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Capone talks to MIDNIGHT SPECIAL writer-director Jeff Nichols about blending sci-fi with parental fears!!!

Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

Prior to this interview, the only other time I’d met writer-director Jeff Nichols was at Roger Ebert’s Film Festival (Ebertfest) in 2012. It was the last one of these events that Ebert himself would attend personally, before his passing the following year. As always at Ebertfest, there was a mid-fest reception that I had never bothered attending previously, but decided to this particular year. Both Nichols and I arrived unfashionably early and ended up being among the only two people at the event for about the first hour. He was there to screen his remarkable film TAKE SHELTER the following night and do a Q&A with his constant collaborator, actor Michael Shannon, who has starred in all of Nichols’ films to date (and even one we haven’t seen yet; more on that).

Nichols fully embraced the idea that he owed a great deal of his success to Ebert’s glowing, four-star review of his debut film, 2007’s SHOTGUN STORIES, which had played Ebertfest a couple years earlier (for the record, Ebert also gave TAKE SHELTER four stars). We talked about that a great deal else having to do with film, both new and old, for about two hours before before others began to recognize him and swooped in to be social. At the time Nichols’ latest work, MUD, was about a month out from premiering at the Cannes Film Festival.

His latest work is the phenomenal MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, starring Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Adam Driver, Sam Shepard, and young Jaeden Lieberher (ST. VINCENT), as Alton, a boy with special powers that most religious fanatics and the U.S. government want in their possession. But his father (Shannon) is desperately trying to protect from all comers. It’s almost impossible to ignore the Spielberg-ian influences. In fact, Nichols more or less embraces them with threads of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and E.T. woven into the film’s tapestry.

If we’re fortunate, we’ll see the next collaboration from Nichols, Shannon, and Edgerton, LOVING, before the end of the year. The true-life story concerns Richard (Edgerton) and Mildred (Ruth Negga) Loving, an interracial couple sentenced to prison in Virginia in 1958 for getting married. I can’t wait. This interview took place just moments before Nichols and I did a Q&A after a screening of MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, during which we were joined by surprise guest Edgerton, who just happened to be in Chicago shooting AMERICAN EXPRESS, a film directed by his brother Nash Edgerton (THE SQUARE). He didn’t join us for the interview, but toward the end he was in the room and is referenced quite glowingly by Nichols. Please enjoy my conversation with Jeff Nichols…





Capone: I told Joel when he was here last year with THE GIFT that [brother Nash’s short film] SPIDER is my favorite short of all time.


Jeff Nichols: That’s awesome. It’s amazing. We were lucky out in LA at an early screening of MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, Nash came, and we both were like, “What’d you think?” He’s a smart guy.

Capone: Watching the film again today, I found myself looking the most forward to any scene with Adam Driver in it. He’s so good in this.

JN: He’s great, right?

Capone: As I’m watching this, it reminds me in parts of one of my all-time favorite movies, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THRID KIND, and he’s the Richard Dreyfuss. Except he’s got a French-sounding name, so maybe he’s got bits of François Truffaut’s characters as well.

JN: It’s one of my favorite too. I was talking to someone today and they were like, “Why don’t you ever mention Balaban[’s character in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS]?” I was like, “Oh, yeah.” Because I always pictured him as Richard Dreyfuss from JAWS mixed with Truffaut from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, which is why I gave him a French name, Sevier. But there’s danger in that. That’s actually the closest I think I come to a true homage, true comparisons. I actually give a lot of the credit to Adam for helping me break the mold of that character. He could have been pretty stock, and Adam helped debunk that a little bit.

Capone: The only reason I say Dreyfuss is there because Dreyfuss is so funny in that movie.

JN: He’s innately likable.

Capone: He’s likable because even when he’s being serious he makes me laugh in that film.

JN: Adam entering the room makes me laugh.

Capone: That’s what I mean. The way he enters the room for the first time he’s, looking in, around, nervously.

JN: “Ah, hello. Uh, hi.” And then he looks at Sam Shepard and goes, “Hello.”

Capone: And then in the interrogation scene, he’s so serious. It’s perfect. He’s the only one in the movie who’s not afraid to ask all the questions we’re thinking. He’s us, which is why I think he’s the most like Dreyfuss. We’re discovering as he does. And once again, you have a father and son and an extended family. Where does that fascination come from with you, that relationship and that bond?



