TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, my guest is filmmaker RaMell Ross. His adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Nickel Boys," is nominated for an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay and for best picture. It tells the story of two Black teenagers in 1960s Florida as they attempt to survive and escape a brutal reformatory academy. The story is loosely based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys, which was a notorious place for its brutal treatment of students. Ross' approach to this story is really unlike anything most viewers have ever experienced.
The film is shot almost entirely from the perspectives of the two protagonists, Elwood and Turner. Ross turns the camera into what he calls an organ by attaching body-mounted cameras and filming the scene continuously with unbroken takes. The outcome for the viewer feels like being both Elwood and Turner.
Now, I introduced RaMell Ross as a filmmaker, but really this title is too narrow. He's also a photographer, a Brown University professor and a writer. A former Georgetown basketball recruit sidelined by injuries, Ross pivoted to sociology and English before honing his visual language rooted in what he calls liberated documentation. His 2018 Academy Award-nominated documentary "Hale County This Morning, This Evening" is an ethnographic story told through fractured vignettes of Black Southern life, and it won a Peabody Award for documentary in 2019.
RaMell Ross, welcome to FRESH AIR.
RAMELL ROSS: Thanks for having me. Thanks so much.
MOSLEY: Elwood Curtis, who is played by Ethan Herisse, is a bright, idealistic teenager who lives with his grandmother, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. And while on his way to college, he gets caught up and wrongfully accused of something and sent to Nickel Academy, which is this reformatory that he'll soon learn is really a house of horrors. In the scene I'd like to play, Elwood is in the infirmary recovering from this beating from - at the hands of the school's corrupt white administrator, Spencer, and he's punished for trying to stop a fight. So Elwood is arguing with his cynical friend Turner, played by Brandon Wilson, about whether the Civil Rights Movement will bring about change. Let's listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "NICKEL BOYS")
ETHAN HERISSE: (As Elwood) If everybody looks the other way, then everybody's in on it. If I look the other way, I'm as implicated as the rest. It's not how it's supposed to be.
BRANDON WILSON: (As Turner) Don't nobody care about supposed-to. The fix has always been in. Games rigged.
HERISSE: (As Elwood) That's what I'm telling you. It's not like the old days. We can stand up for ourselves.
WILSON: (As Turner) Man, that [expletive] barely works out there. What do you think it's going to do in here?
HERISSE: (As Elwood) You say that 'cause you got no one out there sticking up for you.
MOSLEY: That's a scene from "Nickel Boys," adapted by my guest today, RaMell Ross. And RaMell, this film and this scene in particular, it captures your attention. And it demands your attention in the same way that you and I are sitting across from each other right now, and you're staring in my eyes, and I'm staring in your eyes. These characters are staring into the camera, which means they're looking at us, which means we are them. How did you pull that off?
ROSS: Yeah, it's way easier than one might imagine. You basically don't have the character there, and you have a camera operator that's sitting there as the character, and then you shoot it from both scenes. So it's quite difficult for the actors because, essentially, their scene partner is a camera operator. And of course, the character is standing behind or sitting behind the camera operator delivering their lines. But the other character who's looking down the lens is not allowed to look at them, of course. They're supposed to be engaged with the camera. And so this offers, I think, an assurance that while you're encountering this image, you know that it's from a specific person's consciousness - an extension of their consciousness, one could say. And with that, it's a type of personal truth that I think one fundamentally connects to.
MOSLEY: I think your collaborator, Jomo Fray, the cinematographer, called this process sentient perspective.
ROSS: Mm-hmm.
MOSLEY: How did you all come up with this technique?
ROSS: Yeah, I made this film, "Hale County This Morning, This Evening," and I...
MOSLEY: Before this film, right?
ROSS: Before this film.
MOSLEY: Several years before this film.
ROSS: Yeah.
MOSLEY: And that was your first documentary which you were nominated for an Oscar.
ROSS: Yeah, yeah.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ROSS: And essentially, halfway through the process, I realized that I wanted to make the camera an organ because there was something that maybe we'll get into, but that has to do with photo history and authorship and the production of Blackness.
MOSLEY: And when you say make the camera an organ, like, literally - what do you mean by that?
ROSS: (Laughter) I think to make the camera an organ is to acknowledge, first, that the camera is something that others and it's something that abstracts. It's something that produces sort of false positives. When I...
