Jeff Nichols
(Credit: International Film Circuit)
He started work on the script—a darkly funny (but mostly dark) tale of a dead father and two sets of feuding half-brothers—in 2000 while attending film school at North Carolina School of the Arts. Four years later Nichols sent a copy to a pre-“Bug” Michael Shannon and started making his movie. The result was nominated for the John Cassavetes prize at this year's Film Independent Spirit awards and rolls out in a limited theatrical release throughout the spring.
Like fellow NCSA alums Craig Zobel (who made his debut with last year's "Great World of Sound") and David Gordon Green (the director of "Snow Angels," who's also a producer on "Shotgun Stories"), Nichols allows his film to flourish in atmospherics without ever sacrificing the thing that’s most at stake—the story of the three Hayes brothers and the fate they hurtle towards. It's a movie that hums with the ever-present threat of violence and how that threat spills across the Hayes' tiny Arkansas backwater town.
We sat down with Nichols to talk about early morning interviews, finding an actor willing to work for free and his struggles with bringing a controversial book to the screen.
You spent a good two years babying this project… You had to walk it to school and take it to screenings in Berlin, Austin, Seattle…
Totally. Even before that, it was a matter of keeping it alive when no one knew it existed. You kind of talk to it and tell it things like, “It’s alright! People are going to care about you one day!” And now it never calls me.
The movie is even getting a simultaneous release in America and in the U.K., how is that going?
I’ve been doing a few interviews [for British media], and they call at like 7, 8 a.m. I‘m sure that everyone in the U.K. thinks I’m an idiot. My brain doesn’t work that early in the morning. It’s funny. The movie’s taken on it’s own life now, and I can’t control it anymore. To go from having complete control to the film having a life of it’s own in another country is kind of weird.
The landscape of Arkansas is definitely a character in the movie. Did you set out to make that an important aspect from the beginning?
Yeah, especially when we found out we could afford to shoot 35mm. Then we made the creative decision to shoot anamorphic.
What’s the difference between 35mm and anamorphic?
Standard 35 is your standard widescreen. Anamorphic—sometimes it’s called Super 35 or Cinemascope—is like super widescreen. Typically, really big movies are shot in anamorphic. Like "The Thin Red Line" and "Lawrence of Arabia."
Shooting anamorphic for an independent film seems a bit like jumping off a huge cliff with a parachute that may or may not work.
As much as it affects you on the front end, it affects you twice as much on the back end. The processing, the finishing of the film is insanely expensive. At no point did we ever have all the money in the bank to know that the film would be finished. At each step of the way, we had just enough money to do what we were doing at the time.
What inspired you to cast Michael Shannon in the lead role?
I was in college around 2000 and a professor of mine named Gary Hawkins had been at the Sundance Labs with a script called “Downtime.” And Mike Shannon had shown up to work at the lab. When Hawkins got back he was like, “Nichols, you’ve gotta look at this guy!” I saw the tapes and thought to myself, “This is the guy I want to be in every movie I ever make.”
And so you just called him up out of the blue?
It was a couple of years later, after I’d written the script. I just called him and said “Hey, you don’t know who I am, but I wrote a part for you.” Luckily he read the script and liked it. We had four phone conversations beforehand, but we didn’t meet in person until he showed up the week we started filming.
What did he bring to the movie?
He’s been acting in films since he was seventeen, and he’s been in over 30 films. He brings this insane amount of intelligence and focus to the work he does. He’s not waiting for the lunch bell to ring. I mention that because we weren’t paying him. The only reason that he was there was that he saw something in the script that he wanted to be put on film.
You next film was set to be an adaptation of Brad Land’s fraternity exposé “Goat.” But it’s gotten stalled, right?
I’m actually not working on it right now. It’s been a little frustrating, to be honest. Killer Films was producing and I was supposed to direct. Hopefully I still am. We were supposed to start shooting in April. I had my lead in mind, and met with him, and then the financiers just pulled out. They got cold feet.
But you’re still trying to get it back up?
It’s just about getting the money to do it. We’ve got people out there looking for it and hopefully it will come together. [The idea is] to talk about the institution of fraternities in the United States—without being pretentious—and make a movie that’s just about a guy and his brother and their experience together.
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