'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'

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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley.
And today, my guest is filmmaker Rommel Ross. His adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,

The Nickel Boys, is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and for Best Picture. It tells the story of two Black teenagers in 1960s Florida as they attempt to survive and escape a brutal reformatory academy.
The story is loosely based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys, which was a notorious place for its brutal treatment of students.

Ross's approach to this story is really unlike anything most viewers have ever experienced.

The film is shot almost entirely from the perspectives of the two protagonists, Elwood and Turner.

Ross turns the camera into what he calls an organ by attaching body-mounted cameras and filming the scene continuously with unbroken takes. The outcome for the viewer feels like being both Elwood and Turner.
Now, I introduced Rommel Ross as a filmmaker, but really this title is too narrow. He's also a photographer, a Brown University professor, and a writer.
A former Georgetown basketball recruit sidelined by injuries, Ross pivoted to sociology and English before honing his visual language rooted in what he calls liberated documentation.

His 2018 Academy Award-nominated documentary, Hale County This Morning This Evening, is an ethnographic story told through fractured vignettes of Black Southern life, and it won a Peabody Award for Documentary in 2019. Ramel Ross, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thanks for having me. Thanks so much.
Elwood Curtis, who is played by Ethan Harisi, is a bright, idealistic teenager who lives with his grandmother, played by Anjanu Ellis Taylor. And while on his way to college, he gets caught up and wrongfully accused of something and sent to Nickel Academy, which is this reformatory that he'll soon learn is really a house of horrors.
And the scene I like to play, Elwood is in the infirmary recovering from this beating from at the hands of the school's corrupt white administrator, Spencer, and he's punished for trying to stop a fight. So Elwood is arguing with his cynical friend Turner, played by Brandon Wilson, about whether the civil rights movement will bring about change.
Let's listen. If everybody looks the other way, then everybody's in on it.
If I look the other way, I'm as implicated as the rest. It's not how it's supposed to be.
Don't nobody care about supposed to. The fix has always been in.
Games rigged. That's what I'm telling you.
It's not like the old days. We can stand up for ourselves.
Man, that s*** barely works out there. What you think it's going to do in here? You say that because you got no one out there sticking up for you.
That's a scene from Nickel Boys, adapted by my guest today, Ramel Ross. And Ramel, this film and this scene in particular, it captures your attention and it demands your attention.
And the same way that you and I are sitting across from each other right now and you're staring in my eyes and I'm staring in your eyes. These characters are staring into the camera, which means they're looking at us, which means we are them.
How did you pull that off? Yeah, it's way easier than one might imagine. You basically don't have the character there, and you have a camera operator that's sitting there as the character, and then you shoot it from both scenes.
So it's quite difficult for the actors, because essentially their scene partner is a camera operator. And of course, the character is standing behind or sitting behind the camera operator delivering their lines.
But the other character who's looking down the lens is not allowed to look at them. Of course, they're supposed to be engaged with the camera.
And so this offers, I think, an assurance that while you're encountering this image, you know that it's from a specific person's consciousness, an extension of their consciousness, one could say. And with that, it's a type of personal truth that I think one fundamentally connects to.
I think your collaborator, Joe Moffray, the cinematographer, called this process sentient perspective. How did you all come up with this technique? Yeah, I made this film, Hell County, this morning, this evening.
Before this film, right? Several years before this film. And that was your first documentary, which you were nominated for an Oscar.
Yeah, yeah. And essentially, halfway through the process, I realized that I wanted to make the camera in Oregon, because there was something that maybe we'll get into, but that has to do with photo history and authorship and the production of blackness.
And when you say make the camera in Oregon, like literally, what do you mean by that? I think to make the camera in Oregon is to acknowledge first that the camera is something that others. And it's something that abstracts.
It's something that produces sort of false positives. It's observational.
It's anthropological. It's anthropological.
Perfect. Yeah.
Yeah. I think in terms of the way that photography and film present a truth that is perspectival but presents itself as unauthored often, just by fact of it not being clearly from someone's point of view, has always been the problem.
Because from an anthropological perspective, when you go to a place and you make something from your point of view and you present it as science, it just reads as factual.

