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With the arrival of Midnight Special, director Jeff Nichols is fulfilling a childhood dream of making big-budget movies with substance. The director of such beloved underseen indies as Take Shelter and Shotgun Stories and the sleeper hit Mud, Nichols now has his biggest opportunity yet to tell personal stories for a mass audience.
But unlike other recent indie sensations who have gotten their big breaks by slipping seamlessly into pre-existing franchises, Nichols is making his first studio movie resolutely on his own terms. A blend of 70s Close Encounters–style sci-fi and a deeply felt family story, Midnight Special flirts with genre while going its own way—more precisely, answering far fewer questions about its supernatural leanings than most studio films dare. Even Nichols admits it’s a bit of a stubborn response to audiences who might have balked at the ambiguity of his previous films.
“I was like, ‘Fuck this. Fuck everybody. You don’t like these speeches? You think this is too cute?
Well, here’s Midnight Special.’ I’m going to take out every piece of fucking information in this movie and just give you the essence of what this thing is.” He pauses. “Perhaps I overcorrected.” So how does a guy get handed a studio budget and final cut and turn in a movie that refuses to give an audience what it wants?
It’s a story that involves tenacity, long stretches of poverty, a little bit of luck, and a filmmaker who promises, even as he chases that big success, “I am going to make movies about who I am.”. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Nichols was always certain of only two things: that he wanted to make movies, and that he needed to leave his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, to make them. In the University of North Carolina School of the Arts film program he had the type of enriching experience that colleges are designed to provide; he was introduced to artists like author Larry Brown (“he just blew the back of my head open”) and his chief filmmaking inspiration, Terrence Malick. These were the halcyon days, says Nichols, “where they didn’t know how to keep us from doing cool stuff.”. One of those “cool” things was his trip to the Cannes Film Festival in 2000, via a Kodak internship, where he wore a tuxedo purchased by his mom at Dillard’s and sat in the nosebleed section, taking it all in. “This is it,” he remembers thinking.
“This is how people are supposed to watch movies.” Without a feature script to sell out of film school, Nichols moved back home with his parents for a year and banged out a script while working for minimum wage at a pizza place. “Life was getting dark fast,” he recalls.
As most of his film school friends moved to Los Angeles, Nichols—uninterested in fetching coffee on a studio lot—moved to Austin, Texas, instead, and was hired on Margaret Brown’s film Be Here to Love Me. It was Brown who gifted Nichols a copy of Sam Shepard’s Motel Chronicles, a title “so cool” it inspired the name of Nichols’s first feature, Shotgun Stories. She’s also the person who set him up with a roommate, Missy; five years later she would become Nichols’s wife. Nichols spent the bulk of 2003 repeating one line to himself: “Make a movie in September of 2004.” With money inherited from one grandmother, begged from another, and borrowed from everyone else who loved him, Nichols was “desperate to just make something.” That something was Shotgun Stories, a family drama set in rural Arkansas starring Michael Shannon, already an established Chicago theater actor. “We shot the whole movie blind, because I couldn’t afford to pay for dailies,” Nichols says. Each day he and the crew cautiously waded into the unknown as footage stacked up in the office inside his dad’s furniture store. When Shotgun Stories was submitted to (and promptly rejected by) Sundance, “It broke my heart,” he says.
But Nichols and his supportive team rallied. Shotgun Stories was accepted into the Berlinale—the Berlin International Film Festival—and a series of festivals after that, which allowed Nichols to travel “around the world with the movie” penniless. “I was so broke,” he says. “They had these filmmaker receptions, and I’d stick food in my pockets. I was drinking free beer and getting real drunk because I was so hungry.” Shotgun Stories earned critical acclaim, including a spot on Rogert Ebert’s 2008 list of the best movies of the year, but only led to offers like the one Nichols received shortly after its late 2007 release.
Jeff and Missy had just sent out their invitations for their March 29, 2008, wedding. When the job came through and the producer told Nichols, “You’re moving to Louisiana in two weeks,” Nichols protested, “That’s my wedding.” The producer’s response? “You need to think about what your priorities are.” Nichols remembers this encounter in painful detail.
“She started crying, and I started crying. You know, do we move the wedding date? What do we do about this? And we decided we’re not going to move the wedding date.
