One of the year’s best movies was filmed in first person

RaMell Ross considers himself more of a visual artist than a movie director. His second film, Nickel Boys, attempts a visual artist’s feat: a feature shot entirely from the first-person point of view.

Every decade, it seems, first-person camerawork reemerges in film. Kathryn Bigelow’s dystopian thriller Strange Days (1995) cut to it when its characters deployed a sci-fi technology to experience other people’s memories; the much-maligned Doom (2005) had a section that paid homage to the POV of its video game origins; Hardcore Henry (2015) proved doing that at feature-length was exhausting. But if there’s a through line between the works that have deployed the first-person perspective, it’s that they’ve used them for visceral means, often to heighten the intensity of violence.

Nearly 10 years later, Nickel Boys presents the first person to achieve the opposite: quiet intimacy. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the film alternates between the perspectives of its leads, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), two Black teenagers who meet at a brutal reformatory school in the Jim Crow South. Despite the institution’s punishing environment, Elwood continues to maintain an optimistic worldview reflective of the ongoing Civil Rights Movement, while Turner grounds himself through pragmatic survivalism. The audience sees what they see — and believe.

The first-person vantage point does something clever: when we’re seeing things through Elwood’s eyes, we’re mostly looking at Turner, and vice versa. The effect is startling and, in its best moments, sublime. And the film is so confident that it almost never relents. Nickel Boys commits to the first person for nearly its entire two-hour, 20-minute runtime, except for a few splashes of archival footage and a handful of scenes that flash forward. But the brilliance of Nickel Boys is that the camerawork isn’t just a visual gimmick; it’s tied so deeply to the film’s themes that it allows the film to pull off a final act reveal that, before I saw this adaptation, I believed could only be achieved in a novel.

The movie arrives in theaters this Friday, but thanks to a strong run at festivals, it’s already being talked about as an Academy Award contender. (As of this writing, Nate Jones’ most recent “Oscar Futures” column at Vulture predicts the film as a Best Picture and Best Director finalist.) A New York Times critic declared it the year’s number one film, and director Ross just took home honors at the New York Film Critics Circle, an award that tends to be a bellwether for the industry’s biggest prizes.

The year’s most celebrated movie might just be its most ambitious. Asking audiences to watch a film from the first-person POV is a big risk, and the technical challenges to pull it off convincingly were no easy ask of the crew or actors. In some ways, Nickel Boys feels like an unlikely gambit.

Here’s how it got made.

A photographer and author, RaMell Ross comes from the art world, a place that, in his experience, embraces and elevates abstraction over explanation. Working in film, he says he finds that people — the regular ones that watch movies and the powerful ones that allow them to be made — tend to ask more questions about intention and meaning.

As a director, Ross is best known for his 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which follows the life of two Black high school students in Alabama, where Ross spent five years capturing footage.

Hale County eschewed the traditional building blocks of narrative — plot through an order of scenes — for a fragmentary, patchwork approach. The result is stunning and resembles less a conventional documentary and more the kind of impressionistic video art you might find at a contemporary art museum. But even with all its formal invention, Hale County still earned an Academy Award nomination in the documentary feature category.

It lost to Free Solo, but still: not a bad showing for a movie never expected to be in the running. After, Ross was compelled to return to his work in visual arts, completing a performance piece for the Ogden Museum of Southern Art titled “Return to Origin,” wherein he shipped himself from Rhode Island to Alabama in a large wooden crate — an allusion and reversal of the Great Migration, made a touch funnier when you learn Ross is six-feet, six-inches tall.

During that time, he’d also returned to his full-time job, teaching visual arts at Brown University. It’s unsurprising to learn that Ross is a professor — even from our brief encounter, it’s clear he possesses an academic’s curiosity and the enthusiastic engagement of a lecturer. More importantly, teaching gives him the space to be patient. “I get to make art at my own pace. I get to think big and move slow. There’s nothing better than that.”

But having come within spitting distance of Hollywood’s highest recognition, the Oscar, surely producers and studios were reaching out to Ross with projects, right? It turns out that no one was calling. Sundance recognition and an Academy Award nod would have to suffice. “I never took a meeting,” he says, appearing content with that outcome.

Then, in 2019, a producer reached out about an adaptation of a not-yet-published novel called Nickel Boys.

Ross had heard of the production company Plan B before. But it wasn’t until they reached out that he looked them up: they’d made 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight. It was Brad Pitt’s production outfit. High-profile producers Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner were also involved, but honestly, Ross wasn’t familiar with the kind of names that circulate among Hollywood regulars. He’d made little effort to penetrate that world because, well, he liked his life, teaching and making art at his own speed.

But after reading an advanced copy of Nickel Boys, the idea of POV came immediately. Whitehead’s book fictionalizes the very real horrors of the Dozier School for Boys, where, only recently, forensic anthropologists have uncovered nearly 50 unmarked graves of students who were secretly buried. In imagining those harrowing details, Ross was at a loss for words, but he could conjure the images. What if he could give those boys a literal point of view?

He had no idea if Plan B would be up for such a formal gambit, but he had no interest in being a for-hire director. What did he have to lose? When Ross pitched the idea to Plan B, he was surprised when they immediately signed off on it.

“They genuinely did not flinch. They stress-tested it, as all the producers did over the course of making the film and really whittled down the script, but generally never questioned [the first-person approach],” Ross says, then adds: “Kind of crazy.”