And that's why we believe certain things about certain places.

It replaces that perception.

And so to make the camera an organ, to me, is a strategy to ensure that the person encountering the work knows that it's authored, that it's subjective.

Nickel Boys is an astounding story.

And what makes it especially heartbreaking is Nickel Boys is an astounding story. And what makes it

especially heartbreaking is that it is based on the truth. Take me to when you first read the book.
What were the things that you saw on the page as you were reading it that you felt compelled that you wanted to adapt this story? Yeah, I think it's what wasn't on the page. I think reading

Colson Whitehead's Nickel Boys

my first thought is, like, what's the world look like then, you know? In the 1960s. In the 1960s.
And I say that with like an armchair philosophical undertone in that I like to think about, we don't know what the world looked like, specifically from our lens now. The world that we see is not the world that they felt.
It's the world that we think we know from our future position. I look at that, I read the book, and I'm like, what would I photograph then? What would I see? Like, what would I feel? A person who's grown up with the privileges that I have and leans towards a poetic exploration of the visual field and society.
I think one of the challenges of the adaption is the adaption itself. You know, like, how do you do that? And you want to take liberties that lean into your strengths, but you don't want to take liberties that undermine, at least from my perspective, because Colson's work is rooted in truth.
And it does have this mythology that is almost biblical in the way in which it's trying to get to the, through archetypes, it's trying to get to some sort of deeper fact. You don't want to stray too far.
You and your writing partner, Jocelyn, do this thing where there's the narrative and then there are the micro narratives. There's imagery that just pops up throughout the entire film.
So like there's an alligator that we see that continues to show up. And then there are these images of Martin Luther King Jr., who is like this sign of hope and progress.
Can you tell me about why and how you came to use that imagery as a micro narrative to tell the bigger story? The idea of the images popping up is kind of how we're dealing. We deal with images, I think, in our own head.
Like when we see something, there's an association that happens and it flexes or accents some sort of visual thing we've encountered in the past. It helps us read that thing and then we're off to the races.
But also in the context of the film, I think it allows the viewer, if they're open enough to it, if they're not taken out by that gesture, to participate in an understanding of larger image production. And specifically in this film, in the production of Blackness, right? If you're showing images that Jomo and Frey and I made, and it's from a black point of view, we're using a Sony Venice, it's 6K, it's poetic, and then you're seeing these archival images from yesteryear that were taken from a completely different context.
Who knows if the people that were in the images were even asked, but 99%, I would say, of all images of all black people across the history of time have been made by white people and that's not necessarily a bad thing made by white people but we know the history of blackness and we know the the transatlantic slave trade and we know how images were used then and so we get to do something I think that is an almost impossible thing to practically do and I think we can only conceptually do it it, which is like thicken time, right? And it's an Aristotle phrase, like how thick is time, you know? Thick is, yeah. Yeah.
And how interesting, right, to be able to watch something and be engaged explicitly and emotionally in the history of that visual process. And it's beautiful that you think about these things in your work.
You're a trained photographer. And I wonder, have you ever been in a place and like you want to capture it and like you start to take out your camera and you start to take pictures and it just can't capture it.
Like you look then at what you shot, what you snapped, and it just doesn't do the thing.

I'm just thinking about that in terms of you talking about the images of us from the past and how they were taken from a different eye.

