5 Film Recs From 'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross

"Moonlight is a predecessor to Nickel Boys factually in terms of what I'm able to understand is possible [on film]. The trailer was good enough for me. I was changed by the trailer; I saw things in it I'd never seen before aside from in my own eyes."

"When I find a film that I like, I don't just watch it — I try to become it. I want it to be literally a part of my body that is an active ingredient in the way in which I am the next day. I tend to memorize my favorite things and watch them obsessively. One of them is "La Jetée." It's enormously powerful, but I'll tell you — after you've watched it 50 times, it still holds up. It still gives you emotion, and it's still just as dense and as beautifully living as any human being I've come across. There's one line in it that was vital for [Nickel Boys]: 'Nothing tells memory from ordinary moments, only afterwards do they claim remembrance, on account of their scars.' Is that not the most clear language of what it is to be human?"

"I have never woken up a day in my life and said 'I don't want to watch Tree of Life.' And never while I was in it did I want it to be over, or I don't just want to restart it. It's the thing [writer] Alan Watts says about scale: The closer you are to something, the more difficult it is to see the bigger picture, and the bigger picture makes it more difficult for you to see what it is to be an individual on the inside. What's the right scale to view reality? What's the right scale to view your life?"

[Editor's note: The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, and Testament of Orpheus form Jean Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy.]

"Images of scale are beautifully rendered in the Cocteau trilogy, which tends to make most people go [gargling noises] and it's like — do you not see he's teaching us how to see? This is how you see. I teach the trilogy in my film classes, but I show it toward the end of a class because if you show it at the beginning, students will be like ... ummm."

"When [screenwriter] Joslyn Barnes and I saw Ethan Herisse [who plays the lead character Elwood in Nickel Boys] we realized he looked like Sidney Poitier. We were thinking about films in which people are incarcerated then they break out — what does that look like? In our movie, Elwood runs, Turner runs. We watched The Defiant Ones and obviously Sidney Poitier is Sidney Poitier. Him singing is so visceral — we had to use the audio somehow. But once you watch the film, [the] relationship [between Poitier and co-star Tony Curtis' characters] and their stick-togetherness despite everything that got Poitier in this position ... The palpable disdain Poitier's character has for Curtis — but he goes back to prison to save him, and the cost of that is him going back to prison. This guy's loyalty to the other human being is absurd; there's something about that love that we tied to Nickel Boys."