Nichols lights up sci-fi with sincerity – ‘Midnight Special’ a chase movie

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NEW YORK, March 17, (Agencies): Jeff Nichols’ “Midnight Special” — a sci-fi mystery that plays out in a clandestine, nocturnal chase from Texas to Florida — began with an idea of light in the writer-director’s mind, and a desire to recapture the cryptic thrill of science-fiction films like “Starman” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

But it wasn’t until after Nichols, the 37-year-old writer-director of “Mud” and “Take Shelter,” was driving to his writing office in Austin, Texas, one day when he knew what “Midnight Special” would be about. That was when he heard the news of Sandy Hook.

“This movie, it’s a silly sci-fi chase movie, but at its heart is me trying to deal with that: Pulling over to the side of the road and hearing about children being shot and picturing my son being afraid in his final moments and just being devastated,” says Nichols. “Does the movie reach those heights? Probably not. Is it good that it doesn’t? Maybe. But this is what I was feeling.”

“Midnight Special,” which Warner Bros will release Friday, is the first studio film for Nichols whose films — personal tales rooted in classically American moviemaking — have made the Arkansas native one of the most exciting voices in independent film. “Midnight Special” finds him developing his command of special effects in a bigger budget production than he’s done in the past, yet remaining a steadfastly sincere storyteller.

Possesses

“The thing that Jeff possesses in spades is if you carved his heart out, I’m sure it would be heavier than most people,” says Joel Edgerton, a co-star in the film. “He feels things very deeply. His films are infused with an emotion that generally trends toward family and love and protection and care. Even if there’s violence, it’s because it’s spurred on by the lack of those things.”

In “Midnight Special,” Michael Shannon (who has appeared in every movie by Nichols, beginning with his debut, “Shotgun Stories”) stars as the father to 8-year-old Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), a boy who possesses a mysterious special power. Alton, who wears goggles to cover eyes that can illuminate in searing beams of light, has attracted the pursuit of the government (Adam Driver plays a sensitive NSA agent) and the religious sect from which his father is trying to rescue him.

The film, patient but explosive, metes out exposition slowly and leaves some questions unanswered. It opens with a Chevelle throttling through the night, headlights off, with the father and his accomplice (Edgerton) driving with night-vision goggles. Their mission is vague and uncertain, but Shannon’s father is compelled by a faith in his son and a determination to shepherd Alton where he needs to go.

“That’s parenthood,” Nichols, who has a 5-year-old son with his wife, said in an interview over lunch in Greenwich Village. “Just because you believe in something doesn’t mean you understand it. In fact, usually you don’t.”

“Midnight Special” is a kind of companion to Nichols’ “Take Shelter” (2011), which grew out of his anxiety in becoming a parent. Shannon played a paranoid father who sees literal storm clouds on the horizon.

Fear

“Fear has been the basis of all of my movies, almost,’” says Nichols. “‘Shotgun Stories’ was about the fear of losing my brother. ‘Take Shelter’ was the fear of the entire world falling apart and the fear of becoming a parent. ‘Midnight Special’ was the fear of losing my child. But fear in and of itself is not a story. It’s a catalyst that creates something.”

“Mud,” a Mark Twain-esque coming-of-age tale set along the Mississippi and co-starring Matthew McConaughey, was very well received and selected for the Cannes Film Festival. But it struggled to find a distributor and wasn’t much promoted. Nichols grants that the experience “shook my confidence.”

But “Mud” inspired the interest of Warner Bros., which gave Nichols final cut on “Midnight Special.” Speaking positively about his studio experience, Nichols feels emboldened to try a $100 million film, should the right opportunity present itself.

“The reason I’m more interested in it now is: I know what to ask for,” says Nichols, whose crew is populated by regular collaborators like cinematographer Adam Stone, editor Julie Monroe and production designer Chad Keith. “I know what I need to make a film my way.”

Nichols next film, currently being edited, is “Loving,” about the interracial couple Richard (Edgerton) and Mildred Loving (Ruth Negga) whose marriage made them criminals in Virginia in the 1950s. Focus Features will release it in November, placing it the heart of awards season.

“Jeff’s very comfortable around me, but sometimes being comfortable is not the best thing for art,” says Shannon, who has a small part in “Loving.” ‘’It’s not such a bad thing for him to work with somebody like Ruth. It’s a different kind of story for him and it’s good for him to branch out.”

For the ever-progressing filmmaker, “Loving” may be yet another evolution. At the film’s mention, Nichols cups his hands over this reporter’s voice recorder and whispers: “It’s the best movie I’ve ever made.”

“It’s very quiet. It’s very silent. It’s very painful. It’s very beautiful,” he says. “In a time where the political debates around marriage equality and around race are so heated, this film just cuts through it. It’s just about these two people.”