Do you think that there's something somewhat mystical, too, in what happens between, say, a person who has a closer connection to an image and they take it versus those who are an anthropological when they're taking an anthropological look. That's essentially the origin of all of my work because I filmed Hell County this morning, this evening, the documentary in the South, of course, Alabama.
I think I had about 1,300 hours of footage. You lived there for 12 years? Yeah, I still live there.
I have a house and go back as much as possible and still film. I'm interested in like a longitudinal relationship with image making and with people.
And so I basically spent, I felt like to some degree, both Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, the two main characters in the film, that I was part of their family, like nuclear family. And then when you add a camera, you also get to see moments that no one else is there for, that only the nuclear family is there for.
And those are the moments that endear you so much to the person that when they do something horrible or they make some mistake where it's just like, you're not the sum of that. That's just one thing.
I know you really well. And so how do we account for the fact that almost every image made by every other person that's been disseminated to represent them has never been those images? It's government, news, reportage, street photography, always in the intent of someone else who has no family relationship to you.
So you have to ask yourself, what if every image made by every other person across time had always been as if that person was your brother or sister? I think we would have a different relationship to humanity at large. And I love your take a picture and it doesn't represent the thing entry point because everyone knows that.
But if you start to question why and you start to look for strategies to account for that, you get to a film, you will get to a film like this. You will get to Hale County this morning, this evening.
It's just not settling for that and making that a mission. So we've been talking about Hale County this morning, this evening, as it relates to the Nickel Boys.
This was your first step into filmmaking. It is loosely based on two young men, Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, as they move through their final years of adolescence into full adulthood.
It won the Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar. What was it about that time and experience that captured your imagination that made you say, no, I need to pick up a camera for this? Yeah, what a decision in hindsight.
I moved there in 2009, and I was freelancing in D.C. and just couldn't really afford to live.
And my roommate had a connection to an organization called Project M, which is a design build organization out of MICA that was doing workshops in Hale County, Alabama. And he was like, I'm going to go.
Do you want to come? And so I, there was an opportunity through chatting with folks to teach a two-week photography course there. And so I go to teach photography and I'm like, well, this place is, is incredible.
What was incredible to you about it? Do you remember what really during that trip? Mostly the sense of time, you know, when you go to the historic South or any place that is storied in that way, that I like to say that the iconography of the South is so spread out where you can have dreams and you can have more dreams and nightmares in between icons than you can in the city. Because in the cities, especially because stuff is always refreshed and they're always doing renovations and there's so much money and so much people

and it's so dense, you're always engaging with things. And it's just way faster.
But in the

South, there's just these huge fields. And then you have this church that was built in 1800.

That's what you mean by the icons. Yeah.

Then you have this huge field and then you have this weeping willow tree. And so you're just like

out in the middle of this expanse, essentially a desert for metaphorical reasons.

And then you come to this thing that holds this meaning culturally.

And so like what a meaning making space.

That's why I like time feels different there.

And it's like it is a it makes you question what time is, which is on everyone's mind, maybe has always been on everyone's mind, but there in which the architecture doesn't change. Then what else does not change? You're coming from a city.
So what are some things you had to unlearn to actually be able to get that lesson you're talking about? Well, I think I went there and I'm like, I can photograph, I can get better. And I made photographs for quite literally three years, nonstop, every day, spending all my money, large format photography, like rapacious image making of my students, of the landscape.
Was your camera basically like your appendage? Oh, for sure. I had it in my hand almost all times, you know, when I was shooting with the DSLR, otherwise it was right in my backpack.
I'm like always thinking photographically and looking cinemographically. And every image I made looked like someone else's image for three years, no joke.
And like, I don't show these images unless they're in some sort of artist talk, which I'm trying to talk about my process. And that's when I realized that my imagination was curated because I'm trying so hard.
And the images, I think the images were beautiful. And I know they were.
People would tell me, but why do they feel like someone else's? Can you articulate the difference? Because one of the things that was very clear to me in watching Hale County was even from the first images in the church is where you all start out. Those kids just are ignoring you.
Like you are not there. You are in such intimate moments.
And yet, like, I don't feel like you're there. Yeah.
Because while this time I'm making images, I'm teaching in the community. I'm working at an organization called Youth Build.
And I'm also coaching at the high school basketball team. Coincidentally, I played basketball at Georgetown one year overseas.
I was like the best basketball player in the area. And so that gives you just mad respect because people respected me fundamentally.
And then I'm working at this program that's helping kids who are 16 to 24 who are dropped out either get back into school or get some workforce training. And I think when I moved to Hale County in the local school system, public school system, I think they had 70 seniors and I think 30 graduated.
I know everybody, everybody's family. And that's my role.
My role is not a photographer or an art maker. My role is a community facilitator or assistant to some degree.
So when I decided to make a film, people still thought that I was working at YouthBuild. And I would correct them, you know, like I actually left, I'm living in Rhode Island, I'm in grad school, but the foundation of my relationship to the community was not to be there to make images or films.