JN: In each of these films, I try and find some emotion that’s palpable. I think that’s the only way you can get through this gauntlet of filmmaking and try and affect the audience is to have some emotion that you can check in with at any point in the process and still feel it. In SHOTGUN STORIES, it was the idea of one of my bothers being killed. That got me. TAKE SHELTER, it was the idea of my marriage falling apart. That got me. In MUD, it was my high school girlfriend breaking up with me.

Capone: These are your greatest fears.

JN: Yeah, they’re my fears. I don’t think it’s so much that I’m obsessed with the father-son dynamic. It’s that that’s where you guys have caught me in my life. I would imagine in the next 10 years, it will be another version of that dynamic, but I don’t know. I think there’s more coming, it’s just that these are the things that are very prevalent in my own life right now, so this is what I’m talking about.

Capone: So where does this film come from, the relationship with your father or the relationship with your son?

JN: This is definitely my relationship with my son. When I made TAKE SHELTER, my wife was pregnant. We had just been married, so the idea of family was theoretical and the idea of my failure as a parent or as a husband was a theoretical fear. When my son was 8-months-old, I was working out this film and he had a febrile seizure, which are actually fairly common—1 in 1,000 kids have them. It’s the body’s reaction to a spike in fever. It was terrifying. I quickly realized, that first year of having a kid, you’re just underwater. Your whole life is turned upside down. But then, this whole thing happened eight months in where I was like, “Oh my god. It’s not about me being sleep deprived or not being able to go out and have a beer. This boy could die. This could happen.”

Capone: And you have no control over it.

JN: I have absolutely no control over it. It just so happened that I was also trying to think about what the hell my sci-fi chase movie was going to be.

Capone: So you’re saying, if you had made this movie like 5 years from now, it would have been a very different movie.

JN: It’s the same thing Spielberg says about CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. I don’t know if you’ve heard that quote when he talked about the ending. He was like, “I wouldn’t write that ending today, because I would never leave my children. I wouldn’t get on the spaceship.” I’m really glad he wrote it when he did, because I like that he got on the spaceship.

Capone: So where did the germ of the sci-fi chase movie come from?



JN: Yeah, I was just struck by this idea of these two guys driving this fast car down these dark roads in the American South, the same way I was struck by the image of a man standing over a storm shelter in my backyard. Sometimes these things just strike you. I remember hearing these urban legends—I don’t know if they’re urban legends or not—growing up in Arkansas. I-40 was just a big interstate that runs across Arkansas. The drug runners used to turn off all their headlights and put on night-vision goggles, and I remember thinking, “Well, that’s pretty cool.” I was talking to my buddy, another film maker named David Green [he’s likely talking about David Gordon Green, who produced Nichols’s first film SHOTGUN STORIES], and I told him that idea for that scene and he’s like, “Yeah, yeah. Jackie Chan does it in CANNONBALL RUN II.” I was like, “Aw, shit. Well, I’m going to ripoff CANNONBALL RUN II then, because I’m putting that scene in my movie.”

But that image of those guys, and the title came to me really quickly. It just made sense. It felt like something I wanted to try my hand at, because I grew up on the same movies that you’re talking about. I grew up on E.T. and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and STARMAN, and now people are giving me a chance to stretch my legs a little bit, maybe a little bit more money, so let’s do a sci-fi chase movie.


Capone: This had nothing to even do with a kid.

JN: The plot came first. I even knew there would be a father-and-son dynamic, but I didn’t know what that meant. Just because you say, “Yeah the movie is about fathers and sons,” that doesn’t mean anything. What are you trying to say? YI think it’s very important that if I am going to separate myself from bigger studio films, these things have to be unique to me. You have to actually make a point; you have to have a thought. You can’t just cobble this stuff together and say, “Here you go.” What are you trying to say? I think what I was trying to figure out for myself was, if I have no control over the well being of my child, if I have no control over who he grows up to be, what am I here for? I think as a parent, I’m here to try and figure out who he is and try and help him figure out who he is and not try and force my opinion on that but just help him be who he’s supposed to be. All of a sudden, that felt like a though. That felt like what parenthood is, and then Mike Shannon’s character had a purpose in the middle of this chase movie.

Capone: In a lot of ways, this story is about accelerating the process that parents are supposed to do throughout childhood, which is not hold them, but prepare them to let go.

JN: To leave. They all leave. We just hope they leave in an organic natural way. We don’t want them to leave too soon.

