMell, alongside our archival producer and our producer and co-writer Joslyn Barnes, had been mining archival footage for three or four years before
PERSON’S EYE VIEW This one-of-a-kind production employed pioneering camera techniques to create its first-person shots
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