Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is listening to Louis Armstrong singing “Makin’ Whoopee” on her phone as I slide into a booth at a Telluride hotel restaurant.
Not a bad way to start a Sunday morning.
She then opens a Spotify playlist and listens to the song that started her day, Ella Fitzgerald and Armstrong's cover of “Autumn in New York,” and tells me that she and a friend are planning a fall trip to upstate New York and her friend had sent her some songs to get her in the mood.
Ellis-Taylor and I have met several times in the past few days (Telluride is a small festival) and each time, she was dressed impeccably, with a different pair of brightly colored glasses. People told her that Telluride was casual, “all sweatpants,” but she wasn’t about to represent her new movie, “Nickel Boys,” in casual clothes. “I’m not playing,” she says, laughing, showing off a gold ring with a snake design.
“I love it because I’m from Mississippi and snakes are abundant,” she says.
Ellis-Taylor grew up on her grandmother’s farm in Magnolia, Mississippi, and it was those roots that led her, indirectly, to “Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed novel about the friendship between two black boys in a brutal Florida reform school in the early 1960s. Ellis-Taylor saw Ross’s Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” and was so struck by his depiction of black lives in a marginalized Alabama community that she looked up his phone number at Brown University, where he teaches, and left him a message.
“I went to Brown, so I still knew the switchboard number by heart,” she says. “I don’t know if she ever got my message. I’m sure the person who took it said something like, ‘Ma’am, I don’t know how you think this works, but it doesn’t work like that. ’ But I didn’t care. I just wanted to express my admiration for the job she did.”
Which led her, five years later, to agree to play the pivotal role of a loving and devoted grandmother in “Nickel Boys,” and to this Telluride restaurant where we spoke for an hour.
Why did you respond so strongly to “Hale County” that, as you joked, you were going to “stalk” the filmmaker?
I'm fascinated by representations of the South. And in many of the things I've seen, I haven't felt seen. I've often felt insulted because they're often caricatures.
Do you still identify as a southern woman?
Oh, absolutely. Deep down inside. That's why I responded to RaMell's work, because I felt like I was seeing something that was a real reflection of me and the people I knew. People coming out of RVs and mud puddles outside of RVs, and lives in and out of RV parks. And it's not being done in a way that's making fun of it. It's not a fishbowl. You live in it, you invest in it. I loved it so much.
Had you read Nickel Boys before you were offered the role?
I knew it, but I hadn't read it. But I didn't care what the role was. If it was RaMell Ross, I didn't care. I have directors like that, people like that in general. I just want to be a part of what they're doing. Ava [DuVernay] is one of those people. Lee Daniels is another. I love what they do. I love how they think beyond the work product they present.
Did you talk about the book again? Is it important for you to read the source material for an adaptation?
Well, I'll be honest with you: I started it, but I didn't finish it. And I didn't finish it on purpose. Here's why: with something like [the 2023 DuVernay movie] “Origin”, I had to be fluid in how the lady [Isabel] Wilkerson thought I would have to act like that, so his ideas, his scholarship, couldn't be something I learned in the day, they had to be something I could live with.
“Nickel Boys” is a true story, but it’s still someone’s version. And I didn’t want to feel obligated to what Colson Whitehead wrote, because I have that kind of brain that says, “Why don’t we just stick to this part of the book?” I wanted to approach it as part of what RaMell was constructing with my eyes wide open and just telling the story that he was trying to tell. Because the stories are so different.
How would you explain the differences between the book and the film?
There is an approach to history that could beautifully honor the history that Colson Whitehead wrote. And that would be great. It would also be enough. We would all think, “That’s what I read.” But what RaMell wants to do, it seems to me, is build something out of the actual narrative that makes it bigger than what happened to those kids in Florida. That it didn’t just happen to them, that there is a tradition of those reform schools across the country. And it’s a history that we’ve ignored, that we haven’t really unearthed, and that hasn’t been vindicated.
So what RaMell has done, by weaving together these archival images, is that you see what happens to these children, but you also see it framed in the context of what is happening in this country and what has continued to happen in this country. That's what makes this film worthwhile. When you do that kind of storytelling, the audience comes away feeling complicit. Because we all are. We're all complicit in what happened to these children.
You told me earlier that you hadn't seen the film. Is it difficult for you to see yourself on screen?
It's not just that. You can't afford to fully believe in everything you do. Sometimes it's just work and you pay, and with that I take care of the people around me. So I embrace that and I thank you, Jesus, for that. But there are things that you believe in and you want people to believe in them the same way you do. So I don't see this because I don't want to come in and bring my own judgment to it. I don't want to be affected by opinions, including my own, because I think the brilliance and the value of this should live apart from that. And as soon as I see it, I become a consumer. And I don't want to do that. I want to be an agent of this.
So if you see it in the cinema at the premiere, you are contributing your own self-critical judgment.
Exactly. It becomes an immediate criticism.
And if people walk out in the middle of the movie, as they do at festivals, it's likely to get into your head. I spoke to people after the premiere who told me they had a hard time watching Nickel Boys.
I want to say something about that. I've had people who've seen it tell me that it's difficult. I think as moviegoers, particularly in this country, we've been conditioned to have an expectation of how we should feel when we watch a movie. I want to be an advocate for cinema that isn't palliative. I think a lot of times, people want to come into a space that says, We're unearthing a tragedy, a brutality against American children. But somehow they want to come out of that space feeling good.
They want to leave feeling encouraged, not lost.
Yes, and that’s unfortunate. “Nickel Boys” is about brutality against American children, so we should feel uncomfortable. We should feel confused. Why? Because if we can feel that, even for a moment, then we can have some empathy, real empathy, for what they endured throughout their lives.
You know, people ask me — I don’t want to be self-indulgent, but I do want to say this — because I often play real characters and some of them suffer. Isabel Wilkerson suffered a lot in what we captured in “Inception.” And I’ve been asked, “What’s it like for you to play someone who’s going through that? What’s it like for you to absorb that? How do you decompress?” And my answer is, “I’m fine. It’s a privilege for me to do that.” When I play the suffering Isabel Wilkerson, Ava DuVernay at some point is going to say “cut.” Isabel Wilkerson didn’t have that privilege. The kids in those reform schools didn’t have that privilege. What RaMell wants to do in the film is make us feel a little bit of what was unbearable for those kids.
Much of what we see of your character in “Nickel Boys” comes in flashes. What kind of feeling did you want to convey in these scenes?
Hattie loves Elwood and that love for her grandson is evident in every pore. There is a scene where they are decorating a Christmas tree and there is a playfulness between them. In that era, women, black people, there was not much joy and pleasure with children because there was no time for that. So to see this woman enjoy and delight with her grandson was my hope.
What kind of relationship did you have with your grandmother, the woman who raised you?
It wasn’t like that. My grandmother would say, “You need to be fed, clothed, and go to church, and I’ll take care of you within those parameters.” She loved me, but she didn’t smile at me much. Hattie smiles at Elwood.
Do you still have family in Mississippi?
My sister lives in Hattiesburg with my niece and nephew. And I still live in Mississippi, although I spend a lot of time in Georgia now. I have to have a presence in the South. No matter where I go, I'll always have to have a presence. The South suffered through the Great Migration, and what ended up happening is that it became a haven for the Confederates in this country. They've called themselves a thousand different things. But that's still what it is. And because of that exodus, we haven't been able to properly fight it. So I have to stay there. America has a problem, as Beyoncé says. But I'm not giving up.
