Director RaMell Ross (‘Nickel Boys’) is Redefining Cinema

One week from Oscar Sunday, we’re joined by Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross. At the top, RaMell describes the formal innovations of the new film (6:44), the naivete that allowed him to make this singular project (8:02), and how photography is shaped by race in ways we don’t consider (12:00). Then, we dive into RaMell’s Virginia upbringing (29:28), the hoop dreams that brought him to Georgetown (29:35), and the “question everything” mindset that took flight in his college years (30:30). On the back-half, Ross explains the cinematic lineage of his Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (42:25), his aim to portray the American South in a new light (50:26), and why Nickel Boys is just the beginning of this next chapter in Black cinematic history (57:00). Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  Today, writer, filmmaker, artist, RaMell Ross. Born in Germany, Ross was raised in Northern Virginia, poised to play in the NBA. As a wiry 6'6" guard, he even received a full-ride scholarship to Georgetown University. Then, unfortunately, fate intervened, as Ross became beset by injuries, first to his shoulder, then to his foot. By the end of his stint in college, his dreams of playing professional basketball had passed, as had his mother. In a moving essay called "Goodbye Pluto," Ross wrote that "I started courting photography sometime after my mother got sick.

• 1:20Sam Fragoso?

  The abstract questions surrounding the mystery of illness and death found agency in the refuge of the camera. And it was in that refuge that Ross found both solace and strength to keep moving forward, camera in tow." A week from today, his debut feature film, Nickel Boys, will be recognized at the Academy Awards, where it received two nominations, including Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture. The film, which is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, chronicles the close bond of two black teenagers who become wards of a juvenile reformatory in 1960s Florida.

• 2:01Sam Fragoso?

  Inside the brutal day-to-day of the Nickel Academy, a profound friendship offers both boys the potential for transformation and hope. Here's a clip from the trailer.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Nana.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  Elwood.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Elwood.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  It's been a long wait for some good news.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Good news, good news, good news.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Things is changing.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Nana, what is it?

• 2:39Speaker 02

  I let you down.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  I'm okay, Nana.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  El, I let you down.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  No, I'm okay. I'm hanging in there.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Look back on it. Think back on it.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  It's a long time ago. Hello? Where'd you come from?

• 3:12Speaker 01

  My mother's watch. Deck of marked cards. My big toenail.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  That's all you got?

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Really got nothing left to lose.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  You don't remember? Remember what?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  You really don't remember.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  He's about to fall, he's about to fall, El.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Turner! Turner! This isn't the fight!

• 3:44Sam Fragoso?

  That was from the new film, Nickel Boys, now available on VOD. It recently won Best Adapted Screenplay at WGA, First Time Directorial Feature at the DGA, and Best Directing in a Motion Picture at the NAACP Image Awards. It is, above all else though, a remarkable cinematic achievement. A film unlike any other I've seen, in large part because of RaMell's decision to tell the story from what he calls a sentient perspective. Basically, in first person, where the viewer is living life through the eyes of its protagonists, Elwood and Turner. By the end, the division between the viewer and the characters, where you end and they begin, is nearly indistinguishable.

• 4:30Sam Fragoso?

  We talk about this bold approach at the top of this episode, which we realized in the edit is structured like a semester of a class. I'll let you decide whether it's a high school or college course. But basically, Act One is Film Studies 101. The formal innovations of nickel boys, the naivete that allowed Rommel to make this singular project, and how photography is shaped by race in ways we don't always consider. Act Two, Anatomy of a Student. Ross's upbringing in Virginia, the hoop dreams that brought him to Georgetown, and the question everything mindset that took flight in his college years. Then, finally, Act Three, Student Becomes Master.

• 5:15Sam Fragoso?

  The cinematic lineage of his Oscar nominated documentary, Hail County, This Morning This Evening, his aim to portray the American South in a new light, and why Nickel Boys is just the beginning of this next chapter in black cinematic history. This is Rommel Ross.

• 5:50Sam Fragoso?

  Rommel Ross, welcome to the show.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 5:53Sam Fragoso?

  How you doing?

• 5:55Speaker 04

  I'm good, I think. You can never really know. You need more time to know how you are, I think.

• 5:59Sam Fragoso?

  How do you think you're doing?

• 6:02Speaker 04

  I think I'm doing as well as any person would in this moment. Like, there's no markers of bad. And so, I'm good with that, you know?

• 6:12Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, I think that's positive.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  That's actually positive.

• 6:15Sam Fragoso?

  It's like positive adjacent. I wanted to start back in 1941.

• 6:21Speaker 04

  Back when I was born.

• 6:23Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, you look good for that age, by the way.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  Cryogeny chambers. Yes, I'm happy.

• 6:27Sam Fragoso?

  It's unbelievable. If you had those when you were playing at Georgetown.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:31Sam Fragoso?

  Can you imagine?

• 6:32Speaker 04

  I mean.

• 6:33Sam Fragoso?

  You probably wouldn't be sitting here.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  True. They would give you like shots to help you get through the the pain and stuff.

• 6:39Sam Fragoso?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:39Speaker 04

  And you're like.

• 6:40Sam Fragoso?

  You were point guard at Georgetown?

• 6:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:42Sam Fragoso?

  Six, six?

• 6:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was my asset, my height.

• 6:45Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  I could like see over people.

• 6:47Sam Fragoso?

  Do you have other assets?

• 6:48Speaker 04

  Um, I bought a house, which.

• 6:52Sam Fragoso?

  So nineteen forty one is the year that Citizen Kane came out.

• 6:56Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 6:57Sam Fragoso?

  And Orson Welles was asked a lot at the time, where did he get the confidence to direct a movie? With such formal innovations? And he said, quote, ignorance, sheer ignorance. There is no confidence to equal it. It's only when you know something about a profession that you are timid or careful. Is that the place your film Nickel Boys comes from?

• 7:23Speaker 04

  Yes. I think I love when people are like, my superpower, this is my superpower. And I I've said in a Q and A or two recently that my superpower is obliviousness, you know? Yeah, I like ignorance as an entryway into why this film feels bold for others, but doesn't feel necessarily bold to me. I'll also say that I have been making images that are very particular to myself, I believe, in an art practice and made a film that the camera language is not deeply different from the camera language here. So it's just something I've been doing.

• 8:01Sam Fragoso?

  So it doesn't sound like that much ignorance.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  Well, I think it was ignorance as to how bold, quote, quote, it was to others.

• 8:08Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  People are like, oh, my God, I can't believe you would shoot at POV. And I'm like, I can't believe no one else who shot at POV, they seem like the ones in the wrong.

