“At any one
time I have five or six stories going around in my head”, writer and director
Jeff Nichols says, while moulding some imaginary thing between his hands like a
potter at a wheel. “I’ll pick one up, work on it for a while, then lay it down
and pick up another. The longer I work on them, the better they get. I first
had the idea for Mud when I was nineteen and have been thinking about it on and
off ever since.”
Today
Nichols looks like a lanky Marty McFly in jeans and trainers, a flannel shirt
and red sleeveless body-warmer, his thick sandy hair swept into a peak. At 34,
he appears at least a decade younger, relaxed and thoughtful, brimming with
enthusiasm for his new film and the work of those writers and directors that
have influenced him; “Malick, Spielberg, John Sayles, John Carpenter. Man, I’ll
tell you, John Carpenter is a hero to me…”
Nichols
grew up in the city of Little Rock, hometown of former President Bill Clinton,
deep in the American South. He was a child of the Arkansas suburbs with a
passion for comics, television and movies. “When we were kids, my father would
take us to the movies a couple of times a week. I was fascinated by the theater
of watching films, if you know what I mean; the ritual of it. The audience
settle into their seats, the lights go down and the curtain goes back. It has
always been tremendously exciting for me.”
That thrill
of witnessing a story unfolding is apparent in Nichols’ first feature, Shotgun
Stories. A sparse and literary story of feuding Arkansas farming stock, the
film featured a star-making turn from Nichols’ best friend “and muse, I
suppose” Michael Shannon. His follow-up, Take Shelter starred Shannon again as
a man despairingly trying to protect his family from his terrifying visions of
the end of the world. Now he has swapped the dusty plains and anonymous suburbs
for the lush green banks of the Arkansas river for Mud, another family-focused
drama about two teenage boys Ellis and Neckbone (played by Tye Sheridan and
newcomer Jacob Lofland) who encounter a fugitive (Matthew McConaughey) hiding out on an island in the
Arkansas delta. Acting in secret, they help him evade the bounty hunters on his
trail while re-uniting him with his long-lost true love (Reese Witherspoon).
“You could
call it a coming of age story”, Nichols says, “I’m comfortable with that
definition, but that wasn’t the original intention. I sat down to write a
getaway film, a chase movie. But once I had this character who was a fourteen
year old boy, he connected to all these other things that were floating around
in my head at that time and I found I had stumbled into something else that was
far more interesting.” What kind of things? “Well, my wife and I were expecting
our first child and I was thinking about fatherhood and father figures,
mentors, people who will help you along in life. I was thinking about
communities and how they form and function, because I was about to add one to
that number. Pretty heavy stuff”.
I ask
Nichols how much of the film is autobiographical and he spreads his arms wide.
“The first connection, for me, is always a sense of place. I didn’t grow up on
the river, I wasn’t a river-rat like Ellis and Neckbone, but I had spent time
in their world and felt close to it. With each of my films, I try and find one
emotional connection to my own life, something that is physical and palpable.
Ellis standing in a parking lot getting his heart broken is exactly and
precisely me at the age of fourteen. I remember I had a physical reaction when
that girl let me down that day, nauseous and light headed. It played out almost
exactly as you see it in the film. Similarly, Shotgun Stories came from a deep
fear that one of my brothers would be killed or murdered somehow. And in Take
Shelter I was trying to recapture a momentary anxiety that I had that if my
marriage fell apart, the world would end too. Like a total deterioration. These
are feelings within me, not always rational or reasonable, but once I can
anchor the film to that, the rest of it can be about anything.”
Once the
kernel of an idea comes to him, his approach is to flesh it out with characters
that he knows intimately. “Ellis and Neckbone are basically two sides of my
personality, the fantasist and the realist. To bring them into the story, I
just think about who they are, what they want and how they can achieve that. I
try to make that as realistic as possible and as close a match as I can to the
kind of experiences I have had myself. A lot of times I think filmmakers are
only concerned with plot. They’ll say, “I am making a movie about this or
that”, as if defining it in two sentences or less is somehow a positive. I
think that is a bad way to tell stories.”
Nichols
describes his method of screenwriting as “mostly thinking, then typing”.
Relating how, one summer a couple of years back, he had two films on his mind,
he tells me how he sat down to write them both at the same time. One became
Take Shelter, the other became Mud. “They’d been knocking around for a while.
They had to come out. I made Take Shelter before Mud because I knew with this
film I was going to have to shoot in boats and on sets built on water. To do
that effectively takes time and costs money. Take Shelter has a lot more
special effects but oddly, in comparison, it was a simpler film to make.
Whatever we achieve in Mud we did it practically, with effort and sweat.”
Before it
came to shooting, however, Nichols had another practical problem to address.