MOSLEY: It's observational. It's anthropological.
ROSS: It's anthropological. Perfect. Yeah, yeah. I think in terms of the way that photography and film present a truth that is perspectival but presents itself as unauthored often - just by fact of it not being clearly from someone's point of view - has always been the problem. Because from an anthropological perspective, when you go to a place, and you make something from your point of view, and you present it as science, it just reads as factual. And that's why we believe certain things about certain places. It replaces that perception. And so to make the camera an organ, to me, is a strategy to ensure that the person encountering the work knows that it's authored, that it's subjective.
MOSLEY: "Nickel Boys" is an astounding story, and what makes it especially heartbreaking is that it is based on the truth. Take me to when you first read the book. What were the things that you saw on the page as you were reading it that you felt compelled that you wanted to adapt this story?
ROSS: Yeah, I think it's what wasn't on the page. I think reading Colson Whitehead's "Nickel Boys," my first thought is, like, what's the world look like then, you know?
MOSLEY: ...In the 1960s.
ROSS: ...In the 1960s. And I say that with, like, an armchair philosophical undertone in that I like to think about - we don't know what the world looked like. Specifically from our lens now, the world that we see is not the world that they felt. It's the world that we think we know from our future position. I look at that. I read the book, and I'm like, what would I photograph then? What would I see? Like, what would I feel, a person who's grown up with the privileges that I have and leans towards a poetic exploration of the visual field and society? I think one of the challenges of the adaptation is the adaptation itself (laughter), you know? Like, how do you do that?
MOSLEY: Yes.
ROSS: And you want to take liberties that lean into your strengths, but you don't want to take liberties that undermine - at least from my perspective, because Colson's work is rooted in truth, and it does have this mythology that is almost biblical in the way in which it's trying to get to the - through archetypes, it's trying to get to some sort of deeper fact. You don't want to stray too far.
MOSLEY: You and your writing partner, Joslyn, do this thing where there's the narrative, and then there are the micro-narratives. There's imagery that just pops up throughout the entire film. So, like, there's an alligator that we see that continues to show up. And then there are these images of Martin Luther King Jr., who is, like, this sign of hope and progress. Can you tell me about why and how you came to use that imagery as a micro-narrative to tell the bigger story?
ROSS: The idea of the images popping up is kind of how we're dealing - we deal with images, I think, in our own head. Like, when we see something, there's an association that happens, and it flexes or accents some sort of visual thing we've encountered in the past. It helps us read that thing, and then we're off to the races. But also in the context of the film, I think it allows the viewer - if they're open enough to it, if they're not taken out by that gesture - to participate in an understanding of larger image production.
And specifically in this film, in the production of Blackness - right? - if you're showing images that Jomo Fray and I made, and it's from a Black point of view - we're using a Sony VENICE. It's 6K. It's poetic - and then you're seeing these archival images from yesteryear that were taken from a completely different context. Who knows if the people that were in the images were even asked? But 99%, I would say, of all images of all Black people across the history of time have been made by white people.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing, made by white people, but we know the history of Blackness, and we know the transatlantic slave trade, and we know how images were used then. And so we get to do something, I think, that is an almost impossible thing to practically do, and I think we can only conceptually do it, which is, like, thicken time, right? And it's like an - it's an Aristotle phrase, like, how thick is time? You know?
MOSLEY: Thick is - yeah.
ROSS: Yeah. And how interesting - right? - to be able to watch something and be engaged explicitly and emotionally in the history of that visual process.
MOSLEY: And it's beautiful that you think about these things in your work. You're a trained photographer. And I wonder, have you ever been in a place and, like, you want to capture it, and, like, you start to take out your camera, and you start to take pictures and it just can't capture it? Like, you look then at what you shot - what you snapped, and it just doesn't do the thing.
I'm just thinking about that in terms of you talking about the images of us from the past and how they were taken from a different eye. Do you think that there's something somewhat mystical, too, in what happens between, say, a person who has a closer connection to an image and they take it versus those who are an anthropological - when they're taking an anthropological look?
ROSS: That's essentially the origin of all of my work because I filmed "Hale County This Morning, This Evening," a documentary in the South, of course, Alabama. I think I had about 1,300 hours of footage.
MOSLEY: You were - you lived there for 12 years?
