‘Nickel Boys’ Exclusive: Aunjanue Ellis Opens Up About The Film’s Emotional Weight, “What Feels Exhausting Is Doing Something I Don’t Believe In”

Nickel Boys has been proclaimed the best film of the year by a number of publications and we can actually confirm that it is indeed that good.

Nickel Boys tells the story of a young man named Elwood Curtis whose college dream shatters alongside a two-lane Florida highway. Bearing the brunt of an innocent misstep, he’s sentenced to the netherworld of Nickel Academy, a brutal reformatory sunk deep in the Jim Crow South. He encounters another ward, the seen-it-all Turner. The two Black teens strike up an alliance: Turner dispensing fundamental tips for survival, Elwood, clinging to his optimistic worldview. Backdropped by the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, Elwood and Turner’s existence appear worlds away from Rev. Martin Luther King’s burnished oratory. Despite Nickel’s brutality, Elwood strives to hold onto his humanity, awakening a new vision for Turner.

BOSSIP Sr. Content Director Janeé Bolden spoke with one of the stars of the film, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor who plays Hattie, Elwood’s grandmother in Nickel Boys. Ellis-Taylor revealed she was already a believer in Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross after watching his documentary short Hale County: This Morning, This Evening .

“I’m not a fan, I’m a believer,” Ellis-Taylor told BOSSIP about her interest in Ross prior to Nickel Boys. “ I’m a believer definitely and hopefully a steward of the kind of work that he’s trying to do. I saw Hale County [This Morning, This Evening] with my friend Ty a few years ago at BAM in Brooklyn and usually when I see portrayals of the Black southern experience, the Black rural southern experience, it feels absurd to me. It doesn’t feel familiar to me and I didn’t feel that way when I saw Hale County. I felt like I was seeing something that felt kindred to me and it was rare. It just moved me, it shook me — and so I tried to reach out to him to tell him how I felt. I knew that he was a professor at Brown. I knew that because I went on Google and found out that he was a professor at Brown and I tried to reach out to him. I tried to call Brown and asked to speak to him and that didn’t work and then I tried to e-mail him with his public e-mail address and that didn’t work, but a couple years later this came around and I was going to do whatever they wanted to do and they asked me be a part of this. Big time wish fulfillment for me. I’m so happy that it happened.”

Lovers of cinema are happy it happened too. The work Ellis-Taylor and Ross, along with Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson and the rest of the Nickel Boys cast have accomplished is truly something special. The film is incredibly unique, like nothing seen or done before in feature film and no wonder. Ross doesn’t necessarily identify as a director or filmmaker in the traditional sense. Ellis-Taylor confirmed that working with Ross on Nickel Boys and visual artist Titus Kaufar on Exhibiting Forgiveness offered a different kind of experience than many of her previous film forays.

“For me it’s a much more expansive approach,” Ellis-Taylor said of working with Ross. “I’ve worked with directors who are visually driven, you know – it’s all about the image, and a lot of times when my experience has been that you end up being props for them. Just something that they need to move in order to capture the image that they’re trying to trying to capture and you feel a little useless and unnecessary. That’s not how I felt with RaMell. I felt that it was a mutuality, it was something mutual and what we both were trying to do — collaborative is the word that’s used a lot, but I like mutual better. There was something that he was giving and something that I was trying to give in return. I think it makes him a better filmmaker. I worked with Titus Kaufar on Exhibiting Forgiveness and his first medium is is painting and it just gives them an eye that goes beyond. Sometimes it becomes commerce –they have a way of looking at it that goes beyond that.”

Based on the novel “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead, the film and book are both inspired by Florida’s Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, in Marianna, FL which opened in 1900 and operated until June 2011. The reform school was the site of brutal abuse and multiple bodies were discovered buried on the school grounds. Set during the 1960’s the film depicts a world where oppressive racism and abuse of power went unchecked. Despite stunning visuals, and the loving relationship of Elwood and his grandmother as well as Elwood and Turner’s strong comradery, much of the plot is heartbreaking.

“I don’t feel that weight at all,” Ellis-Taylor told BOSSIP when asked whether she had to decompress from the emotional weight of the project. “I do not feel that weight at all. If anything, it gives me a place to take the weight that I have in the rest of the world. I don’t feel that weight at all. What feels burdensome and exhausting to me is when I’m doing something that I don’t believe in that is just really paycheck driven honestly and you know you got to do them things sometimes but I didn’t feel that one day with Nickel Boys so I didn’t need to decompress. I was decompressing at work.”

Speaking of Ellis-Taylor’s penchant for projects that highlight important issues, Nickel Boys also serves as reunion for her and Ethan Herisse, who played her son in When They See Us.

“He’s a joy,” Ellis-Taylor said of working with Ethan Herisse, who plays Elwood. “I told him I would be his great-grandmama the next time. Oh my God, you know Ethan was just graduating or about to graduate from high school when we did When They See Us and now years later he’s a college graduate, you know and in chemistry of all things. He’s just good-hearted, he’s a good soul, he’s just a good soul.”

Herisse shares that good hearted quality in common with his character Elwood. Since Ellis-Taylor hails from Mississippi we asked her about the responsibility of raising Black children in the south and whether she and Elwood had been prepared for the threat of their surroundings by their loved ones.

“You know the randomness of that violence that happened to Elwood, you know I don’t think anybody is properly prepared for that,” Ellis-Taylor told BOSSIP. “I know my grandmother and my mother weren’t those kinds of conversations with me because there was such shelter around me and I think that is what Hattie was hoping that she was providing for for Elwood. That that shelter would be something that would be impenetrable, but you know that didn’t happen.”

Nickel Boys arrives in select New York and Los Angeles theaters December 20 and expands this January.

The post ‘Nickel Boys’ Exclusive: Aunjanue Ellis Opens Up About The Film’s Emotional Weight, “What Feels Exhausting Is Doing Something I Don’t Believe In” appeared first on Bossip.