• 8:17Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. So what were you ignorant of? Like, what didn't come to mind to you?

• 8:23Speaker 04

  I think what didn't come to mind was first, and this is probably the most glaring one, how challenging it is to actors. Never thought about it. You know, when I'm shooting Hell County, my guys, when they're talking to me, they're looking directly into the camera. And so a lot of the footage, like, I just don't consider that to be a challenge necessarily.

• 8:44Sam Fragoso?

  And that was a documentary you made in 2018.

• 8:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:47Sam Fragoso?

  In Alabama.

• 8:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think maybe my first indication that it would be a challenge was when I started shot listing with Jomo. Him and Nick had really big tasks. Like, Jomo had to figure out how to shoot it.

• 8:59Sam Fragoso?

  This is your cinematographer?

• 9:00Speaker 04

  Cinematographer, yeah. What rigs? What cameras? How do you get close enough to get these shots that I wanted to get? I didn't think about that. I was just, I was happy with using a DSLR.

• 9:11Sam Fragoso?

  For those that haven't seen the movie, you first had the idea to make a first-person film from the perspective of a black person back in 2012, the year you began grad school at the Rhode Island School of Design. Was there another film or an encounter you had in your life that originally spawned the idea? Like, what did the idea even look like?

• 9:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, it was the lack of a film because I'm in Hell County, Alabama, and I'm trying to make images that are in communication with the history of photography, specifically in that region. I was teaching at a youth program in the town of Greensboro, and I was coaching at a high school. And I'm photographing, you know, my students and photographing the community and trying to figure out first, which I think is most interesting, why my images look like other people's? And then how to dig into authorship? Like, what does it look like to make an image that is from the perspective of a quote-unquote "black northerner" coming to the South

• 10:17Speaker 04

  and looking at it as a sort of return to the conceptual origin of black identity? And that, when you take a photo, that there's no sort of authorship embedded into it, aside from the style? Made me take this one image called I Home, in which my hand was in the frame, holding a phone that was taking a picture of an antebellum home. And that gesture of my hand intervening into the frame, which is something that people have been doing forever, right?

• 10:43Sam Fragoso?

  Sure.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  But in the history of photography in the South, it was a way to to claim ownership of the image. And then I was like, hmm, I wonder what a film would look like. It kind of died there. It wasn't like I had thought about it even more, but it was something I sort of logged in the idea bank.

• 10:59Sam Fragoso?

  And was it a light bulb moment?

• 11:02Speaker 04

  I had a light bulb moment around that time because I'd been photographing so long unsuccessfully about authorship that the light bulb came on and it was dim and it's just slowly glowed and glowed. And it's still glowing.

• 11:16Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  And it's still getting brighter.

• 11:17Sam Fragoso?

  It's still here.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, because it's the same inquiry.

• 11:19Sam Fragoso?

  You grew up in Fairfax, Virginia.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:22Sam Fragoso?

  What did it mean to you in looking at that photograph that would eventually spawn nickel boys? What did it mean to you for a northern black man to film or to photograph the South? Like, how did you understand your own relationship to that?

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Like, I didn't. I think I had the stereotypes that what I like to call the American stranger has.

• 11:46Sam Fragoso?

  And those are what?

• 11:48Speaker 04

  That the people there are backwards, that the place there is just poor, that there are no sense of prosperity. You know, the landscape is haunted. You know, it's incredibly racist. I think we all have them because culture produces them. And the three years that I was making images that I did not like, that I thought were other people's, while I was teaching, I was confronting my relationship between thinking I know how to help the community.

• 12:15Sam Fragoso?

  What do you mean by that?

• 12:16Speaker 04

  You know how people generally are like, oh, this kid just needs to go to college. All you need to do is tie your shoes, son. That's your problem. Like, we have this, maybe not we, but me as someone who's middle class from the North, this idea, based on the way that I've raised, that I know how to help people improve their lives as a teacher. So I go and I'm working with kids who are dropped out of high school. And I'm teaching them math and English and trying to help them get workforce development stuff. And I'm imposing my value system.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  On their lives.

• 12:51Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think that instinct is in part informed by your mother, who worked on the weekend as a drug and alcohol counselor?

• 12:59Speaker 04

  I think it's informed by some embarrassing, but maybe underacknowledged fundamental sense of superiority that every person has in relationship to those who have less or to those who are seeking help in that we believe that we have answers. We believe we know, based on our experience, how to help improve someone's life, discounting the nuances and array of experiences, sensory experiences they've had in their communities and in their family over the course of their lives.

• 13:37Sam Fragoso?

  So photographing them, you realized you couldn't help or that the help you were offering was misguided or insufficient?

• 13:46Speaker 04

  I think photographing them, I realized that the images that I was making was feeding the American stranger's perception of them that I had before I got there. And how do you make images that don't trap them into that consumptive relationship? I wanted to present them as more open-ended.

• 14:06Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  I came to conclude for myself, if I were to take a straight photo of them, then I'm feeding the stereotype of my previous self.

• 14:15Sam Fragoso?

  So this delivers you to Nickel Boys how? Like, you bring all this baggage with you to this movie. How does that inform how you create the story?

• 14:26Speaker 04

  Well, I end up coming to ideas like strategic ambiguity, right, like suspending narrative.

• 14:33Sam Fragoso?

  How do you understand that?

• 14:34Speaker 04

  I understand that as making an image that has multiple points of entry that produce clearly different narratives, so that it's not kind of a single-use image. And with this non-single-use image idea and this sort of more plural interpretive relationship, I make this film that is a sort of moving image version of that. That's not about the narrative. It's just about this open-ended experience of being with them. And so when I come to Nickel Boys, I think with my co-writer, of course, what happens if you take what we did in Hail County this morning, this evening, and we bring that into actual characters? What if we bring this anti-narrative into narrative?

• 15:18Sam Fragoso?

  So when you do bring it into narrative, the film tells the story of two black teenagers in 1960s Florida as they survive and escape a brutal reform school, which is based on the real life Dozier School for Boys, a school that was run by the state of Florida from 1900 to 2011, which finally, after 111 years, closed after hundreds of black men came forward to share the abuse they suffered and even killings that they witnessed. You said that, quote, "You can't treat black boys the way they did at Dozier School without the language of photography pushing forth

• 15:59Sam Fragoso?

  a stereotypical idea of black folks in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. They're inextricable." How do you understand and process that link?

• 16:11Speaker 04

  Man, it's really hard. It's a big idea that I've been attempting to approach.

• 16:19Sam Fragoso?

