Although Nickel guys is a film about the abuse black children suffered at a brutal reform school in the Jim Crow South, but it never explicitly depicts abuse on screen.
Director RaMell Ross said this was on purpose. In making this film, he told Yahoo Entertainment that he reflected on years of depictions of brutal violence against people of color in TV and film and wondered who those images were really intended for.
“We knew before that they needed to raise awareness and provide actual visual stimulation about the horrors,” Moss said. “But we already have those images in our heads.”
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The film is based on a 2019 Pulitzer-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, which was based on the experiences of boys at the Dozier School for Boys in Florida. It operated for more than a hundred years despite a reputation for abuse, assault, rape, torture and murder of students by staff before it closed in 2011.
The film shows the places where boys were beaten and abused. It shows the terror and prospect of violence and the emotional struggle to overcome that trauma, both for the people it was inflicted on and for the people who saw its aftermath in their peers. It shows hospital stays, hushed conversations and headlines about mass graves – but no graphic violence.
“That’s just the beginning of a trauma,” Ross said of the abuse at the school, which is called Nickel Academy in the film. “Trauma – that violence ripples forever. How can you not overload that visuality so that it is almost excluded from that space?”
Enter Brandon Wilson Nickel guys. (MGM/Courtesy of Everett Collection)
Daveed Diggs plays the adult version of the film’s protagonist, who reflects on his traumatic time at reform school as society begins to discover the extent of the abuse he suffered. Diggs told Yahoo Entertainment that by avoiding images of graphic violence, the film considers how the people who physically interact with it also struggle with the memories that arise in the future. It’s a ‘memory game’.
“When you are in a situation where something terrible happens, you close your eyes. You look away. You do things to keep it from being burned into your retina,” he said. ‘You still catch things. A big part of it is noise.”
Whitehead’s novel is only 224 pages without extensive descriptions. Ross’ film is extravagantly visual. The audience sees most of the film through the eyes of the hopeful protagonist, Elwood – looking through him rather than at him, and seeing what he sees. At points it switches to the point of view of his friend at Nickel Academy, the more hardened Turner.
Ethan Herisse in Nickel guys. (MGM/Courtesy of Everett Collection)
Ethan Herisse, who plays Elwood, told Yahoo Entertainment that finding connections with his character was important to his portrayal.
“My starting point was love [his grandmother] raise him,” he said. “I also connected with his view of the world and his optimism – or naivete, whatever you want to call it… I admired his courage, his grace and his intelligence and tried to portray those characteristics as honestly as possible.”
Ross said he saw the book as “the best architecture ever” and that it is “full in its own way, in a literary sense.” He drew on his own experiences to fill in the gaps in the imagery.
“I kind of thought of myself as Elwood and Turner,” he said. “I’m fortunate enough to be a black boy, and so every image I’ve ever seen has been from my point of view, and that’s the language of film. Every moment I encounter is relevant to the production of their lives in cinema.”
Nickel guys now playing in select theaters.
