Nickel Boys, filmmaker and artist RaMell Ross has created one of the most surprising awards movies. His radical approach to form and content is unlike anything usually championed in the mainstream. However, the film is precisely the type of work we’ve come to expect from Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner’s Plan B Entertainment.
Nickel Boys has a nom in the top category of Best Picture, alongside Best Adapted Screenplay.
The film’s script is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys, which tells the story of two Black boys, Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner, who are sent to a corrupt reform institution in rural northern Florida in the nineteen-sixties.
The film is shot almost entirely from the perspective of the characters–Ross and his DoP Jomo Fray have described it as “sentient perspective.” The result is a wildly original experience that moves beyond adaptation with questions about cinema’s ontology.
Kleiner and Gardner were first handed the novel by Whitehead, whose 2016 book The Underground Railroad they had previously adapted for TV with Barry Jenkins.
They admired Ross’s first feature, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, and approached him with the material, hoping he would return with “expansive” approach to the adaptation.
“We were counting on that,” Gardner says. “And we were ready to make the bet and give it a go.”
Ross wrote the Nickel Boys screenplay with Joslyn Barnes at Louverture, and the film debuted at Telluride before screening at NYFF and has won honors at the Gothams and DGAs.
The film is one of Plan B’s first buzzy awards titles since it was acquired by Mediawan in late 2022.
Below, Gardner and Kleiner discuss why they decided to take a bet on Ross, how they worked with the filmmaker to create the film’s ambitious approach, and how they have created, along with Pitt, a political and artistic identity for Plan B.
JEREMY KLEINER: Yes. There had been a good vibe with the Underground Railroad, so we got a pre-publication copy. I will never forget the feeling I had when the twist in the novel hit me. I knew it would be unbelievable if we could somehow get that across in a movie. I never imagined it would be the way RaMell did it. But we wanted to take it on. It was initially Dede who was thinking expansively about the story insofar as if you created a straightforward linear rendering, it would sap the book of some of its power. We had already gravitated to RaMell’s other work. We had seen Hale County, and he also some talked about how there was a specific archive of African American life that had been missing from cinema. We were intrigued by his initial thinking about what his films should be doing.
At what point did RaMell and Joslyn shared their approach to the material?
DEDE GARDNER: It was before the screenplay. RaMell wrote us a long letter that set out his intentions. The letter contained a lot of philosophizing and articulated his intentions, but it was also practical description of what he meant.
KLEINER: When we went back through all the documents as we sometimes do, the spirit of the film was present in that early form. Everything was there, the archival material, The Defiant Ones. Even the last sequence that happens over the Mulatu Astatke song Tezeta. He always knew he was going to do it to that song. We love that song so much and knew it before he mentioned it. It was a signal of the environment in which he was going to lay all of these ideas out.
GARDNER: I remember reading the very first draft. I felt completely altered by RaMell’s idea of removing inciting incidents from pivotal scenes. The scene where Elwood gets pulled over. There’s a cut after the cop approaches the car, and, in doing so, the film shifts audiences off the traditional track of how they’ve been taught to view every historical incident in their lives, from books to the classroom. It’s no longer about the inciting incident it’s about system, condition, and environment. I remember reading that and feeling my whole body seize up. I knew it would be life-altering and thought if we could do our jobs and get it onto the screen, it could become something applicable to how we go about our lives and receive information. I thought it could be revolutionary.
The film as a real intervention…
KLEINER: It expands our idea of what’s possible. It’s also important to say we read the book and had known RaMell’s work, but Joslyn Barnes was amazing in those early days. Also, Alana Mayo and her production team at Orion. Adrienne Bowles and Jerry Rich. The physical production team. There were several stages during the making of this film where RaMell had to talk about the film, and there was a climate of encouragement. But he’s also a person that makes you believe in what he’s talking about. He just creates that confidence, and all those people deserve credit.
Working on a subversive film like is complicated
GARDNER: No, not really. We were ready to make the bet and give it a go because you never know. It’s a complete toss-up. But once we knew this was the path we were embarking on, we had very similar conversations about things like casting that you would have on heist movies and thrillers. We worked a little on the edit, helping to find the balance. But these are all things we love to do. We were just doing it on a different canvas.
KLEINER: There are many producers and directors who make a lot of really daring films that we admire. Brad has inculcated an ethos of approaching cinema with a longer life, which Dede and I already had seeds of in our respective practices.
GARDNER: One year, we had A Mighty Heart and Jesse James come out, neither of which more than 10 people went to see in the theater. I remember vividly at the end of that year, Brad said he couldn’t be prouder. I was so confused. You get trained to think your opening weekend and box office matters. You’re given this particular metric system. But what Brad continued to say was that throughout our lives we didn’t find our favorite, most informative movies in the movie theater. We found them in our basements and bedrooms, in museums and second-run theaters. He said all you have to believe in is the shelf life of a film, and to this day, Jesse James is one of the handful of movies where more filmmakers walk into our office and say, ‘Oh, my God, that movie.’ And really, nobody went to see that movie.
KLEINER: What made RaMell trust us was that he knew that Dede and Brad had produced The Tree Of Life, so these movies are a form of communication with other artists in the future. I’m really proud that this year we were involved with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Bob Marley: One Love. We do a lot of different things. The common desire is that the work doesn’t become disposable or dated. What constitutes consequential can be different. Eat Pray Love, which Dede produced, is consequential in a different way. And there’s a lot to be said for that. But the fact that people feel that way about our work is extremely gratifying. It’s not an easy climate these days.
GARDNER: I can tell you a story. We had 12 Years A Slave and World War Z come out in the same year. And for the decade running up to that, many people had been asking us what constituted a Plan B movie. We kept resisting giving a definition because Jeremy and I have a special and unique bond and we thought if we get to do this long enough it will define itself. So when we got to that year, Brad said that’s what we do. We do those two movies in one year. He calls us a garage band.
Reaction when you first saw Nickel Boys?
GARDNER: Well, you have to first absorb your startle for a while, and then I suspect I smiled. People often say they’re going to do something, but when they actually accomplish it, and with such charge… I was ecstatic.
KLEINER: We saw it for the first time in the MGM screening room. And as soon as you see it, you just see there’s something undeniable about this vision. This movie makes you watch it according to its rules. This movie is in charge. It teaches you how you ought to watch it. In other words, there’s no alternate version of the movie that you could sculpt or mold it into. When a filmmaker is working with that kind of power, it’s incredible.