He’d connected with cinematographer Jomo Fray, a fan of Hale County. But even Fray, who came with his own awards and bona fides, found that the POV of Nickel Boys required him to rethink the language of film “on a quantum level.” The two of them were suddenly reconceiving the basic elements of the medium: What is an establishing shot when you’re in first person? A cut? A transition? The prospect was daunting — and thrilling.

But first, there was a lot of testing — a month’s worth, just to get the feel right. Ross recalls specifically homing in on how they wanted time to move with the camera. What they learned is that the most convincing images had to be slightly behind their marks. Traditionally, a movie is tightly blocked and choreographed with the camera; but in their trials, Ross and Fray found the results unrealistic. Messiness, they found, was more convincing. “If you are late to something and then you find it… then it just fundamentally feels more like human vision.” The way a person sees the world is not as tidy as it is in cinema. To avoid making the POV feel like a contrivance, the image had to be deeply immersive, one “that allowed you to live life concurrently with Elwood and Turner… navigating and moving through space with them, not merely watching them do it,” Fray says.

It also required some special gear. Fray chose the Sony Venice, a full-frame digital camera, because it could shoot in IMAX quality. In “Rialto mode,” which separates the body from the 6K sensor, the footprint of what the camera operator is holding was barely larger than an average DSLR. (Fray knew from what Ross had imagined they would often be filming in tight spaces.) There were a lot of setups, too: chest mounts, helmet cams, SnorriCams (the exoskeletal selfie stick rig that produces shots most associated with Darren Aronofsky’s work); there were handhelds in various orientations; a scene where Elwood gets clocked required its own custom rig.

But what does shooting an entire movie in first person actually look like? Well, it involves the camera crew and the actors getting unusually close. There were times when they were actually on top of each other.

Most of the shots were filmed by Ross, Fray, and camera operator Sam Ellison. If the scene was from Elwood’s POV, Herisse would stand close behind the camera operator and say his lines; if a Turner scene needed a hand in it, Wilson would reach his arm around the camera operator to get himself into shot. “We’re making a frame and we’re like, ‘Hey, E, put your hand up here a little bit more,’” Ross says.

There were many scenes — Ross estimates about a quarter of the shots — where the limitations of space meant the actors needed to don the camera rigs themselves.

“You don’t really get that opportunity really as an actor, to work behind the camera and then step into the shoes of an operator for certain moments,” Herisse says. Suddenly, he had the opportunity to wield an object he didn’t normally interact with, which he was always told he was supposed to ignore the presence of. Was it stressful? 

“Obviously it’s scary in the sense that I didn’t want to break anything. I definitely know that this is a very important and expensive piece of equipment that’s hanging off my chest,” he says. “But otherwise, it was so cool.”

For him and his co-star Wilson, shooting scenes from the other side of the POV meant violating the most basic rule of acting: never look at the camera. Now, they were instructed to speak directly into it. When I speak to Herisse and Wilson, I ask if it was hard to shift their focus.

“We definitely couldn’t ignore [the camera]. But we were able to get into a rhythm with it and learn that new thing of staring down the barrel of the lens in place of having each other’s eyes or each other’s physical presence,” Wilson says.

“Eventually the camera just fades away and you get this feeling that you’re no longer speaking to this machine,” Herisse adds. “Brandon was there physically — right next to Jomo or Sam or RaMell during the scenes — and I could hear his voice. And I knew that he was there with me.”

They were still listening to each other, even if a 6K camera rig and its operator stood between them.

Toward the end of our conversation, I tell Ross that shooting Nickel Boys sounded extremely difficult — reinventing the language of film, coming up with the technical way to do that, then executing on that ambitious vision. But Ross just laughs it off.

“The hardest part is time in general because you don’t have infinite time, like in documentary where you can just come back. So we have two hours to shoot the scene and we’re starting from scratch. [The actor] doesn’t have the rig on. Bluetooth isn’t connecting. Those types of things make it challenging, but the images themselves, yeah, we had that.”

After rushing through eight or so weeks of preproduction, shooting was compressed to a month after losing a week to covid — an intense experience for a guy who spent the better part of a decade on his last film.

Preparation helped, though. Ross estimates that 90 percent of what he storyboarded and scripted shows up exactly that way in the final thing, with only a little bit of improvisation along the way. I’m surprised to hear the shot list was a whopping 35 pages, single-spaced — every single moment, gaze, and beat accounted for, in a film that still feels naturalistic.

It’s easy to see how Ross’ newest film is a clear extension of his body of work. If Hale County was, in his words, the story of how Black people have come to be known through the camera, Nickel Boys offers a story where the perspective of Black characters becomes the camera.

Nickel Boys is structured along more conventional plot lines (it even has a big twist), but the film also offers many reprieves and distractions, emulating the way the eye wanders and how memory can often be nonlinear. Some of those images are the most resonant: the first shot opens with an outstretched arm, gripping an orange; sensory fascinations, like the sound of loafers clopping through a puddle or a knife scraping cake off a dish, take center stage. 

One of the movie’s most moving moments is a humble one: actor Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor embracing Turner for a hug, the camera suddenly looking past her shoulder.

Recalling that day on set, Fray describes it as a new experience for him as a cinematographer. No longer the voyeur, he was suddenly in a position where he had to meet his scene partner in the eye.

“That changes how you compose an image,” Fray says. “That changes how you shoot an image. And I think that changes the dynamic between actor and camera, and cinematographer and performer.”

Nickel Boys is in theaters on December 13th.