RaMell Ross directs films like a hooper

If the film Nickel Boys was a basketball play, it would be a Steph Curry 35-foot transition 3. Or a Kobe Bryant buzzer-beater. Or a 40-year-old LeBron James windmill – something that seems risky to everyone except the athlete prepared to perform.

RaMell Ross, the director and co-screenwriter of Nickel Boys, is a hooper. I’m not talking about one of these celebrities who post meh moves on social media like they’re really doing something – Ross ranked in the top 100 coming out of high school, played at Georgetown, and ran pickup with Michael Jordan. The 6-foot-6 point guard’s basketball career was derailed by years of recurring injuries, but he has translated his athletic process into an audacious film nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards (airing live March 2 on ABC and Hulu).

“The connection between sports and art, it’s where I’m at,” Ross said. “That’s my life.”

Nickel Boys, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead, is about two Black teens – played by actors Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson – imprisoned in an abusive juvenile facility during the racist 1960s. The film is shot almost entirely from a first-person, point-of-view perspective. Viewers don’t see the main characters, they see and feel what those characters see and feel – a sadistic guard, a friendly face, the road unspooling beneath the front wheel of a bicycle. Ross’ technique, which he has dubbed “sentient perspective,” is being called “a stunning achievement” and “a new way of experiencing Black people’s humanity on screen.”

It also represents a significant risk – like Jamal Crawford going where no ballhandler had gone before. 

“It’s like what Kobe said,” said Ross, 42. “Why do you have so much confidence to take all these shots? Kobe was like, well, I’ve done everything that I could do. I’ve worked harder than any person I know to get to this point. So that’s the best I can do. I can trust myself …  you’re relying on an instinct that you’ve built, a muscle memory you’ve built.”  

“Most people that make films wanted to be filmmakers, and they’ve been doing this their whole lives. This is my second career,” Ross said. “I’ve already failed big, not in other people’s eyes, but I’m a hooper. I was supposed to go to the league! I was a nominated McDonald’s All-American. That loss, it freed me from – I know what ultimate failure feels like, and I am not afraid of it.”

During his final season at Georgetown, from 2004 to 2005, Ross’ mother died, and photography became an outlet for his grief. He segued into video during his one season playing pro ball in Ireland. Though hooping was a physical torment, Ross was still obsessed with the game. When he could no longer hoop, he transferred his obsession into the visual realm.

“All I knew was literally hard work and discipline. That’s the only thing that I had been doing, which was do something in small bits and it builds up to a big bit later,” he said. “You can go to the gym and you can practice and you can play, and not see results. You can take photos and make films and not progress as well, unless you’re doing that critical thinking you need to do, which is equal to going into the gym and having a plan and having metrics and working on very specific things. I took that approach to art making.”

After receiving a master’s degree from Rhode Island School of Design, Ross moved to Alabama to work as a photography teacher and basketball coach. There, he began collecting images and scenes that became his unconventional 2019 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which won a Peabody award and was Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary. 

“If a person knows film and cinema, it’s one of one,” Ross says of Hale County. “It’s like seeing a James Harden who relatively reformed the stepback, where you’re like, ‘Oh, this person’s dealing with space and time differently.’”  

That film led to Plan B Entertainment, the production company co-founded by Brad Pitt that has produced championship-level Black films such as 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight, asking Ross to helm the adaptation of Whitehead’s novel. 

(Let me call time out here to state that Whitehead is, in my opinion, the LeBron of American novelists. I got Octavia Butler as Michael Jordan; Dennis Lehane as Kobe Bryant; Toni Morrison as Bill Russell; and Walter Mosley as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Twain, Hemingway n’em are Mikan, Cousy, etc. Argue wit’ yo momma.) 

Like the Knicks giving Jalen Brunson the keys and allowing him to become an All-Star, Plan B gave Ross complete creative control. 

“It’s like finding the perfect coach,” Ross said. “The coach that believes in you and everyone else on your team is like, ‘Man, this m—f—- gets to shoot all the time.’ And it’s not fair, but there’s nothing better than finding someone who believes. And Plan B literally said, ‘We have a tranche of money to make films like this, and if we’re going to take a risk on a filmmaker, we want to take it on you.”

For a hooper like Ross, it was not a risk at all.