Selfless Love and Memory: Joslyn Barnes’s Oscar Nominated Best Adapted Screenplay, “Nickel Boys”
- Callee Fair
- Mar 4
- 9 min read
In a beautifully crafted narrative, Director RaMell Ross recreates Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, “The Nickel Boys”, based on the abusive Dozier School in Florida which operated for 111 years. Using thought-provoking cinematography, this film captures the humanity and vulnerability of the characters through memories and experiences. Behind this 2025 Academy Award nominated adapted screenplay, the director composed this script with writer, producer, and co-creator and President of Louverture Films, Joslyn Barnes.
“Nickel Boys” is a story about a young man who finds himself in the hands of social injustice as he is sent to a reform school. Elwood learns about the brokenness in society first-hand as he faces mistreatment, abuse, and the corruption of the system. He ends up meeting Turner, and the two form a heartfelt and genuine friendship, learning from each other’s values and backgrounds.
Barnes previously worked with Director RaMell Ross as a producer for his first feature documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” (2018). The documentary received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature for its intimate portrayal of Black lives, using creative visuals and artistic style. The filmmakers were later approached to take on the adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize Winner by the Plan B Entertainment Company, who owned the rights to the novel early on.
“Ramel and I did that meeting together and they ended up offering it to us as a producer, director, team, and then Ramel actually invited me to co-write with him, which is how I ended up writing,” Barnes explained. “We undertook the adaptation together and based on the premise that Ramel came up with, which was to basically shoot the entire film in single shots.”
When crafting the screenplay, the co-writers focused on the visual imagery of the film and how the film should be presented to the audience using Ross’s artistic abilities to further guide the emotions the characters are facing. Barnes was driven by the convergence of the audience’s perspective with the characters.
“We decided to start the process with a treatment, a very, very detailed treatment, that was written as an edit,” the co-writer revealed. “We kind of worked backwards from what we imagined the film would actually look like. Usually, when you write a screenplay, you're writing what the audience will see. And in this case, you're not only writing what the audience will see, but you're also writing how they will see. That's a very different experience because you're also imagining what the return gaze will look like. Actors are always told not to look at the camera. In this case, they're looking directly at the camera for most of the film. So you, the audience, as you…your subjectivity is aligned with the subjectivity of the characters.”
Ethan Herisse gave a heartfelt performance as the film’s lead, Elwood, alongside Brandon Wilson, who brought honesty and complexity to his portrayal of Turner. Their connection on the screen seeped into the powerful friendship of the two characters– one that teaches us about emotional depth, redemption, growth, and ultimately, selfless love. The concept and definition of this higher form of love is the force that drives the film from within.
The friendship between Elwood and Turner has an effect on who they are as people. Through learning each other’s different experiences and values, they connect in a genuine and mundane way that supersedes relationships based on self-serving motives because of the harrowing trials they go through together.
Barnes went on to say, “You have two very different people and what they go through together changes them. But also what they learn from each other about how to deal with that changes them as well…This idea, of love, how love operates in the world, is really important to who we are in the world and who we can become in the world, and what it means to have the practice of caring for others. It’s essential to what we would consider the social contract, and what we would consider freedom. It relies on relationships that are not transactional, but that are relational.”
In portraying and developing the friendship, the co-writers are both “very influenced by quantum physics” and even took a page out of Heisenberg's theory when thinking about the two character’s connection.
“In mapping that friendship and in deepening that friendship, we also thought a lot about time. We thought about very abstract things, like quantum physics. There was this Heisenberg principle of when you look at a particle, you can't see the wave. And when you look at the wave, you can't see the particle. It was kind of like this with Elwood and Turner. If you look at one, then you can't see the other, and yet, they're both there. They're both present all the time…it depends where you place your focus.”
The film challenges traditional filming of perspective by uniquely shooting in first person perspective throughout various parts of the film, using the camera as Elwood’s point of view. Because of this bold and daring choice, it allows the audience to experience the character's journey through a deeper closeness and the understanding of selfless love through Elwood and his grandmother’s relationship.
“The unifying principle of the film was less about the plot and really much more about the transfer of love inside of the film, and centering it around Dr. King's idea of selfless love: agape,” Barnes further explained. “We felt that it was really essential to understand the relationship between Elwood and his grandmother, Hadi, and his experience of love, because his parents effectively abandoned him to his grandmother's care, and she brought him up. We felt that aligning the viewer's own subjectivity with Elwood’s would allow you to sort of enter into that experience of love…As he grows older, it's complemented by his encounter with the civil rights movement and the invitation of Dr. King. And then he transfers that gradually to his much more cynical friend in school, Turner, who's really a very different kind of character. He's somebody who believes that the whole game is rigged. His experience of life is that it's really, you know, a shell game, and you actually see a shell game inside of the film. But eventually, that friendship transforms him and it becomes something that stays with him.”