  Let's try to do it one piece at a time.

• 16:23Speaker 04

  I like puzzles. I'm very bad at them, though.

• 16:26Sam Fragoso?

  I'm terrible at puzzles.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  Are you OK?

• 16:27Sam Fragoso?

  I'm OK at podcasts.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I must say, I think that you're excellent in podcasts. And if your podcast ability is related to your puzzle ability, I assume that you're at least decent at puzzles. The link between the way in which photography has pushed forth an idea of people and the nickel boys narrative is that photography is, this guy Victor Bergen says, "a psychological event." It is just something that like is sort of, I like to say candy for the mind. So if you have an ideology that is, you know, the US sort of visual constitution, whatever that is, how do you make a photo that doesn't feed that, right? Like, most of the people in the US during those times

• 17:13Speaker 04

  didn't have close, intimate and equal relationships with people of color. And so people are photographing people of color with this sort of anthropological point of view, with this Eurocentric view, and then feeding this negative idea or this idea of racism in people's brains with language and then giving them an image that allows that to be projected onto it.

• 17:35Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, you've called the camera a colonizer. 99%, I would say, of all images of black people across the history of time have been made by white people.

• 17:45Speaker 04

  I'm sure eventually that there will be some economist that does the math and says that it's like 89 and calls me a liar, but you guys get the point, you know, like most images aren't made by inner community views.

• 17:59Sam Fragoso?

  The article will be camera, kind of a colonizer.

• 18:03Speaker 04

  Camera, 10% less of a colonizer than claimed, than previously claimed.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  Fair enough, fair enough.

• 18:14Sam Fragoso?

  Oscar nominated filmmaker, RaMell Ross greatly overstates the colonization of the camera.

• 18:22Speaker 04

  15% off his mark.

• 18:24Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, that quote, the imagery we've seen of black people has been made by white people. It's a kind of obvious statement, but when you hold it in its totality, I can't believe we don't talk about it more often.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:39Sam Fragoso?

  Like it hits you in the stomach.

• 18:41Speaker 04

  I mean, that was a flash lightbulb moment where you're like, yeah, you think about it, or I come to that, that sentence construction and it's like, whoa.

• 18:49Sam Fragoso?

  What does it mean to you?

• 18:50Speaker 04

  It means that when you think about the way in which you take photos of your family members, or the way that you care about the image of your parents, or whatever, that if images were taken with the opposite approach, that I imagine the world would look completely different. I imagine cultures would be considered from other cultures completely different. I feel like if every photo was taken like you were photographing a loved one and it was held with that regard, always with context or always with grace.

• 19:21Sam Fragoso?

  You're saying that the world and our understanding of it by way of images would look wildly different if every image we saw was taken by someone that was accepting and open to the complexity of the person they are photographing.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  Yep, yep. It's like the reason why your son, or your uncle, or your mother, or your aunt can do something horrible, and you say, oh, it was just, you know, that's, they just made that one bad decision is because of that relationship.

• 19:52Sam Fragoso?

  Have your parents never taken a bad photo of you?

• 19:56Speaker 04

  I would say that all photos are bad photos of me. I mean, I've tried to do that, make that right. And like, I find it's difficult.

• 20:06Sam Fragoso?

  Right. I say that because intellectually, I understand the idea. But to me, I guess it's fascinating because in your 2019 manifesto for Film Quarterly, you wrote to yourself, "I want to fail at representing blackness. The act of representing is the act of reproducing. The less black, the more black." I read that quote and I thought, where do you land on filmmakers who are explicitly and proudly making work about their black communities? I'm thinking of Bill Gunn, or Kathleen Collins, or Spike Lee, or Julie Dash.

• 20:49Speaker 04

  It's complicated. And I think that if you're not, and in that same manifesto, there's something along the lines of embrace contradiction, reject contradiction. Like, there's a responsive nature to the art of people of color film and in other spaces that has a lot to do with trying to figure out how we've come to be seen and responding to the lack of representation. Like, our art is often fundamentally responsive at its core, or at its root, or at its foundation. And so with that, I think that every single art piece or piece of media by people of color has deep value and should be made.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  But the goal is to have as open-ended an approach and to have icons, as many sites of ambiguity and iconicity that exist in the other realm, which is from the white gaze, so that there's not consolidation towards tentpole stereotypes. You know, if we only make films about representation, then all of our art is going to be about representation, you know?

• 21:56Sam Fragoso?

  I've heard you say this, yes. Why are you looking at me skeptically?

• 21:59Speaker 04

  You know, like, when you're talking out loud, often, you don't know what you're saying. And then after you say it, you're like, that made sense in the small context of my head.

• 22:09Sam Fragoso?

  And it made sense within the small context in which you answered the question?

• 22:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:14Sam Fragoso?

  But you're not really answering how you feel about those filmmakers.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  Oh, I love the filmmakers. I have types of films that I gravitate towards as my source of inspiration.

• 22:23Sam Fragoso?

  Yes.

• 22:23Speaker 04

  You know.

• 22:24Sam Fragoso?

  The Terrence Man, like the Karasowski.

• 22:26Speaker 04

  The Bellators, you know. I think if I were to teach a film course, I would show their work. And I would say, these are important films. And I would talk about the trajectory of black visualization.

• 22:38Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 22:38Speaker 04

  Because it goes from kind of representation, which is, I think, where a lot of the early filmmakers were, where they were literally just trying to get us out there and get the stories in place.

• 22:49Sam Fragoso?

  You're talking about, what, in the 60s, 70s and 80s?

• 22:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, 60s, 70s, 80s. Maybe even early on, like, you have like guys like Burt Williams, who are just trying to be there and do his best. And that's a huge reduction of his talent and his over. But I think you know what I'm saying. But maybe the next phase after representation is the politics of those representations. How are you integrated and what are you saying and et cetera, et cetera?

• 23:14Sam Fragoso?

  That's a Spike Lee.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  The Spike Lee.

• 23:16Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  And then maybe the next phase is sort of black subjectivity of representation. So like now, can we get into the idiosyncratic?

• 23:25Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  And can we get into the interior life? So I think that there's, it's an arc or it's an ongoing conversation. And I think because they made that representational work, it's a lot easier for me to not feel the need to do that. But I can't imagine if they weren't there, that I wouldn't be in an earlier phase.

• 23:42Sam Fragoso?

  And you see yourself in that arc how?