And so no one cared that I was filming them because we had a relationship otherwise. How did the folks in Hill County respond to the Oscar nomination? It's funny because I think now people see me as an artist photographer.
Though sometimes people, when I'm there they still ask me if i can if i can get their kid into a program or you know how i can you know help the the kid connect with uh a college but a slight tangent why i call the film hell county this morning this evening is because it's not hell county it's my hell county and when people use the names of places there's there's some sort of absolute ism that i think is fundamentally attached to it as if that's the experience for everyone else when it isn't and it's it's not their fault for using language like like that but i always think when someone someone should make things more personal break down what you. Like it's it's not Hill County.
It's your Hill County. I wrote this article for the Huffington Post and added one of the photos that I don't show.
And people in the question was, yeah, what's it like in Hill County? What's it like in this place? And I spoke about it. And in the comment section, a couple of from Hale County were like, that's not Hale County.
What I know to be Hale County is this. And you said that this was the best restaurant, but this is the best restaurant.
And this is this. And coincidentally, it was a white-black dynamic.
I'm spending my time with the majority. Well, I'm spending all my time with black folks.
They're spending almost all their time with white folks. They see Hale County time with white folks they see Hale County as something else I see Hale County as something else and that filtered into my image making it's like oh yes of course it's true I did use the language in a way that totalized the place in my point of view I need to be more specific what is my Hale County I need to say it's my Hale County how do you make make images that feel that specific? How do you make images that feel that personal so that, again, you're not presenting the place as incorrect because it is actually your perspective and that's built into the reading of it? Our guest today is Oscar-nominated filmmaker Ramel Ross.
We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
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You did something a few years ago.

You shipped yourself from Rhode Island to Hale County. How did that idea come about, Ramel? And why did you want to do it? I'm so glad you're asking.
That's so, man, I forget that I did that. Wait, you forget that you shipped yourself in a four by four by eight foot box? I do.
Well, it's not something I thought about it every day leading up to it for about three years. But afterwards, in the same way that you skydive or you, you know, you swim in the Mariana Trench, you take that experience in.
And then now the anxiety is over. You have it in your body and in your brain and you kind of go forward.
I feel like this just might be an insight into your psyche that you're thinking about so many ideas and thoughts and experiences that like you could forget something like that. But continue, how did the idea come about? And yeah, yeah, say more about it.
And why do you want to do it? Well, I love that you asked because that idea is where the boxcar imagery came from in Nickel Boys.

Like, that's how I came up with that thought. Because, yeah, there's these images that pop up where you're in a boxcar and you're looking at the night sky through the boxcar.
yeah because i wondered like i mean the box it was built um by myself and and the design it was

