Breaking Baz: ‘Nickel Boys’ Filmmaker RaMell Ross On Blocking Out Black “Trauma Porn” In Visual Poetry Adaptation Of Colson Whitehead’s Novel

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: When Plan B’s Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner handed RaMell, the visual artist and filmmaker, Ross Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Nickel Boys — the story of Black boys beaten, tortured and worse at a notorious state-run reform school in the Florida Panhandle — he knew he was being asked to bring his vision to the table, and not what he calls Black “trauma porn.” The resulting film Nickel Boys, starring an incandescent Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (Origin, The Color Purple, If Beale Street Could Talk) as Harriet, Ethan Herisse as her studious grandson Curtis Elwood and Brandon Wilson as his friend, Turner, is the one that he and frequent collaborator Joslyn Barnes first conversed with Gardner and Kleiner over five years ago.  “We flew out [to LA], and just talked for two hours about cinema and everything.

Then at the end they’re like, ‘You ever heard of Colson Whitehead? He just wrote a new book, The Nickel Boys. It’s not released yet, but we want to know what you think,” he says, recalling the meeting.

They handed him a confidential manuscript of the novel. “They said, ‘Read it.’” Ross later wrote Whitehead an email. “You know… ‘Colson you’re the best… Love your work… Thank you for this opportunity…” He wrote me back right away saying: ‘Thank you very, very much.

I wish you the best of luck.’” That was their only interaction. Whitehead’s novel features a penal institution for juvenile offenders which he calls the Trevor Nickel Academy.