• 23:45Speaker 04

  I see myself in that arc as someone who is absorbing their work and thinking that what they have done is foundational for me to feel free enough to try things like black subjectivity and strategic ambiguity and not worry about the politics of it. I'm not worried about representing a positive view of black life. Like, I think that that was a previous conversation. And I think that it's still important. I don't, we shouldn't do like poverty porn. Like, there's more nuance to the conversation. But they make space for the evolution of cultures' expression of our needs.

• 24:25Sam Fragoso?

  After the break, more from Mermell Ross.

• 24:39Sam Fragoso?

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• 26:10Sam Fragoso?

  In La Jete. Say more, say more. Oh, sorry, I just. That's good. That's allowed, and please, more of that. If you. Moment of silence. OK.

• 26:22Sam Fragoso?

  Thank you. It's one of your favorite films? Yes. It's directed by Chris Marker. And there's a line in the narration that goes, "Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars." Now that there's some distance, what are the scars that remain from making Nickel Boys? What, in this moment, claims remembrance?

• 26:49Speaker 04

  Man, you're really, really digging into the soup of the mind, the animal soup of time. I love Hal so much. I don't know, I don't have as philosophical an answer as I would like to, that I know is in there, but my, my instinct tells me that the scars are a type of, almost a bird mark on cinema and culture that I hope is a, a wound to like the sort of, maybe the, the fair skin, the alabaster skin of, of cinematic culture.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  Like, you know, I think the film itself, to me, is like, kind of like a totem pole, or like a planting a flag.

• 27:38Sam Fragoso?

  And, and the flag says what?

• 27:40Speaker 04

  I think it's just like a, a black thumbs up.

• 27:42Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, okay.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  You know?

• 27:43Sam Fragoso?

  That will fit on there.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think the flag is more of a blouse.

• 27:51Sam Fragoso?

  We're keeping that in.

• 27:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know I'm like barely answering your question, but I, I'm gonna think about it a lot more.

• 27:58Sam Fragoso?

  You can come back around.

• 27:59Speaker 04

  Okay, we'll drop it in the pot.

• 28:01Sam Fragoso?

  Did you call this podcast a soup?

• 28:03Speaker 04

  Well, your question makes me go into the animal soup of time, but I feel like, in some ways, yes.

• 28:09Sam Fragoso?

  Can we go back further into the animal soup of time?

• 28:12Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 28:12Sam Fragoso?

  You grew up in Fairbanks, Virginia.

• 28:14Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 28:15Sam Fragoso?

  You're a military brat with brief stints in Indiana, Chicago, and Maryland. But by the time college rolls around, you end up at Georgetown University, as I mentioned earlier,

• 28:26Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 28:27Sam Fragoso?

  on a basketball scholarship with dreams, real, actually, potentially attainable dreams, of making the NBA.

• 28:36Speaker 04

  Thank you for that attainable add in there, because you know, sometimes when you tell someone your dream, they immediately are like, pipe.

• 28:44Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. As someone who wanted to be in the NBA and had dreams of being in the NBA, and gave up those dreams in seventh grade. I could tell yours were real. Of that freshman year, when you're in college, you said recently to NPR, "College is when I really started to think in a way that was annoying for everyone in my family." Because the deconstruction and picking apart, they were the targets of it. I began to question everything. When you refer to your family as the targets of your thinking, what did that look like?

• 29:19Speaker 04

  It looked like, "Why do you do this? Why don't you do this?" You said that this is how you think I should act, but you act like this.

• 29:30Sam Fragoso?

  This is mostly to your father?

• 29:32Speaker 04

  Oh, definitely to my sister and my, you know, it's that kind of, you know, information is so intoxicatingly powerful when you first get it. I was consuming a lot of language and starting to question what I'd never questioned before, which is, "Why my parents joined the military? Is the military good? Is the US good? Should my parents have been more Afrocentric?"

• 29:54Sam Fragoso?

  Did you ask them the Afrocentric question?

• 29:56Speaker 04

  I didn't because I hinted around...

• 30:02Speaker 04

  I, I, um, I wasn't stupid now.

• 30:06Sam Fragoso?

  Right, exactly. I want to make sure.

• 30:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I respect my parents and, you know, I come from a family where you don't curse in front of your parents or else my dad wouldn't spank me now, but I...

• 30:15Sam Fragoso?

  And you viewed Afrocentric as a curse word?

• 30:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  I was like, "Why wasn't I more centric?"

• 30:27Speaker 04

  And they're like, "Excuse me? Did you just..."

• 30:31Sam Fragoso?

  We thought you would learn something in Georgetown. Now you can't even finish a word.

• 30:34Speaker 04

  Right? You don't even know how to pronounce the motherland. No, I think, I think because my family was very kind of German at its base. Like, we had German tinker things all over the house.

• 30:46Sam Fragoso?

  You were born in Frankfurt?

• 30:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:48Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  That I never expected them to, but like, there's a certain amount of inside community knowledge that comes along with parents who are really invested and interested in the history of the African-American diaspora and our ties to the continent of Africa. I didn't read James Baldwin until I was outside of college. Or really, I don't even remember hearing his name until after college. And I say that embarrassingly. It makes me almost sick to my stomach. I wonder what would be different otherwise or how that's affected others, you know?

• 31:20Sam Fragoso?

  I'm sure, given the current administration that's in the White House, there'll be many more people who won't learn about James Baldwin until after college.

• 31:29Speaker 04

  Right. And what a honestly surprising moment, you know? I thought we were pretty sure about certain authors and intellectuals' contribution to American history. I mean, James Baldwin, he's the most articulate and nonviolent intellectual. And I say most, knowing that I'm being hyperbolic, but I mean, come on. All he's talking about is equality. Who doesn't want that?

• 31:58Sam Fragoso?

  I can show you about 57 million people.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  Bad question.

• 32:02Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  Bad rhetorical question.

• 32:03Sam Fragoso?

  As a point guard on the basketball team, did that question everything mindset affect your playing style?

• 32:11Speaker 04

  Ooh, I love that question. Did it affect basketball? No, I think it affected.

• 32:16Sam Fragoso?

  Because I mean, basketball requires you in many ways to narrow your focus, not expand it.

• 32:22Speaker 04

  It made me question my relationship to basketball culture, which was something I kind of fully bought into when I came to Georgetown. And maybe specifically Georgetown culture, which is sort of very urban, for lack of a better word. Like, I wore a chain and I had like really baggy pants my freshman year.

• 32:39Sam Fragoso?

  Urban?

• 32:40Speaker 04

  God, it's a code word, huh?

• 32:42Sam Fragoso?

  You do know we're not on NPR, right?

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. It was super black, you know? And I grew up in Northern Virginia. When I was living in.

• 32:50Sam Fragoso?