led by this guy bobby dav, who kind of runs my art studio in Rhode Island. And it's built out of Alabama railroad ties, too, which is just really, really, really cool.
You can't access it from the outside. You can only get out because, you know, we're relatively thoughtful dudes.
And the person whose truck I was on, it was a gooseneck trailer, open air. We got him from this website, you ship.
He didn't know I was in there. You just said, would you please ship this item? Yeah.
We told him that it was a kinetic sculpture. Yeah.
Because, you know, our lights would go on and off and there would maybe be some movements. And we know that he didn't know what kinetic meant.
We don't even know what kinetic sculpture means. But, like, that mystery will allow him to, like, accept that weird stuff is happening and don't call the police.
Yeah. But he didn't know I was in.
And so we were worried about if he got suspicious trying to open it. And, of course, liability of human trafficking, like all of these law problems that we can't even account for because we're just regular folks.
But in that building of it and being inside of it for 59 hours, like it was supposed to be 36, 38 hours, but he wasn't as truthful as he could have been. And he had overdriven his hours and he ended up stopping at a rest stop in Pennsylvania.
Were you keeping time inside? Well, I had a GoPro. I had like 80 batteries or something and I had enough SD cards and I had a timer on my watch and I had a light in there with a battery and every hour I would change the GoPro battery.
And so I could record the whole thing. And that's kind of how I knew.
I also have my phone, but I didn't use it. So, yeah.
So I wondered over the course of it, like, if I was, if the door was open, like, how beautiful. If I could just, like, see the landscape from a boxcar.
And, of course, it's great migration, you know, from that perspective. But the origin of the project is thinking about the reverse of Henry Box Brown, who shipped himself out of slavery in the mid 1800s.
And the idea that, you know, people of color and black folks need to or should or I'm encouraging them as many people are to go back to the South, to reverse migrate and to claim land and to, you know, sort of dilute. Why did you want to do it? Why did you, I understand the origins and the symbolism, but why did you want to experience being in a boxcar, in a car? Well, it's a very personal reason.
Like I'm a very serious athlete and I'm used to mind over matter and, you know, playing through pain and putting my body on the line for what I want to do, what I believe in. When I stopped playing sports, I lost that aspect of my physical relationship to things I cared about.
And I think intellectual labor has its own version of that. But I'm like not a person to go to protest.
Like I'm not, I've been to them before, but it's not, it's not, it's not me, whatever that means. It can be unpacked more.
So I think that doing performance art and doing work like this is my version of putting my body on the line and the way in which so many people go and are battered by police officers and or always at risk of being hit in the face by some pepper spray or some tear gas. Like, who knows what could happen? This is my version.
Did you feel claustrophobic at all? Did you feel any sense of fear at all being in that box? I never said this publicly. I loved it.
I loved being in there. What did you love about it? I loved that there was nothing else to do.
Yeah. I was just in there.
What am I going to, what am I doing? What am I going to do? My only goal was to like survive or to, I mean, it's a bit dramatic because two people knew I was in there. I could get out whenever I wanted.
Yeah. I'm not saying that this was anything like Henry Box Brown's.
Yeah. Just a project with deep meaning to me.
But my goal was to exist. And the sound, it sounded like I was time traveling because I sound like I was on a freight train.
I thought the box was going to fall apart. It was loud.
Yeah. Oh my God.
It was terrifyingly loud at times.

I can't see how it's strapped. I know my guy, Bobby Davis, he's one of the smartest people I know.
I know that the box is built well. I know it's strapped down because he would not, he was hesitant to even do this thing.
I had to like almost force him, but he's a big supporter of my work.

But also, I can't see it.

So I think, so it's terrifying.

It's calming because you have to submit. You're putting your hands in the life of someone else.
But I think the reason why I liked it is simply because I just had to be. Our guest today is Oscar-nominated filmmaker Ramel Ross.
We'll be right back after a short break. This is Fresh Air.
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Learn more at capella.edu. Okay, so Ramel, you were born in Frankfurt, Germany.
As you mentioned, your parents are both in the military. We're in the military.
How long were you in Germany before you all moved? You all moved to Fairfax, Virginia. That's where you spent most of your childhood.
Yeah, not so long, actually. I was born there, left, I think, within a year.
My sister was also born there. And that was really influential, I think, in the way in which I viewed the globe.
The world. The world, yeah.
And I want to go to college with you because you're 6'6". You're a tall guy.
You were playing basketball at Georgetown, and then you were injured. Dream, man.
Dream. I still dream about basketball.
Daydream about it. Like, I still feel it.
Like, so much muscle memory it like I still feel it like I so much muscle memory like I am a trained basketball player you know you could imagine like a person that's a green parade I was a trained killer when when did you start playing um you know really late like I'm a late bloomer to all this stuff like Like, I was just a relatively, you know, free-floating child. Really into math, honestly, and really into drawing until I found karate in, like, middle school and then basketball, I think about my freshman year.
Of high school. Of high school, really late.
I met one coach whose name is Robert Barrow. He was, you know, arguably the most influential person

in my life outside of my father, male at least.