“Midnight Special,” opening March 18, is the fourth collaboration between director Jeff Nichols and actor Michael Shannon. A studio movie made with the resources a genre story demands, it’s a far cry from the shoestring budget beginnings of their first effort, Nichols’ 2007 debut “Shotgun Stories.” But it’s also unusual in that the director maintained an independent writer-director voice within a Warner Bros system that, of late, is focused on cranking out franchise blockbuster fare. That began right at the top with casting choice.

“There’s a lot of this that is a culmination of a relationship that has grown and flourished,” says “Midnight” producer Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, who represented Nichols as an agent on his first film. “I don’t think there’s been a bigger metamorphosis of a filmmaker from uber-indie and scratching it out, to being able to make a studio movie while not getting stuck in the financing bubble of, ‘I’ve got to put one of seven guys in it.’ He was able to say, ‘I’m going with the guy I believe in, and who believed in me.’”

The first time Nichols saw Shannon’s work — in a Sundance labs scene written and directed by one of his film school professors, viewed on a low-quality VHS cassette — the Little Rock, Ark. native was struck by an authentic Southern voice he had heard only in films like “Sling Blade.” It wasn’t hackneyed or overt.

“That got lodged in my head, and when I wrote ‘Shotgun Stories,’ I wrote it with that voice in mind,” Nichols says.

The seeds of a fruitful collaboration had been planted, but Nichols only hoped he could push through his draft, scrounge together an operable budget and populate the film — which focused on two feuding sets of half-brothers in a small Arkansas town — with similarly authentic actors.

Meanwhile, Shannon, a theater actor who had successfully made the transition to movies, found himself on a promising character actor track. He turned up in big Hollywood films like Michael Bay’s “Pearl Harbor” and Cameron Crowe’s “Vanilla Sky,” with Tom Cruise, but felt like he was moving in the wrong direction.

“I pulled away from that and went back to Chicago doing storefront theater again,” Shannon recalls. “That’s who I am underneath, just a storefront theater actor, and I felt like if I floated away into the Hollywood dream, I would disappear or something.”

Related Nichols Retains Indie Mojo With ‘Midnight Special’

That’s when Nichols, who had worked up the courage to approach the actor after seeking out his contact information from his old professor, came calling. It was a risky prospect for Shannon, working with a first-time director on a minuscule $45,000 budget, but he was drawn into the world Nichols had created on the page.

“Nobody writes like Jeff,” Shannon says. “His screenplays are so bare and so full at the same time. They have so much potential in them for the other artists involved to make a contribution. Sometimes you get a script and it’s like a coloring book. You go, ‘Oh, I’ve just got to color the apple red and the tree green.’ But Jeff’s scripts aren’t like that. You really have to participate.”

There were none of the usual amenities, either. Nichols’ mother prepared meals for the cast and crew, who bunked up barracks-style throughout production. But the director was still learning, and he was eager to soak up any guidance Shannon could afford.

“I think he used me as a barometer of, ‘Am I doing this right,’” Shannon says. “But of course while there are rules and systems and things like that, the best art is the art that defies those rules and goes outside of them. So Jeff would say, ‘This must be the weirdest movie you’ve ever been on,’ and I would say, ‘Well, that’s a good thing.’”

Nichols was moving swiftly through the shoot, however, keeping a vigilant eye on the cost of production and the resources available. Three days in, he was already ahead of schedule, shooting just one or two takes before moving on.

“I was so worried about running out of film stock,” Nichols says. “But Mike pulled me aside and said, ‘Listen, everybody else on this set just wants to have a lunch break and go home. We are the only ones who are going to have to live with the consequences of what we do here today.’ He was basically telling me that just checking the boxes and getting the shots is not enough. ‘This is it. This is the only chance you have.’ And now I’m starting to paraphrase for him, because he doesn’t talk this much, but that was what was transferred to my brain: ‘We’re the ones who have to live with this. Your name’s going to be on it and my face is going to be on it, so let’s do something worthy of our time.’ He started teaching me how to direct.”

It became a collaboration of few words. Nichols and Shannon even relished the practice of not rehearsing material on set. “I like to keep the juice in the lemon,” Shannon would say.

Nichols sent the actor his script for “Take Shelter,” about an Ohio man afflicted with visions of an oncoming tragedy who obsessively outfits a backyard storm shelter, and got a concise “it’s brilliant” by text message. “That’s all he said,” Nichols says. “And we never talked about what his character was trying to achieve or what his problem was, was his character crazy or not crazy — we never talked about any of that. I think I talked to him a little bit about the research I did on schizophrenia, but not much.”

Nichols had also written the script at a watershed time in his own life, the anxiety of being an expectant father working its way into the DNA of the film. But while the story on the page was laced with existential dread, on set, Nichols had attained newfound confidence.

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