  No, I'm going to get in trouble.

• 32:52Speaker 04

  No, I appreciate it. Urban was the third word that came to mind. And I was like, that one sounds safe.

• 32:59Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, I see. You saw my sweater.

• 33:04Speaker 04

  First of all, your sweater is not cashmere, is it?

• 33:09Sam Fragoso?

  I'm answering that question. But there was a third word you thought of.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:13Sam Fragoso?

  Because you thought this sweater and this face wanted urban.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  No, I'm, I'm checking myself to not say it was, the basketball team had like a certain, like, kind of hood mentality to it.

• 33:26Sam Fragoso?

  So that was the first word?

• 33:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:27Sam Fragoso?

  And the second word was black?

• 33:29Speaker 04

  No, second word was ghetto. Because when we, like, when I came, I'm like suburban, middle-class. My dad's family and my mom's family, both of them grew up crazy poor. My dad's family in North Carolina was middle-class as well, but it was way more of like, like, when I go there, like, we're out in the streets, like, hanging out and doing crazy shit. Going to Georgetown, even playing against kids from the city of DC, like, the kids have a different hunger. They're playing for a different reason. That comes with the use of basketball in their lives. Basketball was joy and fun. For them, generally speaking, and stereotypically speaking, it was like survival, and it was how they were gonna, like, escape their situations. The basketball team at Georgetown, like, the players had that, they had that viciousness.

• 34:14Sam Fragoso?

  And for you, it was joy and fun?

• 34:16Speaker 04

  It was. But I also am really competitive, so I can play because I would put myself, not self-respect, what is it? I would put my ego on the line when I'm playing. And so I'm, I'm basically fighting. But that level was natural for them, and I had to sort of learn that viciousness, or that, like, the Kobe mentality. You know, whatever they call it.

• 34:36Sam Fragoso?

  The Jordan mentality.

• 34:37Speaker 04

  The Jordan mentality.

• 34:38Sam Fragoso?

  Is the right thing. As someone from Chicago.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  I would agree.

• 34:41Sam Fragoso?

  In your years at Georgetown, you suffered a lot of injuries playing basketball. Before you got there, you had a dislocated shoulder. When you got there, you had a broken foot that you broke a couple times.

• 34:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, there we go.

• 34:52Sam Fragoso?

  And yet, you told the big picture, which is a great podcast, you said that, though injuries set me back in basketball, I know the intellectual mistakes I made along the way. What were those mistakes as you see them now?

• 35:07Speaker 04

  This is the hardest thing to cope with in thinking about my past. I became wise enough to know that I didn't make the intellectual leap to playing at the college level. I was still playing the type of basketball that I wanted to play, which was one that was more style before substance. You ever heard of the Anwon mixtape?

• 35:35Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  I mean.

• 35:38Sam Fragoso?

  I was raised on the Anwon mixtape. What are you talking about?

• 35:40Speaker 04

  As was I. That was my problem.

• 35:41Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. Yeah. Thing is, I was raised on it, but it was like, well, I can't do that.

• 35:46Speaker 04

  Oh, OK. I could.

• 35:47Sam Fragoso?

  You were raised on it and I could do that.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  I could do those things. Yeah.

• 35:52Sam Fragoso?

  You know what? We gotta end this podcast now. It's over.

• 35:56Sam Fragoso?

  I could do some of those things.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:58Sam Fragoso?

  But none of those things, even if I did them perfectly, looked like that when I did them.

• 36:03Speaker 04

  I see what you mean. Like, they kind of looked.

• 36:05Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, look at me.

• 36:06Speaker 04

  I mean.

• 36:07Sam Fragoso?

  I look like someone who doesn't play, still to this day.

• 36:09Speaker 04

  I mean, I could imagine you taking your shirt off and there being like a 10-pack.

• 36:14Sam Fragoso?

  Have you thought about me taking my shirt off during this podcast?

• 36:16Speaker 04

  While I was saying that, I was like, I wonder if this seems like I've imagined it. And now that we're at this point, I have.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  I will say that you, um, you have a nice shape.

• 36:29Sam Fragoso?

  So the painful part, as I understand it, is that you couldn't or didn't make the leap stylistically to fit into the, I assume, button-up structure of Georgetown, Hoya's Patrick Ewing college basketball.

• 36:45Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 36:46Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. You couldn't do what Jeff Green did.

• 36:49Speaker 04

  Exactly. That's a really good example. I couldn't do that. And I, in hindsight, I think that, dare I say, I could have gone to the league if I did, even considering the injuries, because I would have had enough time. Like, I played one year overseas, averaging a ton of points. At that point, I knew it. I go on the floor like I'm only scoring, and then I could score 30 points. I'm not thinking about making seven dribbles and crossing over the person in front of me and doing an air reverse, which was my favorite thing to do.

• 37:20Sam Fragoso?

  That was your favorite thing?

• 37:21Speaker 04

  I would do an air reverse for no reason.

• 37:23Sam Fragoso?

  In your senior year of college, you started picking up the camera a lot more. It was a Pentax K1000.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:32Sam Fragoso?

  That you described as an other world contraption capable of catalyzing hope. As you were with your mother, as she was increasingly sick that year, someone in the family, I believe, took photos of her. And I'm curious, like, did those photos inspire hope in you, the way that you're talking about a camera could? Like, did the photographs accurately capture how you were experiencing your mother in those final moments?

• 38:01Speaker 04

  No, I think that the camera, and the way that it helped catalyze hope, allowed me to be in a space where I was not suicidal. You know, where I could, there was something for me. There was like a future. Because losing basketball and losing my mother, those are, you know, obviously for my life, the biggest things, you know, aside from my family. My dad, photography allowed me to create my own meaning and have something just to hold on to, like a view finder that was mine, like a world that I see through that it's controlled, basically.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  And yeah, the Goodbye Pluto essay, I think it's me. Also, it's looking back on the images of my mom and then thinking about the way that those images represent her in totality and that that is a failure of photography.

• 38:58Sam Fragoso?

  What do you mean by that?

• 38:59Speaker 04

  I'm actually, like, I'm unsure. This is maybe a hot take, maybe it isn't. I'm unsure how, I don't even know what fucking natural is or organic is, but I'm unsure how natural it is for us to remember people through these two dimensional.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  Images, right? Like, our brains have functioned over time to work with impressions, to rewrite memory in very specific ways. And I look at some of the photos of her when she was sick, and I'm like, that's not my mother. Okay, it is my mother, obviously. And I remember those moments, but I remember her so much more and so much more full of life and-

• 39:34Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, tell me about the gap between the two, between what you're looking at and what you were living in those final months.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  You know, maybe the most difficult part of, not the most difficult part, but a difficult part of a loved one becoming ill is seeing them in a state that doesn't represent how you feel about them, or as you know them as this ball of light, or in their personality, like being emaciated or sick. And those images of her show her slow progress towards ultimately death, and they sort of instantiate not only a version that you don't recognize as the totality, but also a version that she would not want to be remembered as. And so with that, it's kind of confusing to look at those images or to have them.

