‘Nickel Boys’ editor Nicholas Monsour on the three ideas that dictated the film’s visual language
“Nickel Boys” editor Nicholas Monsour is going to go out on a limb. “I’d never edited anything like ‘Nickel Boys’ in terms of its first-person POV nature. And I’m tempted to say no one has,” he tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: Film Editing panel. Watch the video interview above.
The RaMell Ross drama, adapted from Colson Whitehead‘s Pulitzer Prize winner, is shot in first-person point of view as it follows Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a Black teen in 1962 who is sent to a reform school, Nickel Academy, after being falsely accused of a crime. The film alternates between Elwood’s perspective and that of Turner (Brandon Wilson), whom Elwood befriends at Nickel.
“There is this weird lineage to that format and idea peppered throughout film history and even commercials, videos, video games, and all sorts of things,” Monsour continues. “You would, in a more traditional film, cross first-person POV as a device occasionally where you just wanna go right in to clearly tell the audience this is what that person is observing, but it’s usually pretty brief. And often it’s usually used to invoke fear or terror. You think about somebody peeping through a keyhole or something. There’s usually something nefarious going on.”
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In “Nickel Boys,” the sentient camera, as the team called it, was deployed to immerse viewers in the film, and Elwood’s and Turner’s minds. For Monsour, it was always an evolving conservation and collaboration with Ross, a “fabulous interlocutor of ideas,” cinematographer Jomo Fray, and co-writer and producer Joslyn Barnes about the structure and style of the film. He likens it to being in a band, “where you pick up what they’re doing and you improvise a bit and you gain that kind of rhythm as you go.”
“We can talk about the ideas almost too much,” Monsour shares. “We talked so about the script and the book but definitely the script structurally. And its language has to do with these three ideas that have to do with researching the past, remembering the past and misremembering the past, and creating a new story. And how those three things are sort of similar and sort of different.”
Ross was always “unencumbered by concerns about traditional structure and visual storytelling.” As such, “Nickel Boys” is also interwoven with impressionistic montages of archival, cultural, and original images.
“[Ross] had a lot in mind. I don’t think anything was non-negotiable. I think there were things he was attached to,” Monsour says. “He really did a great job of gathering an initial batch of material, both that he captured on set but also more experimental methods, like the time-lapse boxcar footage and some other things that might read as archival footage in the film that he created. That plus having some researcher and having a research background himself — the script had YouTube links embedded in it so you could see sort of what he was thinking about. But we continued to find and pull and change things, and it really became a process of becoming as immersed as possible in the story, the characters, the setting, and the ideas, and then using an intuition.”