The cast and director of Nickel Boys want you to feel like one of the characters in the story.

Shadow and Act Managing Editor Trey Mangum spoke with director RaMell Ross and stars Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. Ross said that he went into adapting Colson Whitehead’s novel by infusing it with documentary techniques.

“Even though this is a scripted drama film…it [also] plays a lot kind of like a documentary at the same time,” he said. “It’s not that I’m held to any aesthetic standards, meaning I’m not going into this dramatic film thinking about employing a dramatic structure. I’m going into it trying to let whatever happens in the film be, or emerge as natural as possible from the source material.”

One of the major relationships in the film involves Herisse’s character Elwood and his grandmother Hattie (Ellis-Taylor). Herisse said he was surprised to find out he’d be working with Ellis-Taylor again, since she played his mother in When They See Us.

“I was like, ‘No way, that’s amazing,” he said about realizing Ellis-Taylor would play Hattie. “It’s just really good company to be in. I mean, she’s one of the most incredible actors that I’ve had the privilege of working with.”

“Getting to see her do her thing in this movie, what she does in this movie is truly unbelievable,” he continued. “She’s just such a force.”

Elwood’s relationships with Hattie and his friend Turner are tinged by the racially violent world around them. The film is set in 1960s Florida at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and while it could have been easy for Ross to show the violence against the characters, he chose not to. Wilson said that shifting the focus from the violence allows the audience to immerse themselves into the characters’ lives.

“It invites you and encourages you to question your own identity, your own place in these stories and these events in a different way, in a new way, which is beautiful and powerful,” he said. “Their decision to not show violence also leaves space for you to see the beauty and light in all these experiences in a different way, through these boys’ eyes, to still see that even though they’re going through these traumas, they still look up at the trees. They still play with the grass and they still look at each other and get to have this experience of friendship.”

Ellis-Taylor agreed, calling some films’ hyperfocus on racial violence “a kind of pornography.”

“You would think the response would be, ‘I’m seeing the trauma of this person and I’m mortified by it and I’m going to do something about it.’ But really that has never been the story of race-related trauma in this country. There was delight in it,” she said. “So when we continue to produce those images, we are contributing to that fetish. So we have to be really responsible about how we show violence, how we present violence towards Black people. …I loved the way [Ross] has chosen to do this film. He makes you a part of it. He makes you share it.”

Nickel Boys is now in theaters.