And he was like, you know, Ramel, you got it.

And I'm, you know, I'm like 14 years old.

I'm like, what is it?

And he's like, you know, I played with Grant Hill

and, you know, I played at college

and I think you could go to the NBA. You're smart enough.
You're athletic enough. And I say enough because you're not like naturally talented in any of those things.
But you have the bones, essentially. If you do this and he like pulls out a sheet of paper and is like, if you do these workouts, you can go to the NBA.

And I was like, all right, coach. How were you injured? Do you remember? Oh, I remember.
I remember well. First time I dislocated my shoulder was at a AAU tournament in Las Vegas.
It was before my senior year of high school. And I already committed to Georgetown.
and I guy was going up for a shot, and under the hoop, really big guy, and I swipe with my left arm.

And I'm really extended.

And the force of my palm hitting the ball, you know, ricochets through my arm and pops my shoulder out.

Really painful.

Throw my arm up, scream for my father.

I think eventually my arm slid back into place. We didn't think much of it.
You know, people get injured all the time. Turned out to be a reoccurring injury where I needed to have like kind of reconstructive surgery on my shoulder.
When did you realize that dream of the NBA was over? My sophomore year, when I was ready to start and I was playing my best basketball, recovered from my left shoulder injury, and I broke my foot in the summer before my sophomore year. That's fine.
I can deal with that. Got fixed, rehabbed, was ready to play, ready to start.
And the first practice of that season, I break that same foot again. I break the screw out of it.
I knew it right when I rolled my ankle. And that's when I was like, oh, I might not go to the NBA.
You know? Yeah, it's so visceral. Like, I remember it I remember it like I've never that was my first time being depressed you know hold myself up in my dorm grew a beard for the first time and like didn't talk to anyone for like two weeks which isn't a long time but like the opposite of my personality at that time at least yeah do you.
Do you still feel phantom pain at all? Oh, yeah. I can't play now.
I can play for like 15 or 20 minutes, but my foot still hurts. You know, both my, I ended up rehabbing back, ready to start.
And then my junior year, same thing happened to my left shoulder, happens to my right shoulder. Rehab again, then my senior year, same thing happens again to my right shoulder.
And so it's always been a constant body failing me relationship to basketball, my first love, which to tie back to filmmaking is why, one, I care so much, and two, why I am not so concerned with the reception or the outcome. Because first career is done.
I've already had my biggest hopes and dreams squished. And the meaning that I got from basketball was replaced by photography and film.
And so not only do I care about it more than most things, I'm also used to, I've also gone to the extreme of hope and despair. And so this is all like second life to me, genuinely.
There was also something else that happened during that time. You lost your mom.
Yeah. I'm sorry.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's okay. You know, I think it happens to everyone and it's never a good time.
Yeah. What opened up for you in that time period that photography looked like? Not a savior, but like an interest that you say, okay, I'm going to focus my attention here.
Yeah. It's a combination of, I don't think photography would have felt or filled the space or done what it did if I didn't lose basketball and my mom at the same time.
I think if it was just either one of those, something else would have happened. That's probably with everything in everyone's life.
It takes a combination of factors. I think there's something about, I want to say dangling the carrot, the way in which basketball is like, you know, every time you make a shot, it's perfect.
You could be done, you know, but you do it again. Because it's not about that one moment of perfection.
It's about perfection over time or it's about the pursuit of it. It's something else.
There's something about photography that is like that in which you need to prove that you can do it again to yourself you're like trying you're chasing you're chasing something you're in pursuit you're on some treadmill like it's and it's ineffable and you want to do it forever and you're never satisfied and it's essentially not about the thing itself it's doing something else for you um and yeah i just needed I just needed that you know i needed what like what a big hole to to fill you know two first loves mom and and sports i think maybe now for the first time i'm understanding that it actually filled this is what it did did. It filled the role.
It allowed me to see myself. I'd never seen myself because I'd always been disciplined and basketball obsessed and so loved by my family and so privileged in all those ways, I never had to reflect on the composition of myself, the constitution of myself, what I believed.
I didn't know what I believed. I didn't know what I believed until I started reading books, because then you're engaged with the interior life of others in a way in which you can't always, through conversation, especially when you're going through puberty or you're becoming a person.