Capone: I particularly liked this religious group that you opened up with. I do have one actual plot question: did that group form around Alton and his abilities, or was the group already there? It’s almost more powerful and more of a comment on religious groups if they completely restructured their beliefs around this boy. That’s the sense that I got, that they already existed.



JN: Yeah, it’s hinted at. It’s in there, but it’s subtle. When Joel Edgerton’s character—the one actual piece of backstory I actually give in this whole damn film—when he says yeah, we were buddies growing up, and then in high school parents took [Shannon’s Roy] to the ranch

Capone: That’s right.

JN: So that ranch definitely existed. And then this crazy thing happened. Part of that came from my research into ranches like that. It’s based on an FLDS ranch in South Texas, one of the Warren Jeffs’s ranches.

Capone: I just read a Rolling Stone article that esssentially updated PROPHET’S PREY.

JN: There are some amazing articles written by a writer named Katie Vine out of Texas Monthly Magazine about it. That’s what I read. They were talking about a raid that happened on that ranch, and everybody was freaked out after Waco, so everybody was trying to be as civilized and cool as possible, meaning the federal government. So they made a handshake deal with the local sherif to talk to the elders of the ranch, and they went on the ranch because they needed to find out if kids were being married and raped, which they were.

One thing that was tricky for them was, they started to do these interviews with these young people, and they were lying about their ages. It’s because they had no birth records because they were born on these ranches. That’s when I said, “If a kid with superpowers was born in the middle of one of these ranches, there would be no record of him. It’s not like he went to a local hospital, and they stamped his foot.” So that just made sense. So yes, they completely rearranged their lives, not only their belief systems, but their practical lives. They all started having their services at night, which is mentioned in the film. They started shifting around the Messiah they thought was born in their midst.


Capone: That to me feels like statement from you, that these people just go wherever the strongest wind is pushing them. Their belief system is very fluid.



JN: Well, yeah. I’ve taken some knocks on organized religions in other parts of my film, but it’s always very subtle. I don’t disagree with organized religion. I grew up Methodist. I went to church. But I think it can be dangerous. I think it gets dangerous when people start to build their own belief systems and then force them on other people. I think that’s not right. That’s what felt like was going on in this ranch. Honestly, each character is an example of a particular type of belief system. I built one for each of them. The ranch is a whole type of belief system, which is going against your own inner moral compass because somebody told you something else was right. That’s Bill Camp’s character. He plays the electrician on the ranch. He knows these things aren’t right that he’s being asked to do, but he lets his belief system trump his moral compass.

Capone: That’s a really moving moment when he says, “Sometimes, we get asked to do things that are beyond us.”

JN: I actually think it’s the essence of the whole movie. That’s really what Mike Shannon’s character’s being asked to do, something that’s beyond him, which is to deliver his son someplace that he doesn’t fully understand.

Capone: Edgerton’s character is really fascinating too. After however many years of not seeing Shannon’s character, he has that bond with his old friend that he just trusts implicitly.

JN: It speaks to the boy. If the boy didn’t commune with him, that probably wouldn’t happen. You said Driver’s character is us; I actually think Joel’s character is us— he’s this really rational guy. His belief system is built around pragmatism, and he sees a sick boy, he wants to save him. I imagine he was a state trooper, and he probably came across a wreck at some point. It was a minivan, there were dead kids inside, and he had to come to terms with the fact that there’s no justice in this. There’s no balance in this. This happens.

So when he sees a sick kid on a road he’s like, “Look, this kid could die. I don’t care if you think he’s touched by God.” Kids die all the time. But at the same time, he’s also caught up in it. As soon as he gets away from one of these events that the boy does, his rational mind starts to take back over and he’s like “Wait a second. What are we doing here?” And then something falls out of the sky. [laughs]


Capone: There’s an interesting juxtaposition that you have between the two gentlemen from the ranch and the government, both of whom are looking for Alton. They’re extremes of a belief system—God and country. Their fervor is almost identical in their pursuit of this kid. You put us a=in a position where we’re not sure which is worse.



JN: There are no bad guys, right? Bad guys don’t exist. Everyone has a point of view, and I think the point of view of the government is “This kid is extraordinarily dangerous.” One of my favorite actors, Paul Sparks, who plays the FBI agent is just like, “Look, this kid brought down a satellite designed to detect a nuclear event. That’s not cool. We can’t just let that happen.” Similarly the ranch is like, “Look, we believe this boy is the conduit to the rapture. This is where we drink the Kool-Aid and get on the spaceship [not literally]. If he’s not here, the spaceship is not here. So we must have him.” How rational it is, who knows, but to their credit they both have a pretty fair argument for getting the boy back. The point is, none of those entities have tried to know the boy. They’re not concerned about the boy. “What does the boy need?” Only his parents care about that, and that’s how life is.