We’ll figure it out.” Within the month, the studio went bankrupt. An apologetic phone call from the producer never came. The film will be released this year, though, with a shockingly talentless pop star at its center. “My wife and I joke about it a lot,” Nichols says now. “Never move the wedding date. Because these movies are thin air until you’re sitting in the theater watching it.
They’re all fake.”. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
Two years after Shotgun Stories—a gap that might as well be two decades in the film industry—Nichols started anew. Inspired by The Hurt Locker, which he believed to be Kathryn Bigelow’s remake of Point Break (“but as an indie film”), “I thought, let me make a genre film like an independent film, which ended up being Take Shelter.” A story about a father (Shannon) who is convinced the end of the world is nigh, Take Shelter brims with the urgency of someone fighting for his livelihood—which is precisely what Nichols was doing at the time, expecting his first child even as his bank account continued to dwindle. With pressure mounting from all angles, Nichols describes how he nearly fell apart one day on set, when a tricky special effect involving water went awry. “I try not to yell, but this was fucked,” he recalls. It was cinematographer Adam Stone, who has worked on all of Nichols’s movies, who stepped forward with a solution. “Not to get cheesy about it, but that was the beginning of understanding what it means to have a family of people help make your movie,” he says. “They were babies.
We were all babies back then.” Accepted into Sundance, Take Shelter, like Shotgun Stories, met with critical acclaim but not much else. With a six-month old child to feed, a big studio “offered me a million dollars” to remake an 80s horror classic, Nichols remembers. “You’re tested with doing one for them, or doing one for you,” says Nichols. The next one for him? Mud, which had potential producers immediately vexed: “Why would you ever want to go make this obscure indie film with an actor that no one likes anymore?” The actor was Matthew McConaughey, who would star in Mud one year before winning the Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club. “And then Mud comes out,” says Nichols, still exasperated, “and that whole saga happens where nobody wants to buy it.” The film premiered at Cannes to a “terrible buyers’ screening.” “ Harvey Weinstein walked out an hour in, apparently.
I didn’t know it, but my film was tanking. It was dying.” This triggered Nichols’s depression, which had remained dormant since his days as a pizza delivery boy. “I was questioning my sanity,” he says. “I was like, Mud’s good. Maybe it’s not as intellectual as Take Shelter, but it’s really good.” Sitting in distribution purgatory, Roadside Attractions teamed with Lionsgate to put the film in theaters.
“Not only are they not buying the film, we actually paid them to release it.” With limited promotional support from Lionsgate, Mud beat the odds, going on to gross $32 million worldwide. Until Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine was released, the movie was the highest-grossing independent film of 2013. That success catapulted Nichols into another stratosphere, at least mentally. He was no longer entirely comfortable operating in the indie world. His heart was set on Warner Bros., “the studio for filmmakers,” he believes. “They have Clint Eastwood, Christopher Nolan, Ben Affleck,” he explains.
“They did smart fan boy stuff really well, which is the way I saw the marketing aspect for my movie.” He made an impassioned case, but the exalted studio politely passed. And then the phone rang. “My agent rang and said, ‘The head of Warner Bros. Just saw Mud and flipped out. He wants to meet you.’ ” There was one condition that Nichols had to put on the table from the start. “There’s a problem,” Nichols told Warner Bros. Production executive Jeff Robinov.
“I only work with final cut. I know you guys are a studio, and I’m a young guy, and you don’t know me. But that’s what I require.” Robinov sat back in his chair, silent, as Nichols tells it. “How much were you going to make this movie for?” he asked. Nichols blurted out “$18 million.” “I tell you what. You make this movie here for $18 million. I’ll even give you wiggle room up to $20 million.
You can have final cut.”. Courtesy of Warner Bros. The script for Midnight Special was written while Mud was foundering on the festival circuit.
“I was really questioning myself that summer,” Nichols says, which led to the “fuck everybody” attitude that makes Midnight Special far more ambiguous than your average sci-fi adventure. The story of a father (Shannon) and son ( Jaeden Lieberher) with extraordinary powers on the run from authorities in search of an uncertain destiny, Midnight Special is unapologetically ambitious and laconic. And it’s not for everyone. At test screenings, Nichols admits, “They weren’t too keen on it.” Audiences longed for exposition and answers. Nichols insists it’s all there. “It’s real easy to not pay attention to that film and miss a lot.,” he says.