So I think it let me think about identity deeply while forming my identity. And that's probably why I take it so seriously as a knowledge production of identity.
Yeah. I'm just curious about the kind of conversations you'd have at home with your parents and your siblings.
Like, were you deconstructing life, trying to pick apart things growing up? Is that part of innately you? Is it your family too? Like, take me there. I think I was always curious.
My dad and my mom, I think, encouraged that for my sister and I. I think once I went to college is when I really started to think in a way in which was annoying for everyone in my family.
In what way? Like, how would you annoy them? Because the deconstruction and picking apart was they were the targets. What do you have access to? Your mom, your dad, and your sister.
Right. And their decisions.
Yes, yes. They loved you.
Yeah. They loved me, but they didn't want to talk to me probably.
Yeah. And then, of course, you get out of that mode of, I mean, I began to question everything.
And when I mean everything, I mean everything. I would go outside.
I would read nutritional facts because, I mean, I felt undereducated. Like once you come into, once I came into my own, especially as an athlete at a school like Georgetown in which everyone's vocabulary is just like, I don't even know what they're talking about.
I didn't know what indifferent meant. I remember when I was walking and a friend was like, man, I'm indifferent to that.
I was like, indifferent? How do you get inside something that's opposite of something else? This was such a pleasure to talk with you. Congratulations on your nominations.
And thank you. Thanks so much.
Thank you. Ramel Ross's film, Nickel Boys, is in theaters nationwide and will be available on Prime Video later this year.
It's been nominated for Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay for this year's Academy Awards. The ceremony will be held on March 2nd.
Coming up, a review of the new season of the hit TV series, The White Lotus. This is Fresh Air.
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Learn more at ucsd.edu slash research. One of this year's most eagerly awaited TV series is the new season of The White Lotus, Mike White's acclaimed comic drama about privileged tourists getting up to trouble in posh seaside resorts.
In this latest installment, whose first episode drops on HBO this Sunday, the action has moved to Thailand, with visitors that include characters played by Michelle Monaghan, Walton Goggins, Carrie Coon, Jason Isaacs, and Parker Posey. Critic-at-large John Powers has watched a big chunk of the series and says it aims deeper than earlier seasons.
One of the most exquisitely cynical lines in 20th century literature comes in the Italian novel The Leopard. A young aristocrat is telling his uncle, the prince, why he's joined up with Garibaldi's revolutionaries.
If we want things to stay as they are, he explains, things will have to change. This is precisely the thinking behind successful TV franchises, which try to change things just enough to seem fresh, while still serving up what the audience loved the first time.
Except for maybe Fargo, no show tackles this challenge more honorably than The White Lotus, the Emmy-grabbing HBO series in which rich, entitled white folks cause trouble at enviably gorgeous beachfront resorts. Written and directed by Mike White, The White Lotus doesn't merely introduce new characters and locales every season, the latest one is set in Thailand, but also shifts its tone and preoccupations.
Still, it follows a template. Like its predecessors, season three begins with an unidentified dead body and then flashes back to show us who's dead and why.
We watch the guests arrive at the White Lotus, a wellness-centered resort on the island of Koh Samui. These include the well-heeled Ratliff family from North Carolina.
The parents are played by Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey. There are three 40-something girlfriends led by Jacqueline, a TV star played by Michelle Monaghan.
There's Gloomy Rick, that's Walton Goggins, a scruffy dude who's here with his far younger girlfriend, Chelsea. And as always in Paradise, there's a serpent.
It would take an hour to tell you the plot. Suffice it to say that after a low-key start, the show becomes a stir-fry of financial secrets, dark family histories, drug abuse, kinky hijinks, poisonous snakes, scary gunfire, and oddball comedy.
White loves to shove his characters and audiences out of their comfort zone. We often can't be sure whether something is supposed to be funny or serious or both.
We don't know which characters are actually nice, are deeper than they first seem, or are blithely headed toward bad things. Take, for instance, the Ratliff family, Timothy and Victoria and their three grown-up kids.
Their provincial complacency is on display when they arrive at the White Lotus and meet the hotel managers. Wow.
Yeah. Hi.
The Ratliff family, yes? Yes, us. How was your flight? Long layover in Doha, but it's all forgotten now.
We flew over the North Pole. How did you find us, may I ask? Well, Piper here is a senior, thank you, at Chapel Hill.
I was also a Tar Heel, but Timothy went to Duke. Saxon graduated Duke.
Lachlan, our youngest, just got accepted to both, so you can imagine it's a whole thing. And she's a religious studies major, so she's writing her thesis on...