ROSS: Yeah. I still live there. I have a house and go back as much as possible and still film. I'm interested in, like, a longitudinal relationship with image-making and with people. And so I basically spent - I felt like, to some degree, both Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, the two main characters in the film, that I was part of their family, like, nuclear family. And then when you add a camera, you also get to see moments that no one else is there for, that only the nuclear family is there for.
And those are the moments that endear you so much to the person that when they do something horrible, or they make some mistake, where it's just like, you're not a sum - you're not the sum of that. That's just one thing. I know you really well. And so how do we account for the fact that almost every image made by every other person that's been disseminated to represent them has never been those images? It's government, news, reportage, street photography, always in the intent of someone else who has no family relationship to you.
So you have to ask yourself, what if every image made by every other person across time had always been as if that person was your brother or sister? I think we would have a different relationship to humanity at large. And I love your take a picture and it doesn't represent the thing entry point because everyone knows that. But if you start to question why and you start to look for strategies to account for that, you get to a film - you will get to a film like this. You will get to "Hale County This Morning, This Evening." It's just not settling for that and making that a mission.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is filmmaker RaMell Ross. He's up for an Academy Award for his adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Nickel Boys." We'll continue our conversation after a quick break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALEX SOMERS' "GROWN INTO")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today, I'm talking with filmmaker, photographer, educator and writer RaMell Ross. He's nominated for the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for "Nickel Boys." Ross was also nominated for an Academy Award in 2018 for his directorial debut, "Hale County This Morning, This Evening," which documents Black life in Hale County, Alabama.
So we've been talking about "Hale County This Morning, This Evening" as it relates to the "Nickel Boys." This was your first step into filmmaking. It is loosely based on two young men, Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, as they move through their final years of adolescence into full adulthood. It won the Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar. What was it about that time and experience that captured your imagination that made you say, now, I need to pick up a camera for this?
ROSS: Yeah, what a decision in hindsight. I moved there in 2009, and I was freelancing in D.C. and just, like, couldn't really afford to live. And my roommate had a connection to an organization called Project M, which is a design-build organization out of MICA that was doing workshops in Hale County, Alabama. And he was like, I'm going to go. Do you want to come? And so I - there was an opportunity through chatting with folks to teach a two-week photography course there. And so I go to teach photography, and I'm like, whoa, this place is incredible.
MOSLEY: What was incredible to you about it? Do you remember what really...
ROSS: Yeah.
MOSLEY: ...During that trip?
ROSS: Mostly the sense of time. You know, when you go to the historic South or any place that is storied in that way, that - I like to say that the iconography of the South is so spread out where you can have dreams and - you can have more dreams and nightmares in between icons than you can in the city because in the cities, especially because stuff is always refreshed, and they're always doing renovations and there's so much money and so much people and it's so dense, you're always engaging with things. And it's just way faster. But in the South, there's just these huge fields, and then you have this church that was built in 1800.
MOSLEY: That's what you mean by the icons?
ROSS: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ROSS: Then you have this huge field, and then you have this weeping willow tree. And so you're just, like, out in the middle of this expanse, essentially a desert for metaphorical reasons. And then you come to this thing that holds this meaning culturally. And so, like, what a meaning-making space. That's why, like, time feels different there. And it's - like, it is a - it makes you question what time is, which is on everyone's mind, maybe has always been on everyone's mind. But there, in which the architecture doesn't change, then what else does not change?
MOSLEY: You're coming from a city. So, like, what did - what are some things you had to unlearn to actually be able to, like, get that lesson you're talking about?
ROSS: Well, I think I went there, and I'm like, I can photograph. I can get better. And I made photographs for quite literally three years nonstop, every day, spending all my money - large format photography, like, rapacious image-making of my students, of the landscape.
MOSLEY: Was your camera basically, like, your appendage?
ROSS: Oh, for sure. I had it in my hand almost all times, you know, when I was shooting with the DSLR. Otherwise, it was right in my backpack. I'm, like, always thinking photographically and looking cinemagraphically (ph). And every image I made looked like someone else's image for three years. No joke. And, like, I don't show these images unless they're in some sort of artist talk which I'm trying to talk about my process. And that's when I realized that my imagination was curated because I'm trying so hard. And the images - I think the images were beautiful. And I know they were. People would tell me. But why did they feel like someone else's?
