Filmmaker Jeff Nichols illuminates 'Midnight…
Filmmaker Jeff Nichols illuminates 'Midnight Special' and his path to making it
By Chicago Tribune |
"Midnight Special" is many movies in one: a chase flick, a science-fiction fantasy, a father-and-son odyssey, a story with elements familiar from, among other filmmakers, Steven Spielberg in his "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" mode and John Carpenter a la "Starman."
It's also "delicate" and "weird," in writer-director Jeff Nichols' words. It's his fourth feature, following "Shotgun Stories" (2007), a side-winding tale of revenge shot in his home state of Arkansas; "Take Shelter" (2011), the ending of which is still being debated on podcasts and at dinner tables around the world; and "Mud" (2014), starring Matthew McConaughey as a fugitive near the Mississippi River who becomes an unreliable friend to a young boy at risk.
"Midnight Special" is bigger than those in one obvious way: Its $23 million production budget exceeds the costs of Nichols' previous three films put together, by many millions.
The story concerns a boy with extraterrestrial powers and a slew of adults, including his parents, who have clashing ideas about what's best for him.
Though it has sparing but elaborate visual effects, this is no conventional effects-driven machine. It's a funky, offbeat, character-driven yarn, starring Michael Shannon (Nichols' steady good-luck charm) as the father, Kirsten Dunst as the mother, Jaden Lieberher as the boy in the swimming goggles, Adam Driver as a NASA adviser and Joel Edgerton as the Shannon character's friend and partner in what initially looks like a kidnapping.
"Midnight Special" made its world premiere earlier this year at the Berlin Film Festival and took its North American bow recently at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.
I'm speaking with Nichols, 37, during an interview in Chicago, over breakfast. Since 2002, he has made his home in Austin, where his wife, Missy, worked for nearly 20 years at Texas Monthly. Their son, Samuel, is 5.
"Midnight Special," Nichols says, grew directly out of the up-and-down experience he had with "Mud." At the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, "Mud" premiered on the closing weekend. Creative Artists Agency, seeking a distributor for it, decided to pre-screen it at the front end of the festival for buyers.
That screening, Nichols says with a wince, did not go well. "Harvey Weinstein walked out after an hour, and the buzz was bad right away," he says. It took three more months for "Mud" to land a distribution deal. In the end it was "underseen," as he puts it.
"It was a weird time," he says. "I went home that summer after Cannes while 'Mud' was trying to find its way out into the world, and wrote 'Midnight Special' which, to be honest, was a bit of a reaction to the 'Mud" situation. I wanted to write something as lean as I possibly could and that didn't indulge in any exposition whatsoever."
Still, says Nichols, "it's amazing how far you can get into a plot before you figure out what you're doing." The chase element of "Midnight Special," he says, allowed him to develop his facility with cross-cutting. "I wanted to make a propulsive movie, or at least my idea of a propulsive movie. That was also a reaction to 'Mud,' which was specific to its point of view, hanging with that boy, seeing everything through his eyes."
Initially "Midnight Special" was slated for a Thanksgiving 2015 release, but Nichols says, "I didn't make Warner Bros. a clear awards-contender. They weren't really sure what I'd made for them. I just hope people like it."
The through-line in all of Nichols' work so far is Shannon. The filmmaker remembers driving him to the Little Rock, Arkansas, airport after the three-week "Shotgun Stories" shoot, done on a tiny budget. "He looks at me and says: 'Well, Nichols … at least we know you can write.' And after he got out of the car, I was, like, wow, that's nice to — wait, what did he just tell me?"
With each new project, Nichols has tried to find the truest, cleanest way into a scene visually, while keeping the scene-to-scene rhythm somewhat unpredictable.
His next film is already in the editing phase, and Nichols, in an atypical moment, calls it his most beautiful movie to date. "Loving" is the title, and it came to fruition after the makers of the HBO documentary "The Loving Story" met with him to persuade him to adapt the true-life subjects for a feature.
Richard and Mildred Loving successfully challenged the state of Virginia's ban on interracial marriage in a 1967 court case that resounds today in the legal arguments on behalf of same-sex marriage. "Midnight Special" co-star Edgerton plays Richard, opposite the lesser-known Ruth Negga as Mildred. Shannon plays a key supporting role.
Focus Features plans to open "Loving" in late November, the same slot that fared nicely, in terms of the awards season, for "The Theory of Everything" two years ago.
"It's a simple, quiet film," Nichols says, attempting as always to stand up for his work while managing expectations. A few seconds later, he tells me that he feels extraordinarily lucky in both his life and his career. "I've been just unsuccessful enough," he says, "not to have been given a big opportunity too soon."