Well, what's your thesis on, Pop?

Well, it's on Buddhism, and there's a monk at a monastery near here.

Anyway, she wants to interview him, so we made a family road trip up here.

Would you please escort them to the villa?

Certainly.

Please enjoy. Right this way.
Enjoy. Thank you.
Enjoy. If you've seen either of the two seasons, you know that Victoria and her kin are likely to face trickier issues than the rivalry between Duke and the Tar Heels.
In truth, season three is less effervescent than one or two, yet the show's still superbly acted by its stars, and White stuffs his scenes with pleasures. I love the comedy of the Ratliff's alpha male son, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger's son Patrick, driving everyone crazy by obsessively making protein shakes in a deafening blender.
I love the increasingly fraught dynamics of Jacqueline and her friends. The others are played by Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb, by the way.
Whenever two of them get together, they grow catty about the one who's not there. I was especially knocked out by the scene in which Rick meets an old friend who launches into a monologue about his sexcapades in Bangkok.
It is, I promise you, the most surprising thing you're going to hear on TV this year.

The White Lotus takes it as a given that its privileged characters have no interest in the

culture they're visiting, be it Hawaii or Sicily or now Thailand. They treat it as a theme park

or a stage on which they can act out. White clearly hopes to avoid doing that himself, although he does glamorize Thailand.
Conspicuous Luxury is one of the show's selling points, after all. He treats Buddhism respectfully, and he makes a point of trying to incorporate Thai characters.
The two best are the hotel's owner, a silver-haired diva, and a sympathetic security guard, whose factlessness makes us constantly worry for him. Now, over the course of the six episodes available to screen, there are eight in all, White repeatedly shows us two very different things, monkeys and Buddhas.
This motif is fitting, for White's theme here is the tension between our animal nature and our yearning for a deeper, more spiritual existence, one free from the values and egotisms that imprison us. Pushing its characters toward questions of life's meaning, this is the most soul-conscious of the three seasons.
No matter how safe and comfortable things might seem, White suggests,

there comes a time of reckoning when we have to face how alone we really are.

John Powers reviewed the new season of The White Lotus, which begins Sunday on HBO.

Tomorrow on Fresh Air, we hear from some of Saturday Night Live's early cast members ahead of their three-hour 50th anniversary special on Sunday. Dan Aykroyd, Al Franken, who was one of the show's original writers before becoming a cast member, and writer Alan Zweibel talks about creating iconic sketches with Gilda Ratner.
I hope you can join us. Our interviews and reviews

are produced and edited

by Phyllis Myers,

Anne-Marie Boldonato,

Lauren Krenzel,

Teresa Madden,

Monique Nazareth,

Thea Chaloner,

Susan Nkundi,

Anna Bauman,

and Joel Wuchram.

Our digital media producer

is Molly C.B. Nesper.

Roberta Shorrock

directs the show.

With Terry Gross,

I'm Tanya Mosley.

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