Why was Nickel Boys filmed in first-person perspective? Reasons explored

RaMell Ross' Nickel Boys employs a technique that is not the easiest to pull off. He uses a first-person perspective, where the camera shows what a character's eyes would see. Ross isn't new to this approach. His Oscar-nominated documentary, Hale County This Morning, and This Evening, used it to convey a sense of intimacy with its characters. Nickel Boys, which marks his feature-film directorial debut uses it for a similar reason.

Based on Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel, Ross's film follows two African-American teenagers—Elwood and Turner, traumatized in a brutal reformatory in 1960s Florida. It shows their struggles in the Jim Crow South, which shaped how they saw the world. So, a first-person perspective allowed Ross to show how his characters looked at the world.

When speaking about his vision behind this approach, Ross told Screen Daily:

"The core idea was: ‘what if we gave Turner and Elwood their own cameras? What would they see and how would they make meaning if they were using the camera as an extension of consciousness?’”

In line with this, Nickel Boys cinematographer, Jomo Fray, hoped his shots in Nickel Boys would:

“Allow you [the audience] to live life concurrently with Elwood and Turner… navigating and moving through space with them, not merely watching them do it”

RaMell Ross' Nickel Boys: The challenges in shooting with a first-person perspective

What sounds great on paper may not always translate well on screen. So, a first-person perspective can be disorienting if it is not executed well. After all, an untethered human vision may not be as tidy as the neatly-framed conventional cinema. It can make the film seem messy and jarring to the audience.

Director, RaMell Ross, decided to embrace the "messiness" of this visual language for Nickel Boys—to make it appear more naturalistic and convincing:

“If you are late to something and then you find it… then it just fundamentally feels more like human vision,” he told The Verge.

Cinematographer, Jomo Fray, agrees with Ross' choice of technique but mentions the challenges that they needed to overcome to make it look believable:

"To build what RaMell was looking for necessitated unlearning everything I think I know about cinema. We wanted to build an image that didn’t look like sight but felt like sight, that felt like memory, that was jazz-like.”

Fray emphasized the use of free-flowing "jazz-like" movements to put us in the shoes of their subjects. To achieve this, Fray and Ross used different setups like helmet cams, SnorriCams, and chest mounts.

The cameras were often mounted on the actors. So, the other actors had to break the usual rule of screen acting—to look directly into the camera lens. When speaking about these challenges with The Verge, actor Brandon Wilson said:

“We definitely couldn’t ignore [the camera]. But we were able to get into a rhythm with it and learn that new thing of staring down the barrel of the lens in place of having each other’s eyes or each other’s physical presence,”

Wilson's co-star, Ethan Herisse, echoed his sentiment as he said:

“The camera just fades away and you get this feeling that you’re no longer speaking to this machine."

First-person perspective cinema: Examples explored in connection with Nickel Boys

Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void used it to present a disorienting journey through a drug-induced mind. Even, Steven Soderbergh's Presence used this technique to allow the audience to feel a ghostly presence like the characters would. Ilya Naishuller's Hardcore Henry used it to convey its rapturous thrill. Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, and Matt Reeves's Cloverfield employed it, in parts, for a similar, visceral effect.

Ramell Ross's Nickel Boys does not use this technique for a similar impact. Instead, it hopes to offer a deeply personal experience, similar to Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The first-person perspective allows people to see the world through Elwood or Turner's eyes. Usually, a book can portray this subjective experience through words. Ross's film uses its visual technique to offer a similarly intimate, sensory experience.