• 40:26Speaker 04

  And I'm not saying that we don't need them. I'm just unsure of the way, if we understand the way that photography has intervened into the landscape of our minds.

• 40:38Sam Fragoso?

  But you said the way they intervened for you-

• 40:41Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 40:41Sam Fragoso?

  Is that you felt less suicidal.

• 40:44Speaker 04

  Well, I'd say the camera, not the photograph.

• 40:47Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Because the images that I was making was not of my family. I was doing double exposures. I was warping, you know, when I'm printing in a darkroom, warping the paper to make something that looked wild, that only, it came out of my impulse, and so it was my meaning-making.

• 41:04Sam Fragoso?

  You said once that if- Losing basketball and losing your mother at the same time didn't happen. You wouldn't have turned to photography.

• 41:15Speaker 04

  Hmm, definitely not.

• 41:17Sam Fragoso?

  Why do you think that is?

• 41:18Speaker 04

  Because I, I think I had artistic impulses as a child, but like, I was just trying to get a job. Like, I wasn't a critical thinker. And that's, that's the, the sort of depression that came out of losing basketball. My mother like turned me into a critical thinker. Like, the questioning of everything made me just think about the world and myself in very specific ways. Think about my identity. Why had I made the decisions I'd made my entire life? Never questioned them, just like an oblivious kid.

• 41:50Sam Fragoso?

  And her passing made you question, like, why did this happen to her?

• 41:57Speaker 04

  I think it made me question the order of things.

• 41:59Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 41:59Speaker 04

  You know? I think her, her passing away, it made me question my identity. It made me question how much control and how much thought I had put into who I was. It made me question faith, predetermination, everything to do with the meant to be.

• 42:20Sam Fragoso?

  Basketball seemed like it was meant to be.

• 42:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, it, it was just the way that it was. And then all of a sudden, it wasn't. And then my mom wasn't, and it's like, well, then what is? Oh, wait a second. My entire trajectory has been just an accumulation of experiences. And this expectation is partly a cultural product. Like, why was basketball so meaningful to me? Was because I loved it? Or what's my relationship to basketball as a person of color? Am I a person of color? What is a person of color? It's almost a language game.

• 42:46Sam Fragoso?

  That depression that you're talking about?

• 42:48Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 42:49Sam Fragoso?

  How did you go about getting through that? Arriving at the place you are now, making Nickel Boys?

• 42:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it took a really long time. And the way in which I talk about photography as hope was the sort of dangling carrot that allowed me to survive the depression and then find purpose and meaning in photography in the same way that I found meaning being in kind of flow state of basketball and practicing basketball and having quote unquote, "purpose." And then the meaning was I was remaining in critique and in conversation of my identity.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  As a response to having never done that as a child. So now I think about all those things as an ongoing conversation to kind of compensate for being out of the conversation previously.

• 43:41Sam Fragoso?

  So like when you go to Alabama in 2009 and you spend those first three years making work you don't like, and then you start making work you kind of like, and that develops into Hale County this morning, this evening. That self critique, that's both at the heart of that movie and your work, but also seems like at the heart of your day to day life. What did that critique sound like?

• 44:07Speaker 04

  The self critique sounded like, I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't know if what I'm thinking are actually my thoughts.

• 44:16Sam Fragoso?

  Say more.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  When I am in making a photo of someone, I cannot live with myself and make this photo so that someone else engages with this photo in a sort of positivist perspective in that it's like a one to one, like this photo means this, because I don't think that that is the way that this person should be represented. And I don't think that my photography skills in one to one representation are enough to give this person to the world in this way. And I think if that's not confusing, that leads to wanting to make a film that gives

• 44:59Speaker 04

  you their life, but forces you to engage with their life with the same type of reflexivity that I was engaging with when I was in the community. Because I'm questioning going to folks' house and having their house be full of love, but not having them have, this is easy example, not having them have all of the markers of suburban love. It makes you question, what are markers of love?

• 45:25Sam Fragoso?

  This is what we talked about earlier.

• 45:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:27Sam Fragoso?

  Where you go somewhere and you think, well, I know how to help these people.

• 45:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:31Sam Fragoso?

  Because I believe my way of being, my way of being raised. Is not only preferable to me, but better.

• 45:40Speaker 04

  Better, objectively better, because how could you not want these things? Maybe these things are what you need to improve your life, because I think I know how to improve your life. And I think everyone has that in them. And so to make a film like Hell County this morning, this evening, that is a, that is participated in the language of photography, which has always been traditionally positivist, which is like one to one. It's like evidence of a thing that's happening, letting it be more open ended was a way for me to show my point of view of the community, my learning about the community and offer a person's participation in it in the same open ended sense. Now, this has all to do with narrative, because the narrative of Daniel and Quincy

• 46:25Speaker 04

  or guy wants to be a rapper from poor community, guy wants to be a basketball player from poor community. You know, both of them will fail or not fail, and this is the plight of the black male. Like, I think that they're more than their narratives, but those are their narratives. So how can I make a film that allows you to be there without having that narrative close them in?

• 46:49Sam Fragoso?

  You said around Hell County, I'm using the camera as close to fluidly with my consciousness as possible in an attempt to participate in their lives. That's Daniel and Quincy.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 46:59Sam Fragoso?

  You coached Daniel in basketball, you taught Quincy in school. But doesn't the very act of participating with a camera change their own participation with the world around them?

• 47:14Speaker 04

  For sure. I think that the difference is, is that I acknowledge that to be true and lean into it and have strategies to participate in that, as opposed to the yesteryear documentarian who maybe believed that there was a way to be neutral. There was a way to not interfering in it.

• 47:33Sam Fragoso?

  You think there is no neutral?

• 47:35Speaker 04

  I think there's, there maybe wasn't neutral before anyone knew what a camera was and anyone saw what a camera could do. Because that not knowing, I think, produces a type of ignorance on the other person's, on the person who's in front of the camera's part, that allows for something to be natural. But the camera doesn't produce anything natural. Like, one of my favorite things to quote is Stephen Shore talking about the camera as a monocular device, and human beings are binocular. The camera produces relationships between shapes, colors, and things that do not exist otherwise. It's already an abstraction.

