‘Nickel Boys’ Star & Creatives On How Shooting POV Meant “Unlearning Everything We Thought We Knew About Cinema” – Contenders Los Angeles

deadline.com:

Shooting Nickel Boys entirely from the characters’ first-person point of view — literally through their eyes — was a novel way to “center the experience” of the film’s subjects, writer-director RaMell Ross said at Saturday’s Deadline Contenders Film: Los Angeles event.

It was also a daunting technical and conceptual challenge. “It was all about unlearning everything that we thought we knew about traditional cinema and trying to reach for the oddest tools, to try to get something that felt really organic and inside the body,” director of photography Jomo Fray said in a panel discussion with Ross, co-star Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and producer Jeremy Kleiner.

Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, The Nickel Boys, the Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios film follows two Black teen-aged boys imprisoned in a harsh, Jim Crow-era Florida reform school, The Nickel Academy.

The setting for Whitehead’s novel is based on the real-life Dozier School, an infamous state reformatory that operated in the Florida Panhandle for more than a century until its abuses — and its dozens of unmarked graves — were discovered and the school was shut down in 2011. RELATED: The 2025 Oscars: Everything We Know So Far About The Nominations, Ceremony, Date & Host Ethan Herisse plays Elwood, who is preparing to go off to college in the early 1960s when he is instead sent to The Nickel Academy after being falsely accused of involvement in a car theft.