MOSLEY: Can you articulate the difference? Because one of the things that I - was very clear to me in watching "Hale County" was even from, like, the first images in the church is where you all start out - those kids just are ignoring you. Like, you are not there. You are in such intimate moments, and yet, like, I don't feel like you're there.
ROSS: (Laughter) Yeah, because while this time I'm making images, I'm teaching in the community. I'm working at an organization called YouthBuild, and I'm also coaching at the high school basketball team. Coincidentally, I played basketball at Georgetown - one year overseas. I was, like, the best basketball player in the area, and so that gives you just mad respect. So people respected me fundamentally.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ROSS: And then I'm working at this program that's helping kids who are 16 to 24, who are dropped out, either get back into school or get some workforce training. And I think when I moved to Hale County in the local school system, public school system, I think they had 70 seniors, and I think 30 graduated. I know everybody. Everybody's family. And that's my role. My role is not a photographer or an art maker. My role is a community facilitator or assistant to some degree. So when I decided to make a film, people still thought that I was working at YouthBuild. Like, and I would correct them, you know. Like, I actually left. I'm living in Rhode Island. I'm in grad school. But the foundation of my relationship to the community was not to be there to make images or films. And so no one cared that I was filming them because we had another relationship otherwise.
MOSLEY: How did the folks in Hale County respond to the Oscar nomination?
ROSS: It's funny because I think now people see me as an artist photographer. Though sometimes people - when I'm there, they still ask me if I can get their kid into a program or, you know, how I can, you know, help the kid connect with a college. But a slight tangent - why I called the film "Hale County This Morning, This Evening" is because it's not Hale County. It's my Hale County. And when people use the names of places, there's some sort of absolutism that I think is fundamentally attached to it as if that's the experience for everyone else, when it isn't. And it's not their fault for using language like that, but I always think when someone - someone should make things more personal.
MOSLEY: Break down what you mean there. Like, it's not Hale County. It's your Hale County.
ROSS: I wrote this article for the Huffington Post and added one of the photos that I don't show. And people - and the question was, yeah, what's it like in Hale County? What's it like in this place? And I spoke about it. And in the comment section, a couple people from Hale County were like, that's not Hale County. What I know to be Hale County is this. And you said that this was the best restaurant, but this is the best restaurant, and this is this. And coincidentally, it was a white-Black dynamic. I'm spending my time with the majority - well, I'm spending all my time with Black folks. They're spending almost all the time with white folks. They see Hale County as something else. I see Hale County as something else. And that filtered into my image-making. It's like, oh, yes, of course. It's true. I did use the language in a way that totalized the place in my point of view. I need to be more specific. What is my Hale County? I need to say it's my Hale County. How do you make images that feel that specific? How do you make images that feel that personal so that, again, you're not presenting the place as incorrect because it is actually your perspective, and that's built into the reading of it.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is Oscar-nominated filmmaker RaMell Ross. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALEX SOMERS AND SCOTT ALARIO'S "BLOOMING BLOODY")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, my guest is filmmaker RaMell Ross. His new film, "Nickel Boys," is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture. It tells the story of two Black teenagers in 1960s Florida as they attempt to survive and escape a brutal reformatory academy. The story is loosely based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys. In addition to filmmaking, Ross is a photographer, a Brown University professor and a writer. Hs 2018 Academy Award-nominated Documentary "Hale County This Morning, This Evening" won a Peabody Award for Documentary. It's an ethnographic story told through fractured vignettes of Black Southern life.
You did something a few years ago. You shipped yourself from Rhode Island to Hale County. How did that idea come about, RaMell, and why did you want to do it?
ROSS: I'm so glad you're asking that. So, man, I forget that I did that, even after...
MOSLEY: (Laughter) Wait. You forget that you shipped yourself in a 4-by-4-by-8-foot box?
ROSS: (Laughter) I do.
MOSLEY: (Laughter).
ROSS: Well, it's not something - I thought about it every day leading up to it for about three years. But afterwards, in the same way that you skydive or, you know, you swim in the Mariana Trench, you take that experience in. And then now the anxiety is over. You have it in your body and in your brain, and you kind of go forward.
MOSLEY: I feel like this just might be an insight into your psyche, that you're thinking about so many ideas and thoughts and experiences that, like, you could forget something like that.