Capone: Probably more than any of your other films, you’ve built this film around a mystery. It’s not a mystery that you wait until the very end to reveal, but you do reveal slices of is as we go on. As you’re writing and editing, at what point do you figure out the pacing of parceling out information and revealing your mystery?

JN: It’s like taking a man to a desert and giving him a drop of water every once and a while. They really appreciate that water if you give it to them. This is the leanest script I’ve ever written, on purpose. All those dynamics were built into the original outline of the film. That being said, when you think about what the movie’s trying to say, which is a film about parenthood, we just don’t know these answers. When Mike Shannon first read the script, he’s like, “Alright, you’ve got to tell me, why do I want to get him to this place? Why?” I was like, “It’s because you believe it’s right for him, but you don’t know. You really don’t know. But you think it’s what he needs, but you don’t know.” And that’s parenthood.

It would actually be disingenuous to give Mike’s character some knowledge of that. That’s not how parenting works. So one, it supports the thematic point and that part of the movie. Also though, it’s just this narrative experiment that I’ve been trying since SHOTGUN STORIES. Before I sent the script of SHOTGUN STORIES to Mike Shannon, and I’ve told this story before, I removed this monologue about how he got shot in the back, and the movie got a lot better. And I, maybe too much so, was struck by the power of that. I don’t think I’ll ever make a movie this oblique again, because this was the ultimate experiment. I’m not saying I get away with it all the time; I probably don’t, because I have some opinions of when it works and when it maybe doesn’t work as well. But I was excited someone let me try.


Capone: Without giving too much away, how much research did you do regarding the science-fiction part of this, into alternate universes?

JN: There’s a book about multiverses that I spent a little bit of time with. I saw the different options, but they’re all theoretical, obviously. What I really tried to do was treat the sci-fi elements the same way I treat wardrobe or locations or lighting, which is, how do we ground these into as much reality as possible? How do we make these things feel organic? Because movies are all fake. Everything about them is fake. In a way, the effects are no more fake than the cars they’re driving or the clothes they’re wearing. They’re all a part of a calculated decision that you’re trying to make feel honest and real. /



When I looked at, okay, this boy is a conduit—and this is when you start getting into the territory of revealing too much—how does the universe communicate? It communicates through light. That’s how we know that other stars and planets exist. They send us their light. So it would make sense that the unifying language between universes would be light. And the eyes are the gateway to the soul. That’s where it comes out of. I’ve read some nerd blogs and other things, and they’re like, “He’s ripping off this. He’s ripping off that.” They’re absolutely right. Sure I am. But it’s a little bit more than that. It just makes sense. If we’re talking about levels of consciousness, that’s kind of how it would manifest itself. It made sense to me. I wasn’t sitting around thinking about Cyclops from X-Men or any bullshit like that.


Capone: Who’s accusing you of that?

JN: The message boards. Damn the message boards.

Capone: There’s a language to this movie that reminds me of films about someone dying, a loss. Maybe “mourning” is the wrong word, but loss is a part of this. You said before because of your son’s illness, that was a fear. Is that in there?

JN: Yes, but there’s something else. When I was driving to work one day to work on this script at my writing office, Sandy Hook happened. I haven't cried since I was a kid, but with a son at home you immediately start to imagine that situation. I just couldn’t handle it. I think as a nation, we did a pretty good job of grieving after 9/11. I think we should have done that after Sandy Hook, and we didn’t. I think it was too horrible. I think it was too horrifying, and we couldn't attach the danger to anything. We couldn’t say it was terrorists from the Middle East. It was us. It was a twisted, sick part of us that did that, and it fucking terrifies me, and it’s just sad. I don’t think anybody’s talked about it. I heard there’s a documentary at Sundance about it [NEWTOWN], which I won’t watch, because I can’t fricking handle it.

Capone: Are you going to be at SXSW next week? It’s playing there too.

JN: I am. I won’t watch it.

Capone: I missed it at Sundance, but I’m seeing it there.