Next to selfless love, capturing memory was vital in adapting this story to the screen. The weaves through different memories of the characters that are reflective upon how we live our day to day lives, and calls into question if being in the present is actually obtainable.
“Memory is the essential ingredient to the film,” Barnes expressed. “It moves both forward and backward at the same time. And it's interesting when you have this idea of the past and the future, but it's the present that you can't really quite hold. You know, people are always saying, ‘be present’. It's like the only thing that really exists. But the second you've said it, you're already not in the present. It’s actually the ungraspable thing that is the present. And in this film, that is the case, in the way it's actually structured.”
In depicting memory within the film, the co-writer talked about the “poetic way” the visuals are written and presented on the screen. Barnes and Ross used archival footage stitched in the film up for the viewers’ interpretation. In the pair’s previous Academy nominated project, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening”, they structured the film’s footage “like a piece of music”.
Barnes explained how they treated the archival footage in their recent film, “We always felt like the visual language of the film would carry a lot of the narrative…We kind of imagined a couple of different uses for it. I mean, firstly, there is an investigation inside of the film that the adult Elwood character is. He is researching and learning about the discovery of bodies buried in the grounds of the Nickel Academy, which is based on actually the true story of bodies that were discovered at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, which is what the book is loosely based on that story of that actual school.”
“We had images, we talked to the forensic anthropologists, the people that actually did that, those exhumations. And we had images that really stayed with us, like a penny or a belt buckle or a marble. These are things that were found in the graves in the pockets of children. And, you know, something like a marble reminds you, of course, what's at stake here that you're dealing with children who were, you know, beaten and tortured and buried. So that was really important for us to include those elements from the true story…It's kind of meant in a poetic way. And that's so much a part of how memory actually works, right? It's not always about what you know or information that you're receiving often. It's about what you're recognizing.”
Working on this film using the concept of memory and time, “Nickel Boys” was structured based on the reality of experiencing a memory and what it feels like.
Barnes discussed, “It’s how a memory works…There's glitches inside of the film. There's a moment where the screen just goes dark. There's a moment where people repeat things. There's things that are just restated and in the moment. And those are just, you know, memory glitches. Every time you remember something, you're actually overriding it in your brains. You're actually getting farther and farther away from the original moment that you're recalling. It's a strange thing.”
Inviting the audience in by developing a unique structure to the film centering these characters’ perspectives and journeys was important to Barnes when curating the script to create active participation. The co-writer wanted to create a piece of art that allows for people to have their own reactions, reflections, and interpretations, which is a notion that contrasts the latest trends of film in the streaming world.
“We're really tired of this idea that art should be passively consumed, that it should be a lean back in a relaxed experience. Deep relaxation is much more about storing energy than it is about leaking it,” Barnes expressed. “And there's something about passive consumption that is also so siloed that people are just sitting on their couch watching things alone or with one other person. Whereas we felt like, okay, how can we create a lean forward? How can we create active reflection? How can we invite the audience into the film to also put the film together in their own way? You know, how do we create a structure that allows room for any like a number of different interpretations? How do we resist or suspend what RaMell calls conclusive imagining? This is important, that participation is actually a key part of it.”
Another important aspect of the film Barnes wanted to give respect to is having no inclusion of on-screen violence, breaking harmful depictions of traumatic events, specifically, out of respect to the Black community.
Barnes went on to say, “I think the first thought that we had after we read the book was, well, if we take this on, there should be no on-screen violence. We don't want to re-inscribe the trauma imaging that audiences are so used to, especially with respect to black people that we're tired of seeing images of, you know, black bodies being beaten, that this is not something that we wanted to see. And we felt like we could actually respect that experience of violence that people, that real people had gone through by engaging the viewers in imagination.”
“It is based on a story that is harrowing, but that we were very mindful about how we made the film and that there is no on screen violence per say. And it's not a bloody film. And I just want to encourage people to see it because deep inside of the film, it is a film about love and it comes from a place of love,” Barnes states. “And as the actress Anjaneu Ellis did say in many panels, when people would ask her, where is the hope? And she said, ‘The hope is here. The hope is that you're here watching the film that we're talking about, and that we're talking about all of the issues and all of the history that goes into this. And that we are resisting the erasure of American history right now. And we're going to continue to resist that. And we're going to continue to fight for the values of a society that we believe in’...So if it's not this film, find another one. But, you know, let's do this in solidarity together. As we have said many times, imagination is the most powerful form of resistance. And certainly, especially if it's centered in love.”
Comments