(LAUGHTER)
ROSS: I mean...
MOSLEY: But continue. How did the idea come about? And, yeah, say more about it. And why did you want to do it?
ROSS: Well, I love that you asked because that idea is where the boxcar imagery came from in "Nickel Boys." Like, that's how I came up with that thought.
MOSLEY: Because, yeah, there's these images that pop up where you're in a boxcar, and you're looking at the night sky.
ROSS: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Through the boxcar, yeah.
ROSS: Because I wondered, like - I mean, the box, it was built by myself. And the design, it was led by this guy, Bobby Davis, who kind of runs my art studio in Rhode Island. And it's built out of Alabama railroad ties, too, which is just really, really, really cool. You can't access it from the outside. You can only get out because, you know, we're relatively thoughtful dudes. And the person whose truck I was on, it was a gooseneck trailer, open air. We got him from this website, uShip. He didn't know I was in there.
MOSLEY: You just said, would you please ship this item?
ROSS: Yeah, we told him that it was a kinetic sculpture.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ROSS: Because, you know, lights would go on and off, and there would maybe be some movements. And we know that he didn't know what kinetic meant.
MOSLEY: (Laughter).
ROSS: We don't even know what kinetic sculpture means. But, like, that mystery will allow him to, like, accept that weird stuff is happening and don't call the police.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ROSS: But he didn't know I was in. And so we were worried about if he got suspicious, trying to open it, and of course, the liability of human trafficking, like all of these law problems that we can't even account for cause we're just regular folks.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ROSS: But in that building of it and being inside of it for 59 hours - like, it was supposed to be 36, 38 hours. But he wasn't as truthful as he could've been, and he had overdriven his hours. And he ended up stopping at a rest stop in Pennsylvania.
MOSLEY: Were you keeping time inside?
ROSS: Well, I had a GoPro. I had, like, 80 batteries or something, and I had enough SD cards, and I had a timer on my watch. And I had a light in there with a battery and every hour I would change the GoPro battery, and so I could record the whole thing. And that's kind of how I knew. I also had my phone, but I didn't use it. Yeah, so I wondered over the course of it, like, if the door was open, like, how beautiful, if I could just, like, see the landscape from a boxcar. And of course, it's the Great Migration, you know, from that perspective. But the origin of the project is thinking about the reverse of Henry Box Brown, who shipped himself out of slavery in the mid-1800s - and the idea that, you know, people of color and Black folks need to or should, or I'm encouraging them, as many people are, to go back to the South, to reverse migrate and to claim land and to, you know, sort of dilute.
MOSLEY: Why did you want to do it? Why did you - I understand the origins and the symbolism. But why did you want to experience being in a boxcar, in a car?
ROSS: Well, it's a very personal reason. Like, I'm a very serious athlete. And I'm used to mind over matter and, you know, playing through pain and putting my body on the line for what I want to do or what I believe in. When I stopped playing sports, I lost that aspect of my physical relationship to things I cared about. And I think intellectual labor has its own version of that. But I'm, like, not a person to go to protests. Like, I'm not - I've been to them before, but it's not me, whatever that means. It can be unpacked more. So I think that doing performance art and doing work like this is my version of putting my body on the line in the way in which so many people go and are battered by police officers and/or always at risk at being hit in the face by some pepper spray or some tear gas. Like, who knows what could happen? This is my version.
MOSLEY: Did you feel claustrophobic at all? Did you feel any sense of fear at all being in that box?
ROSS: I never said this publicly. I loved it.
MOSLEY: (Laughter).
ROSS: I loved being in there.
MOSLEY: What did you love about it?
ROSS: I loved that there was nothing else to do.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ROSS: I was just in there. What am I going to - what am I doing? (Laughter) What am I going to do? My only goal was to, like, survive or to - I mean, that's a bit dramatic because two people knew I was in there. I could get out whenever I wanted.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ROSS: I'm not saying that this was anything like Henry Box Brown's.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ROSS: Just a project with deep meaning to me. But my goal was to exist. And the sound, it sounded like I was time traveling because it sounded like I was on a freight train. I thought the box was going to fall apart.
MOSLEY: It was loud, yeah.
