‘What would happen if the camera was Buddhist?’ The outlier film-making of RaMell Ross

Artists don’t come much more outsider than RaMell Ross. He once mailed himself across the US in a wooden crate. He says things like: “What would happen if the camera was Buddhist?” and, until now, he has never made a feature film. Not the obvious candidate to entrust with adapting a Pulitzer-winning novel, you might think, yet Ross has managed to make a movie that is socially impassioned and highly awards-friendly – and so avant garde that it almost reinvents cinema.

In its subject matter alone, Nickel Boys is remarkable: adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel, it follows two young Black boys at a segregated reform school in Florida in the 1960s. It is a story of friendship in the face of racism, injustice, abuse and even murder. The setting is based on the infamous real-life Arthur G Dozier School, where scores of unmarked graves of students were discovered in 2012.

But the way that Ross has made Nickel Boys is purposefully radical: we experience events entirely from the points of view of the two main characters: Elwood (played by Ethan Herisse), a doe-eyed innocent who is cruelly sent to Nickel for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; and Turner (Brandon Wilson), the more seasoned inmate he befriends.

Point-of-view cinema has been done before – Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, for example – but the experience of watching Nickel Boys is unique: rather than observing events happening to someone else, it feels as if they are happening to us – whether that is lying in the grass gazing up at trees, having Elwood’s mother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) plead across the table straight at him (or rather, you), or being on the receiving end of a brutal beating. And all of this is rendered with a dreamy lyricism that brings to mind Terrence Malick. It makes you question why conventional screen drama is made in the way that it is – like a stage play, with the spectator as an invisible, spectral presence, looking on at a remove.

“I’m less interested in cinema, and more interested in the experience of cinema approaching the experience of reality,” says Ross, as he arranges his 6ft 6in (almost two-metre) frame in an armchair in a London hotel room. “To do that in the context of this story is to bring someone closer to the reality of the story and not just tell them the story.”

It has been a rapid rise for 42-year-old Ross. Living in Rhode Island, he was drawn “by gravity” to rural Alabama in 2009 and began to chronicle its rural Black communities, first in his photography, then in his poetic yet intimate 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening. Hale County won multiple awards and an Oscar nomination, which put Ross on the producers’ radar when they were looking for someone to adapt Whitehead’s novel.

“I feel impostor syndrome all the time,” Ross admits. “Because the only thing I know how to do is what I know how to do … but film is a visual language. So you give me a camera and the people and I can do the thing.”

The point-of-view idea first occurred to him as he was reading the book (which is not told in first person), he says, “just because I kind of see myself as Elwood, relatively, and I think in first person”.

How to achieve it technically was one of many things Ross had to figure out. He had never written a script, either. “To write down, like: ‘This person walks into the room and then …’ I don’t know how to do that shit, because I don’t think that way.” His first treatment was made up purely of images and camera movements, he explains. “I got the idea from George Miller; that’s how he did Mad Max: Fury Road.”

Shooting Nickel Boys was another challenge: Ross was usually directing the camera operator as much as the actors. They also built special rigs to attach cameras to the actors’ bodies, but “75% to 80% of the time” the actor was present. “We realised quite early on that they actually had to act and give their best performance behind the camera, so that the person who was in front of the camera didn’t feel they were imagining being with the character.”

It sounds pretty daunting. “I imagine it would be if you had directed the other way first,” he says. “It’d also be difficult to make a documentary like Hale County if you had made another documentary first, or you went to film school. But I don’t have any of these precedents and so, to me, it’s just the way you do it.”

When I suggest Ross is rethinking cinema from first principles, he’s delighted: “I love that you said that. That’s exactly it,” he says. And not just cinema: “You gotta first address the photograph before we can get to the thing that’s more cumulative [film].” He calls photography “a technology of racism”. “I believe that the camera is Christian. I think it’s born in western ideology. I think it fundamentally ‘others’.”

The power of images resides with those who are pointing the cameras – and historically, especially when it comes to people of colour, that has been white westerners. It is no accident that photography developed in tandem with colonialism – in both cases, those on the receiving end are reduced to passive “subjects”. The power dynamic is often obscured by photography’s claims to “objectivity”, but, as Ross puts it, “all photographs are authored, but they just claim non-authorship”. This is what leads him to wonder: “What would happen if the camera was Buddhist?” How might things be different had photography been born in another culture?

This could be an abstract philosophical discussion, but it’s directly relevant to Nickel Boys. This is a history that has been buried – literally, but also in terms of documentation. There is a gap in the archive to fill. As Whitehead once put it: “The thousands and thousands of kids who go through this – where are their stories?”

But, lately, cinema has been filling these kinds of gaps with what has been termed “black trauma porn” – from 12 Years a Slave to Till to Get Out, which, regardless of their quality, had no option but to depict Black people suffering as a result of slavery and racism. “Maybe we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve seen enough and now we need to dial it back, because we know what that looks like,” says Ross. His first-person treatment offers a way out of this conundrum: rather than presenting yet more violence, it puts us in the shoes of its victims. Less “us and them”, more Buddhist, perhaps.

Ross is not merely adopting the stance of an outsider – he really is one. He never even wanted to be an artist. The son of military parents (he was born in Frankfurt), his dream was to be a pro basketball player. He was pretty far down that track: an athletic scholarship to Georgetown University in Washington DC; in the top 100 going into his senior year. “But my body wasn’t cut out for it,” he says. He rolls up his T-shirt sleeves to show me scars on his shoulders, which required surgery after he started getting “chronic dislocations” on the court. “I realised that I wasn’t going to the NBA when I broke my foot my second time,” he says.

He was 19. “I went into a deep depression. And then, after, I just started reading and I became obsessed with literature.” He switched to English and sociology and started taking art classes, which led him to photography. Then came another blow: his mother died. “With the loss of basketball and the loss of my mom, I was just, like, so aimless, and photography was a place where you could create your own reality … the obsession for basketball was transferred to art.”

There is a connection, he says: “The camera uses space and prediction and adjustment of people’s behaviour based on your own body in the same way you do in sports … I played point guard. You’re reading, that’s all you’re doing, and little snapshots you’re remembering – that’s exactly what the camera does.”

Related: Nickel Boys review – Colson Whitehead novel becomes intensely moving story of a racist reform school

As an artist, Ross has not simply stuck to visual media. In his 2021 piece Return to Origin, he paid homage to Henry “Box” Brown, an enslaved Black man who gained his freedom by mailing himself from Virginia to Philadelphia in a wooden crate. Ross performed a similar journey in reverse, from Rhode Island to Hale County, inside a 4x4x8ft box on the back of a trailer. The journey took 59 dark, shaky, uncomfortable hours “and it was fucking terrifying”, he laughs. “I didn’t realise – I should have, but maybe I’m naive enough to do things like that. Only two people knew I was in there: the person that put me on and the person that was getting me off.”

Despite having opened up new cinematic possibilities with Nickel Boys, Ross is not looking to segue into full-time film-making. “Absolutely not,” he says. “I have other stuff going on. I’m a film-maker because the ideas aligned to film, but most of the time they don’t align to film; they align to sculpture, or mainly photography, and performance pieces.” He is not totally against the idea of doing it again, though: “It definitely wouldn’t be like this, because I’m not a repeater in that type of way. But if the idea was appropriate, 100% – because there’s definitely more to do.”

• Nickel Boys is released in the UK on 3 January