• 48:12Sam Fragoso?

  After the break, Act Three with RaMell Ross.

• 48:43Sam Fragoso?

  When it comes to Hale County, there's a clear lineage, you know, from 45365 by the Ross Brothers to camera person.

• 48:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, KJ, everyone calls her.

• 48:53Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, KJ. But in 2021, after Hale County, but before you made Nickel Boys, you had an exhibit at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art called Spell Time: Practice American Body, which featured large format photographs of yours alongside, I believe, installations and sculptures. Like most exhibits, it came with a statement from the artist, and I wondered if you could read it for us.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I'd love to. I mean, I almost know this one by heart. "To be black is the greatest fiction of my life, yet I'm still bound to its myth. I can't help but think about the myth's childhood and its backyard of the South. How the myth of blackness aged into fact and grew into laws. How it evolved from there to become tacit and join the secret order of things. How it became the dark matter of the American imagination." I've lived, worked and photographed in Hale County, Alabama for almost 15 years now. Sometimes there, I feel like I have no race. And if the light was right, no one else did either. Still, the myth of blackness is entangled at the root of the South's mythology,

• 50:06Speaker 04

  a mythology upheld in textbooks, institutions, media and film, and literature. And photography is implicated. Man, I really, um, it's a kind of still my, my artist statement. I mean, Nickel Boys is a, is a pretty big and formal question that I think, I'm wondering if there's a bigger formal gesture I can make that can question that. I feel like Nickel Boy, they allowed me to put everything in there.

• 50:33Sam Fragoso?

  I can't help but separate that statement, that artist statement, from the fact that we're talking during Black History Month.

• 50:43Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 50:44Sam Fragoso?

  In 2025, where every kind of DEI initiative has been eliminated or is soon to be eliminated, for the most part. Depictions of black life in books and films are being banned in schools. Is your artist statement complicated by that fact? That this country is leaning into an erasure of black history?

• 51:10Speaker 04

  I wrote that statement in 2015. It was just published. And I say that only because that conversation, that language use is mine. But that conversation's been going on for a very long time. And I think now that we're at the point where Google is taking Black History Month off its calendars. I think it speaks to, maybe my favorite line in there, in that it's the dark matter of the American imagination. It's so complicated and not, but it's so complex and tacit. It's like hard. I think it's hard for anyone to put their arms around because it slips right through. You know, like the ink has been spilled with race. It's like the, those who are removing DEI initiatives,

• 51:55Speaker 04

  they're doing so because they're reductionist and they can't control the narrative. And it's so complicated and complex. They'd rather just not deal with it.

• 52:05Sam Fragoso?

  How do you understand it?

• 52:06Speaker 04

  I don't. I think my work is trying to provoke. Like a sort of visual insight of the issue to remind us of things that we know but are unconscious. Yeah, like I've been trying to wrap my mind around what I like to say, like, what is America's visual constitution? Like, I can't even really get too much more beyond that. Like, I wonder what is the visual N word? If there's the N word, then what's the visual version of it? I don't know, but I think it's true. I think it's a thing. I think once you call someone, which has to do with like this Black Dictionary project I'm doing, once you categorize someone as black, that means that every single thing they do is black. So what is a black cough?

• 52:52Speaker 04

  What is a black booger?

• 52:53Sam Fragoso?

  That was my next question.

• 52:55Speaker 04

  I knew I could, I could tell because you had just picked your nose. Just kidding, he didn't.

• 53:00Sam Fragoso?

  It was a side scratch. It was nothing more than that.

• 53:04Speaker 04

  It was a bad angle.

• 53:05Sam Fragoso?

  It was a bad angle.

• 53:05Speaker 04

  But if I photographed it, it would have looked like it. That's what I'm saying.

• 53:08Sam Fragoso?

  I'm telling you, this man likes to think about my angles. I don't know what that means, isn't it?

• 53:15Sam Fragoso?

  It's funny, like that project you're doing, the Black Dictionary, it reminds me of the part earlier in this conversation where you were looking to see what word you wanted to use to describe your basketball team. And the word you landed on initially was urban, in part because of the face before you and the sweater I'm wearing. But I'm thinking about like that period in college where you were on the team and then your dreams of playing in the NBA ended and your mom passed. You know, that's about 20 years ago now. And it's clear your love of film and photography was born out of that moment,

• 54:00Sam Fragoso?

  out of a kind of dual trauma. Has your ideas or your passion for film and photography changed in the afterglow of this recent success?

• 54:13Speaker 04

  It's a great question. It's hard to grapple with because uh-

• 54:16Sam Fragoso?

  We're here to grapple.

• 54:17Speaker 04

  We are. This tug of war is unexpectedly tied to organs I didn't know I had. Oh gosh, leave them in.

• 54:24Sam Fragoso?

  Are you describing this podcast as a tug of war?

• 54:27Speaker 04

  I am. It's gentle. I think photography, and I make grand statements as you can tell, but I do them knowing that they can't be as total as I like to share them with this enthusiasm and whatever passion. But I think if you-

• 54:43Sam Fragoso?

  We're pro grand statements here.

• 54:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well-

• 54:46Sam Fragoso?

  Especially at the end of a podcast.

• 54:48Speaker 04

  Well, let me get to it.

• 54:49Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, good.

• 54:50Speaker 04

  I would love this on my tombstone. If you take photography seriously, it leads you to other arts. And so I take it seriously, led me to film, film led me to performance, to the Return to Origin project, to sculpture. And so I don't think that my love for photography and film has waned necessarily, but I think I'm also interested in other things, which then the spotlight is now shared.

• 55:16Sam Fragoso?

  It's funny you mention that because from Hale County to Nickel Boys, the amount of collaborators-

• 55:22Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 55:23Sam Fragoso?

  On this new project of yours, what is it, times 100?

• 55:27Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah.

• 55:28Sam Fragoso?

  100X it. It was 100X. Like, and one of them was the brilliant production designer-

• 55:35Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 55:35Sam Fragoso?

  Nora Mendez.

• 55:36Speaker 04

  One of my, one of my faves.

• 55:38Sam Fragoso?

  One of the best. And she told me that towards the end of shooting, she and other members of the crew were asking you, when are we gonna do this again?

• 55:48Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 55:49Sam Fragoso?

  And you said to them, oh no, there's no again.

• 55:54Speaker 04

  My exact words might have been, I'm never doing this again.

• 55:58Sam Fragoso?

  Those were your exact words. I was softening them. It's called Talk Easy.