JN: I can’t handle it, man. I can’t handle it. I think that’s part of this. I think that fear gripped our nation, and it certainly gripped me. I can’t be a writer open to the universe and not include that because it was directly related on a more universal scale to the thing I was going through in my personal life. It’s heavy, but it’s what we’re here for.

When we first started working on this, I was speaking to a dialect coach that was going to help us, and she was from Ireland, and we had this really nice conversation about how she works and stuff. We’d sent her the script. At the end of it, she said, “Your script is very hard for me.” I was like, “I’m sorry?” I was just in the middle of pre-production. She says, “Well, it’s been four years since I lost my son.” And it floored me. I don’t think I had realized exactly everything I was dealing with in the script. That was a conceptual fear for me, but I never had spoken to anyone for whom that was an actual event that happened, and the fact that someone drew that out of their life. I was very struck by that. I know this sounds bizarre, but I was proud of it. I was trying to put into some form this feeling that I had after my son’s seizure and after Sandy Hook, and I don’t think I really did. I don’t think the movie really has it’s hands around it, the same as a movie like TAKE SHELTER or SHOTGUN STORIES. It’s too unwieldy. But I was struck when someone else got it so clearly.


Capone: Don’t you love it when someone else tells you something about your movie that is absolutely true, and you don’t even realize?

JN: Yeah, it’s scary. It’s scary.

Capone: A lot of relatively new directors with much less experience than you are taking huge leaps into bigger films, and I know you grazed that at Warner Bros.…

JN: I’ve grazed it a few times. Warner Bros. just got revealed because of the North Koreans [meaning the Sony email hack].

Capone: That’s true. Are you sort of interested in that at all?

JN: Definitely interested. I love the scale of those movies, and I love the reach of them. Hell, I had a 20-minute phoner the other day in New York with this guy. It was a really nice interview about MIDNIGHT SPECIAL. The last goddamn question he asked me was about AQUAMAN. Guess what got printed? And guess what went everywhere?

Capone: I saw it.

JN: Of course. The reach of those things is pretty astounding. So it definitely interests me. I’ve done this five times now, because I’ve made another film after this, and what I’ve realized and what’s become crystal clear to me is that the process— the way you make a movie—dictates the movie. And I have a very distinct process. I’ve developed that. I’ve been allowed to develop that, possibly though a lack of success [laughs], and so I realize how I make movies. And if anybody sees my movies and thinks they would like to see that on a larger scale and wants to allow me that process on a larger scale, then we’ve got something to talk about.

Capone: When I read that stuff about AQUAMAN—

JN: I tried to be quite diplomatic about it.

Capone: I would love to have seen your take on it, because I know it was not going to be what James Wan is going to do.

JN: It was good. I haven’t heard what he’s doing. It will probably be bad ass.

Capone: I’m not saying it would be better or worse, believe me. I dig his movies.

JN: Mine would have been different. Not knowing anything about his, I can probably guarantee that mine would have been a little different.

Capone: What can you say anything about LOVING?

JN: [Points to Joel Edgerton, who is sitting at the bar nearby] That guy deserves an Oscar.

Capone: And I love Ruth Negga. She’s a tremendous actress.

JN: He deserves an Oscar. She REALLY deserves an Oscar. I can’t wait for people to see this movie.

Capone: Will we get to see it this year?

JN: I hope so. Focus bought it out of Berlin. They bought it off just seeing the first six minutes. Just the other night, we finally showed Focus the whole cut, and it’s still being edited. I hope it gets out this year. It needs to get out this year. I think that’s going to be the plan. I don’t know how yet. They’re talking strategy and all this other business, which is their job not mine. But it’s a beautiful film.

Capone: Not to make it sound overly calculated, but the atmosphere seems right for a film…

JN: That’s either going to work for us or against us, sideways, backways, who knows? I’ve been working on this movie for four years, so serendipity or not, I don’t know. These are topics people need to talk about: marriage equality, grace. The thing about the movie is, and the reason I was drawn to it, these are extraordinarily apolitical people. That’s kind of what makes it work.

Capone: I knew a woman in college who's parents were the first interracial couple to get married in Maryland, so when I saw what the story of this film was about, I was shocked. They were probably married in the late ’60s or early ’70s.

JN: They probably got married as a result of the Loving case. Loving v. Virginia came down in 1967. It’s one of the most important civil rights cases in our nation’s history. And we’ve got a Supreme Court justice we’ve got to get in there, so it’s a good time to think about the power of the Supreme Court.



-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
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