ROSS: Oh, my God. It was terrifyingly loud at times. I can't see how it's strapped. I know my guy Bobby Davis. He's one of the smartest people I know. I know that the box is built well. I know it's strapped down because he would not...
MOSLEY: Put - yeah.
ROSS: He was hesitant to even do this thing. I had to, like, almost force him. But he's a big supporter of my work. But also, I can't see it.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ROSS: So I think - so it's terrifying. It's calming because you have to submit. You're putting your hands in the life of someone else. But I think the reason why I liked it is simply because I just had to be.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is Oscar-nominated filmmaker RaMell Ross. We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALEX SOMERS' "LOCKETS OPENING")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, my guest is filmmaker RaMell Ross. His new film, "Nickel Boys," is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It was nominated for an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay and best picture.
OK. So, RaMell, you were born in Frankfurt, Germany. As you mentioned, your parents are both in the military - were in the military. How long were you in Germany before you all moved? You all moved to Fairfax, Virginia. That's where you spent most of your childhood.
ROSS: Yeah. Not so long, actually. I was born there, left, I think, within a year. My sister was also born there, and that was really influential, I think, in the way in which I viewed the globe.
MOSLEY: The world, right.
ROSS: The world, yeah.
MOSLEY: And I want to go to college with you because you're 6'6". You're a tall guy. You were playing basketball at Georgetown, and then you were injured.
ROSS: I dream, man - I dream - I still dream about basketball - daydream about it. Like, I still feel it. Like, I - so much muscle memory. Like, I am a trained basketball player. You know, you can imagine, like, a person - ask a Green Beret - I was a trained killer.
MOSLEY: When did you start playing? Do you remember?
ROSS: You know, really late. Like, I'm a late bloomer to all this stuff. Like, I was just a relatively, you know, free-floating child, really into math, honestly, and really into drawing until I found karate in, like, middle school and then basketball, I think, my - about my freshman year.
MOSLEY: ...Of high school?
ROSS: ...Of high school - really late. I met one coach whose name's Robert Barrow. He was, you know, arguably the most influential person in my life outside of my father - male, at least. And he was like, you know, RaMell, you got it. And I'm - you know, I'm, like, 14 years old. I'm like, what is it?
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ROSS: And he was like, you know, I played with Grant Hill, and, you know, I played at college, and I think you could go to the NBA. You're smart enough. You're athletic enough. And I say enough because you're not, like, naturally talented in any of those things, but you have the bones, essentially. If you do this - and he, like, pulls out a sheet of paper, and he's like, if you do these workouts, you can go to the NBA. I was like, all right, coach.
MOSLEY: How were you injured? Do you remember?
ROSS: Oh, I remember (laughter). I remember well. The first time I dislocated my shoulder was at a AAU tournament in Las Vegas. It was before my senior year of high school, and I already committed to Georgetown. And I - some guy was going up for a shot and under the hoop - really big guy - and I swipe with my left arm, and I'm really extended. And the force of my palm hitting the ball, you know, ricochets through my arm and pops my shoulder out - really painful. Throw my arm up, scream for my father. I think eventually, my arm slid back into place. We didn't think much of it, you know? People get injured all the time. Turned out to be a reoccurring injury where I needed to have, like, kind of reconstructive surgery on my shoulder.
MOSLEY: When did you realize that dream of the NBA was over?
ROSS: My sophomore year, when I was ready to start. And I was playing my best basketball, recovered from my left shoulder injury, and I broke my foot in the summer before my sophomore year. That's fine. I can deal with that. Got fixed, rehabbed, was ready to play, ready to start, and the first practice of that season, I break that same foot again. I break the screw out of it. I knew it right when I rolled my ankle. And that's when I was like, oh, I might not go to the NBA, you know?
Yeah, it's so visceral. Like, I remember it. Like, I've never - that was my first time being depressed, you know? Holed myself up in my dorm, grew a beard for the first time and, like, didn't talk to anyone for, like, two weeks, which isn't a long time but, like, the opposite of my personality at that time, at least.
MOSLEY: Yeah. Do you still feel phantom pain at all?
ROSS: Oh, yeah. I can't play now. I can play for, like, 15 or 20 minutes, but my foot still hurts, you know? Both my - I ended up rehabbing back, ready to start. And then my junior year, same thing happened to my left shoulder happens to my right shoulder. Rehab again. Then my senior year, same thing happens again to my right shoulder.
