Even if you haven’t seen “Nickel Boys,” the film adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, you’ve likely heard how it was shot from first-person perspective of its two protagonists. Director RaMell Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray filmed scenes in uninterrupted shots as if the audience is moving (the camera sometimes physically attached to the actor), listening, and watching through the perspective of Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson). The ground-breaking approach to filming, which Ross dubbed “sentient POV,” meant an equally radical approach to editing. No longer was the audience in its familiar seat of omniscient spectator, denying the editor the ability to crosscut and seamlessly switch perspectives across the action. “Nickel Boys” editor Nicholas Monsour told IndieWire he had to “unlearn” years of what had become second nature when editing traditional scripted narrative projects, most notably for Jordan Peele (“Key and Peele,” “Us,” and “Nope”).
“It was letting go of stuff I’ve internalized through working on projects that have a much different relationship with the audience, and a much different relationship to film grammar,” said Monsour. “Very quickly, the technical and creative approach Jomo and Ramel took to how the camera moves, how it’s performed, showed us, ‘Oh, I am actually learning about Elwood even though I’m not seeing him.’”
Despite their determined approach to shooting the film, Ross and Fray experimented a great deal within the parameters they set for themselves. They shot multiple versions of the sentinent POV, using different camera techniques, movemment, and framing, as well as a wide variance in the shot length, so there were longer and shorter versions of the scenes, in addition to shooting some scenes both Turner and Elwood’s perspective. Ross and Fray also collected what the “Nickel Boys” team would refer to as “thrown gazes” — shots that focused on details outside of the strict POV but that Monsour described as “feeling like an aspect of the thought process of the character.” Combined with carefully selected archival footage, there was “a mountain” of footage and options for Monsour and Ross in the editing room.
“There is a bit of a dominant misconception that the genius in filmmaking is perfectly executing exactly your one idea that you plan to do,” Monsour said. “I think there’s another kind of genius that isn’t necessarily as recognized, which a lot of filmmakers I’ve worked with have, and I think is essential, which is you’re designing the process. You’re doing an incredible amount of work to set yourself up to experiment with purpose within a set of parameters,” said Monsour. “And this sounds maybe hyperbolic, but I can’t quite imagine a filmmaker better suited to take on this type of project than Ramel. The amount of thinking he’s done about visual language and meaning-making, imagery, and photography, is unique in my understanding of the landscape of directors who may have taken on this project.”
Monsour described the edit as being more akin to a laboratory. Each shot was a piece of camera performance, poetically expressing some aspect of character — and the decision-making process behind how to combine and structure these powerful brush strokes was unlike anything the editor had experienced. And one of the biggest questions surrounded the best way to handle the presentation of the POV itself.
“It became a balancing act of when do we need to see Elwood, what does it mean when we see him? Do we see him in an archival image of a photo booth? Do we see him some in Turner’s eyes? Why is Turner looking at him at that moment? And there had to be a psychology behind those choices that was different than with an omniscient or disembodied camera, and hopefully still immersive in a physical way,” said Monsour. “And then when we decided to break that and cut to another point of view, or cut to a behind-the-back shot [for the scenes in the future with adult Elwood, played by Daveed Diggs], we wanted those moments to really carry a lot of weight.”
Monsour said the best (and biggest example of this decision-making process involved when and how to initially break from Elwood’s point-of-view, which in the final version happens a little over 30 minutes into the film in the cafeteria when he meets Turner — the scene repeats, but the second time from Turner’s perspective.
“That took the entire length of the edit to really pin down how we first switch out of Elwood’s point of view,” said Monsour.
It’s a decision that had three different stages to it. The editor walked IndieWire through the creative decision-making process behind those three layers, as it illuminates the complexity involved with executing Ross’ unique vision.
The director always intended to break from Elwood’s POV and enter Turner’s, but the mechanics of it were something that would be figured out in the edit.
“Everybody knew that the first time you break out of that and see Elwood from another character’s point of view was going to be jarring, or at least disruptive in some way,” said Monsour.
According to Monsour, the cafeteria scene was shot to supply the option in the editing room to cross-cut between Turner and Elwood’s perspectives, but it didn’t work. Said Monsour, “I think what became obvious to me, I don’t know if Ramel would say it the same way, is that the intercutting [between Turner and Elwood’s POVs in the same scene] made a lot more sense once we felt that they were sharing the same psychology, rather than a moment when they were meeting.” Later in the film, when the editor and director embrace crosscutting between the two characters’ POVs, it reflects a connection between the two boys. “I would equate it more along a spectrum of openness and vulnerability, As they were able to empathize and be open with each other.”
This is the opposite of what happens in the lunch room when the two future friends first meet. “This first moment, Turner’s pretty guarded, he hasn’t necessarily made many friends here, and Elwood’s particularly shell-shocked from this experience [having just arrived at the infamous “reform” school],” said Monsour. “So, the idea of cutting back and forth, to me, had this palpable feeling of, ‘I’m not buying why we’re cutting here.’ It has an equating effect, in that way that you go from shot to reverse shot.”
The abandoned intercutting in the cafeteria scene, along with other versions of the transition, were subtle ways to ease out of Elwood’s POV after 30 minutes of seeing the movie through his eyes.
“At some point, I just felt like it needed a big gesture that allowed the audience to sort of understand, ‘I’m allowed to be jarred here.’ The intention that this is a big shift and that it means something to move into another person’s point of view,” said Monsour.
Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona,” in which a scene is repeated but from another character’s perspective, Monsour tried to do the same with the cafeteria scene.
“The late-stage discovery of repeating the scene twice… started to activate the rest of what followed and set us up to be in one or the other person’s POV,” said Monsour.
The second layer of how Monsour and Ross figured out this initial POV shift was the breakthrough of inserting the time-lapsed train footage (shot from inside a boxcar with adult Elwood’s feet in the foreground) between the shift from Elwood to Turner’s POV.
“Ramel was very tied to and went through great pains to capture the place and timing of that time-lapsed shot, but we couldn’t quite find the right place for it [in the movie],” said Monsour. “But putting it as the first leap forward in time, in this exact moment when we break into a new POV, it exploded with meaning. It blossomed into all these different readings you could have about a journey between consciousnesses, or however you want to think about it. It just opened it up rather than closed down an audience’s experience.”
The third layer to getting the POV transition right surrounded the decision to create the pre-Nickel Academy scene of Elwood and a girl in a photo booth, and then showing the resulting black-and-white photo strip with teenage Elwood’s face.
“We had discovered that there was one more element of seeing Elwood’s face in the beginning of the movie that we needed before we jumped to Turner, we wanted to some extent to feel who Elwood was when he entered Nickel,” said Monsour. “And that was where this photo booth scene came from as a later photography, as a way to be able to see him without breaking out of his POV or using the same reflection device [for example, at the beginning of the film, we see young Elwood in the reflection of his mother’s iron], and also introduce the idea of captured archival imagery, which by the end of the movie, the photo strip of Elwood means something totally different when we encounter all the other archival material.”
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