“When you write a script with two teenage boys as the central characters, you
just have to believe that the actors to play them are out there, somewhere, and
that you will find them. It’s a leap of faith”. I ask him if casting the film
was a drawn-out process, and he laughs. “Not at all. In a funny way, the
universe delivered them right to my doorstep, quite literally in the case of
Tye Sheridan”. Sheridan, who had just turned fourteen when he was cast, came to
Mud through Nichol’s producer Sarah Green, who had produced Terence Malick’s
The Tree of Life and had spent more than a year on set with the young actor as
he played one of Brad Pitt’s sons in 1950s Texas. “When I talked to Sarah, her
first reaction was to call for Tye. He was about 11 when he was working on Tree
of Life and it was an extraordinary experience for him. When we met he was just
the embodiment of the character I had written. He looked like him, talked like
him, behaved as I thought Ellis would. He’s extraordinary”.
As good as
Sheridan’s performance is, it wouldn’t be nearly as effective without the
presence of Neckbone; a tough, self-sufficient kid who rides a motorbike he
built himself from scrap and speaks with the voice of reason. “For Neckbone, we
put an ad in the paper. I knew Malick had done that to find Tye, so I figured
it was the way to go. What I didn’t know was that Malick had received about
another ten thousand audition tapes”. Casting Neckbone was big news in
Arkansas, Nichols says, “like someone winning the lottery. What happened was
that Jacob Lufland’s mother saw the ad and thought our description sounded a lot
like her son. He had never acted before, never even thought about it. I knew
very early on that he was the right guy.”
Nichols’
luck continued with casting continued with finding the grown-up actors from a
deep pool of fellow Southerners, but he only ever had one actor in mind for his
lead. “From day one I wrote the part of Mud for Matthew McConaughey to
play”. The fact that Nichols
had never met McConaughey,
and had no idea if the actor knew of his existence, didn’t matter. “He didn’t
return my phone calls for a long time and it took some convincing to get him to
read the script but we got there”. I tell Nichols that, for a long time, McConaughey
was better known for taking his shirt off than his acting abilities and the
director nods his head. “He takes his shirt off in my movie too, but only
because it was hellish hot. We
talked about all that though and he told me that he was working in a very
confined space, as an actor, in the studio romantic comedies he made for the
last couple of years. He couldn’t be too happy or too sad, too bright or too
dark, too up or too down. Those characters exist between these two points which
are actually very close to one another. What’s great about Mud, according to
Matthew, is that we can go wherever we want to”.
Like all of
his films so far, Mud is set in his home state and the director feels a deep
responsibility to represent the place as it really is. It’s a part of America
that isn’t often depicted on screen, he says, where money is tight and
communities are even tighter. “There are very few movies about poor people and
the working class”, Nichols explains, “and these are the people I have the most
respect for. When it comes to developing a character, the first thing I do is
give them a job. Our work defines so much about who we are. I’m always confused
when I watch a movie where everyone is an advertising executive living in a
penthouse and driving an extravagantly flashy car. Who are these people? How
can they afford to live to live like this? I just can’t relate to them.”
There’s
more to Nichols’ determination to hew to reality than providing a backdrop to
his stories: he needs his characters to carry their own authenticity. “Take
Ellis’ father, for instance (played by Ray McKinnon). He is a small-scale
commercial fisherman, and that tells us things we need to know about him: his
love and respect for the river that gives him his livelihood, his connection to
his community and his personal history and life experiences. I don’t have to
spell all that background detail out for the audience; the character can do
that for me. Films are about behaviour. There are two elements to any
screenplay: one is action, the other is dialogue. Both of these things are
driven by behaviour. If I just got up and walked out of the room right now,
that would say something to you. I don’t have to share my reasons, or say
anything at all, but you’re left here to deal with the consequences of my
behaviour.”
He stays
seated, thankfully, and continues. “So, I want my films to be rooted in character.
I’ll have the big idea, like a fugitive hiding out on an island in a river, but
the rest of it comes from character. Who is the fugitive? Who are the people
who help him? Why are they helping him? What’s going on around them? I’m not
just asking them to advance my plot and get me to a certain place. I want to
know who they are. Everything is borne out of those characters and if you get
them right, the rest falls into place. Ultimately, if you’re building towards
that physical emotion I was talking about earlier, that kick in the stomach,
the audience will feel it more if you have been honest with them all the way
through. If you’re not, it won’t feel real. You might have this cool idea and
manoeuvre everything to make it happens, but really you’re just putting words
in your characters mouths”.
Nichols has
more stories he’s been turning over, with the two most likely to become his
next films precipitating a move away from Arkansas. “I have this
science-fiction story I’ve been working on called Midnight Special. It’s just a
little chase movie with speculative elements. And there’s a road movie, a biker
film told from a woman’s point of view set in 1960s California. But I won’t
write anything down until I have the movie in my head, from start to finish”.