• 56:04Sam Fragoso?

  Do you still believe that?

• 56:05Speaker 04

  No, I don't. I think the difficulty of the project and the inherent challenges, they force expressions of the future that may not be true. As for most things, I imagine, you know, the moment should but should not be trusted.

• 56:22Speaker 04

  I think I'll definitely do it again and, you know, Nora will 100% work with me. I will force her to work with me.

• 56:28Sam Fragoso?

  But that feeling you had in that moment, that I think lasted for a while. I don't think it was just that day.

• 56:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:34Sam Fragoso?

  That you thought, I think this is it. I think I have said what I wanted to say in cinematic form. I'm not even sure I'm interested in traditional cinematic form. You don't seem to be. Like, where do you see your future in the format? Like, does it interest you?

• 56:50Speaker 04

  Well, I think an issue for me is I have like a lot of projects that I want to do, and most of them aren't in film. And when you make a film like Nickel Boys, you can't do anything else. And so I was unable to do the Black Dictionary. I was unable to do this performance piece that my studio manager Bobby and Davis and I had been planning for two years, which we had planned to do. Then all of a sudden it got pushed to the side. X thing got pushed away. X thing got pushed away. And so it seemed to me like making a film is like not doing anything else. And if I had to choose between film and everything else, I'm choosing everything else. No question. But after, of course, the project's completed, I realized that just pacing,

• 57:34Speaker 04

  you know, like it doesn't have to be either or. It can all be and it's just figure out the timing.

• 57:40Sam Fragoso?

  And this moment, I asked you in the beginning, like, how are you doing? And you said, I couldn't possibly begin to answer. Has this moment, the last six months, has it begun to set in? Are you beginning to understand as we get to the end of it, what the hell this all means to you?

• 57:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't think I'm. Beginning to understand what it means to me because I think my work is always trying to explore that. I'm trying to teach myself essentially through the making process. This awards cycle or this process of getting the film to a place where it could be nominated, which is separate from the filmmaking process itself, is becoming clear what we've accomplished. And that like this specific story of the Dilger School for Boys will be is elevated here and how rare it is for a first time filmmaker, fiction filmmaker to, and this film's form to be elevated to that place. It is setting in now.

• 58:36Sam Fragoso?

  My last question, when you think about the finished film, I've heard you say that it sometimes in its totality makes you want to cry. Why is that?

• 58:48Speaker 04

  Because it feels full, you know, like it's, I mean, I say the same thing about Hell County this morning, this evening, because those moments were lived and you wait two weeks for one image that can make it into the film that has that power. Watching Nickel Boys feels, it feels like memory and it feels like experience and it feels like there's something lost. However, it's corralled into the film form, there's something fundamentally nostalgic about whatever it's doing and what it is. And that's emotional.

• 59:26Sam Fragoso?

  Why is it emotional?

• 59:27Speaker 04

  I think it's emotional because, gosh, what philosopher said that most of human angst just has to do with irreversibility? You know, it's just that you can't change things and you can't go backwards. I think it's emotional because it's set in stone and it was such a good time. And making those images with Jomo was so meaningful and the visual insight that Nick and I found in the edit is just so joyful to be searching for four years and find one image that works perfectly with another. And it's just like a big hooray. Hard to express.

• 1:00:05Sam Fragoso?

  Richard Brody in The New Yorker wrote, "In bringing the historical reckonings of Whitehead's novel to the screen, Rommel Ross hints at an entire history of cinema that doesn't exist. A bearing of witness that didn't happen and the lives that were lost in the invisible silence. An entire history of cinema that doesn't exist." Moving forward, after this movie, however it goes on Oscar Sunday, do you think some of those chapters will begin to be written?

• 1:00:37Speaker 04

  Yes, they've been written, I think, started to be wrote or written since iPhones, since people were capable of recording The Nuclear Family in super detail. Also, the Black Family archive, historically, is starting to be mined and it's ascending to commercial spaces. And so, I think so.

• 1:01:05Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I look forward to seeing how you are part of it. And I hope that means that you'll continue making movies with Nora, of course.

• 1:01:13Speaker 04

  Sam, if I may call you that.

• 1:01:15Sam Fragoso?

  What else would you call me?

• 1:01:16Speaker 04

  Good question. Sir?

• 1:01:20Sam Fragoso?

  No, please don't do that. I'm 30.

• 1:01:23Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me. And I love the way you think and talk think. It's really interesting.

• 1:01:29Sam Fragoso?

  We'll do it again sometime.

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  Please.

• 1:01:30Sam Fragoso?

  Rommel Ross, good luck.

• 1:01:32Speaker 04

  Thanks. We need it.

• 1:01:35Sam Fragoso?

  Please. Please vote for us, our voting's over.

• 1:02:38Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show.

• 1:02:41Sam Fragoso?

  If you enjoyed today's episode with RaMell Ross and want to help us out, the best thing you can do is share the program on social media, share it with a friend, a family member, anyone that you think may enjoy the kinds of conversations we have here each and every Sunday. Special thanks this week to the teams at Amazon MGM Studios, Nora Mendez, and our guest, Ramel Ross. Nickel Boys is available to watch on VOD and in select theaters. We'll include links to the film and more of Ramel's work in our show notes at talkeasypod.com. For more episodes with other great filmmakers, I'd recommend Ava DuVernay, Richard Linklater, and Lulu Wang.

• 1:03:24Sam Fragoso?

  To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You can also subscribe to Lemonada Premium for bonus content. Just hit the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or head to lemonadapremium.com. You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at Talk Easy Pod. If you want to purchase one of our mugs, they come in cream or navy, or our vinyl record with author Fran Lebowitz, you can do so at talkeasypod.com/shop. That's talkeasypod.com/shop. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janiksa Brava. Today's talk was edited by Matt Sasaki and mixed by Andrew Vastola.

• 1:04:10Sam Fragoso?

  Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Chris Shannoy. This episode was taped out of City Box here in New York City. Special thanks this week comes to Ben Eisen, who helped us on the research front. This episode was made in partnership with the good people at Lemonada Media. And I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. We'll be back here next week with a brand new episode. Until then, stay safe and so long.

• 1:04:47Speaker 05

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 1:04:55Speaker 06

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 1:04:59Speaker 05

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 1:05:01Speaker 06

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:05:04Speaker 05

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 1:05:07Speaker 06

  That's it.

• 1:05:10Speaker 05

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground News gives each outlet a factuality rating, so you know how much weight to give the source, and shows you who owns it, so you know what's behind it. The Nobel Peace Center called it "an excellent way to stay informed,

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