And so it's always been a constant body-failing-me relationship to basketball - my first love - which to tie back to filmmaking is why, one, I care so much and, two, why I am not so concerned with the reception or the outcome because first career is done. I've already had my biggest hopes and dreams squished. And the meaning that I got from basketball was replaced by photography and film. And so not only do I care about it more than most things. I'm also used to - I've also gone to the extreme of hope and despair. And so this is all, like, second life to me, genuinely.
MOSLEY: There was also something else that happened during that time. You lost your mom.
ROSS: Yeah.
MOSLEY: I'm sorry, yeah.
ROSS: Yeah. It's OK. You know, I think - happens to everyone, and it's never a good time. Yeah.
MOSLEY: What opened up for you in that time period that photography looked like - not a savior, but like an interest that you say, OK, I'm going to focus my attention here?
ROSS: Yeah. It's a combination of - I don't think photography would have felt or filled the space or done what it did if did if I didn't lose basketball and my mom at the same time. I think if it was just either one of those, something else would have happened. That's probably with everything in everyone's life. Takes a combination of factors. I think there's something about - I want to say dangling the carrot - the way in which basketball is like you're, you know, every time you make a shot, it's perfect. You could be done, you know, but you do it again, because it's not about that one moment of perfection. It's about perfection over time or it's about the pursuit of it. It's something else. There's something about photography that is like that in which you, like, need to prove that you can do it again to yourself. You're, like, trying - you're chasing something. You're in pursuit, you're on some treadmill, like, it's - and it's ineffable, and you want to do it forever, and you're never satisfied, and it's essentially not about the thing itself. It's doing something else for you. And yeah, I just needed that. You know, I needed - like, what a big hole to fill - you know? - two first loves - Mom and sports. I think maybe now for the first time, I'm understanding that it actually filled - this is what it did. It filled the role. It allowed me to see myself. I'd never seen myself because I'd always been disciplined and basketball obsessed and so loved by my family and so privileged in all those ways. I never had to reflect on the composition of myself, the constitution of myself, what I believed.
I didn't know what I believed. I didn't know what I believed until I started reading books because then you're engaged with the interior life of others in a way in which you can't always through conversation, especially when you're going through puberty or you're becoming a person. So I think it let me think about identity deeply while forming my identity. And that's probably why I take it so seriously as a knowledge production of identity.
MOSLEY: Yeah. But I'm just curious about the kind of conversations you'd have at home with your parents and your siblings. Like, were you deconstructing life, trying to pick apart things growing up? Is that part of innately you? Is it your family, too? Like, take me there.
ROSS: I think I was always curious. My dad and my mom I think encouraged that for my sister and I. I think once I went to college is when I really started to think in a way in which was annoying for everyone in my family.
MOSLEY: In what way? Like, how would you annoy them?
ROSS: Because the deconstruction and picking apart was they were the targets.
(LAUGHTER)
ROSS: What do you have access to? Your mom, your dad and your sister...
MOSLEY: Right.
ROSS: ...And their decisions...
MOSLEY: Yes, yes...
ROSS: ...You know?
MOSLEY: ...They loved you.
ROSS: Yeah. They loved me, but they didn't want to talk to me, probably.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ROSS: And then, of course, you get out of that mode of - I mean, I question - I began to question everything. And when I mean everything.
MOSLEY: Like...
ROSS: I mean...
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ROSS: ...Everything. I would go outside - I would read nutritional facts because - I mean, I felt under-educated. Like, once you come into - once I came into my own, especially as an athlete at a school like Georgetown in which everyone's vocabulary is just, like, I don't even know what they're talking about. I didn't know what indifferent meant. I remember when I was walking, and a friend was like, man, I'm indifferent to that. I was like, indifferent. How do you get inside something that's opposite of something else?
MOSLEY: This was such a pleasure to talk with you. Congratulations on your nominations, and, thank you.
ROSS: Thanks so much. Thank you.
MOSLEY: RaMell Ross' film, "Nickel Boys," is in theaters nationwide and will be available on Prime Video later this year. It's been nominated for Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay for this year's Academy Awards. The ceremony will be held on March 2. Coming up, a review of the new season of the hit TV series, "The White Lotus." This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF INCOGNITIA'S "SCANNING FOR SELF") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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