Nickel Boys: We interview the cast and director of this drama with Oscar buzz

Back in November, we here at JoBlo received a pretty intriguing invitation. We were invited to Los Angeles to get an early look at Nickel Boys, a film based on the novel by Colson Whitehead. Directed by RaMell Ross, the movie’s gotten a ton of Oscar buzz, both for its director and the movie’s stars, Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. In it, Herisse and Wilson play Elwood and Turner, two young men sentenced to a reformatory in the Jim Crow-era South. Once there, they realize there’s a good chance they won’t live through their respective sentences, with the punishment inflicted on them far outweighing the petty crimes they’re supposed to have committed. 

It’s undoubtedly one of the boldest movies of the year, with it shot entirely in a first-person point of view, where the camera literally takes the place of Herisse and Wilson at different points in the narrative. While this technique takes a good deal of getting used to (Ross has admitted that the movie really takes two viewings to take in), it’s immersive in ways few other movies are – and considering the hell Elwood and Turner go through, that aspect makes Nickel Boys a rough, but necessary watch.

Yet, for all of the film’s weight, when we were invited to interview the cast and director afterwards, we were delighted to see how laid-back, easygoing and friendly they all were. In our interviews, we speak to Herisse and Wilson about what it was like acting directly into a camera for the entire shooting schedule, while Ross explains just how he and the DP were able to pull off some of the film’s amazing shots. Finally, the great Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor reveals how she openly campaigned for the role she plays in the movie, having been a huge fan of Ross’s last film, Hale County This Morning, This Evening. Check out the interviews embedded above, and check back for our full review of Nickel Boys later this week as it begins its expansion into more theatres this weekend.