“I did the work. You just gotta pay attention.” In the YouTube comments section for the Midnight Special trailer, which Nichols has been masochistically reading/tracking since its release, someone asks, “Is it too early to call Jeff Nichols the next Steven Spielberg?” For Nichols, that kind of expectation is as jarring as bad reviews. “People want you to be something,” he says. “They see one of your movies and like it, and they want something from you that has nothing to do with what you are.” Plenty of filmmakers have seen their careers dictated by the whims of the general public.
Nichols is the antithesis of that. He hears what you want.
He just doesn’t really give a damn. “Like the movies, don’t like the movies, like this one better than that one.
I don’t give a shit,” he declares. “I know how to make a fucking movie.
Let’s take that question off the table, which, for me, has been on the table through all of this.” Coming up later this year is Loving, also starring Midnight Specials Joel Edgerton and Shannon, about the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized interracial marriage. Picked up by Focus Features at the Berlin International Film Festival, the same place where Shotgun Stories first launched his career, it’s Nichols’s first shot at a very different kind of mainstream success—the awards, a hopeful prestige picture. But for now Nichols, a decade into making films that challenge the very audiences they target, is staying realistic about what might happen. He calls Loving “the best crafted film I’ve ever made. Which isn’t to say it’s the best film. I know how to write a movie.
I know how to direct a movie. It doesn’t mean I know how to write and direct a movie anybody will like and pay money to see.”.
One Film Together: Avatar (2009). With old-fashioned 3-D technology, a director had to film the action with two highly unwieldy cameras. Moviegoers tended to watch the often dubious results with one eye closed and a slightly queasy feeling in their stomachs. Cameron has changed all that. In the decade-long preparation for his billion-dollar-grossing sci-fi epic, Avatar, he and a team led by his director of photography, Vince Pace, developed what Cameron has called the “holy grail” camera: a digital system with adjustable lenses that functions much like two eyes connected to a single brain. (An earlier generation of the camera allowed him to film his 2003 underwater documentary, Ghosts of the Abyss.) After that, the once unfilmable-seeming Avatar became a go project, and the rest is movie history.
Like most blockbusters, Avatar is a grand spectacle with great special effects, but it became a global sensation because of its director’s command of the traditional virtues of storytelling and filmmaking. Photographed in Los Angeles on January 6, 2010. One film together: The Hurt Locker (2009). The Hurt Locker is a clear-eyed depiction of the everyday tensions faced by U.S.
Soldiers during the uneasy American occupation of Iraq. Bigelow establishes an elegiac tone while filling the frame with one intense sequence after another. Playing Staff Sergeant William James, the leader of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit who may or may not have a death wish, Renner leaps out of a journeyman’s career to establish himself as a genuine star. At first, his character is unflappable to an almost comic degree—a jaunty rebel in the mold of countless cocky heroes of previous American war films. But his protective strategies fail to hold up under the strain of his work.The Hurt Locker’.s sympathies lie entirely with the soldiers who must take the physical, emotional, and moral risks necessary to accomplish a difficult and dirty job. But the experience of Bigelow’s charming-at-first protagonist seems to mirror the larger experience of the country as a whole: We got more than we bargained for. Photographed in Los Angeles on December 14, 2009.
One film together: Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009). Daniels may be the best thing that has happened to actors since Robert Altman. His unforgettable Precious, a harrowing but ultimately hopeful domestic drama, gets its power, in large part, from the brave performances turned in by newcomer Sidibe and the multi-talented writer-comedian-actress Mo’Nique. Sidibe plays the title character—so beaten down at the start of the film—in a blunt, forthright, almost uninflected manner that works nicely against the story’s moments of high drama. As the girl’s abusive mother, Mo’Nique pulls off something equally astounding: she brings a monster to life and then, without winking at the audience, she stirs our compassion as she shows how that monster came to be. Together Daniels, Sidibe, and Mo’Nique have given voice and form to characters who might otherwise be invisible. Photographed in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 30, 2009.
One film together: Crazy Heart (2009). Anyone who falls under the spell of Crazy Heart, a boozy, all-American story set beneath bright southwestern skies, is likely to hold the opinion that it contains the best Jeff Bridges performance. He so easily embodies down-on-his-luck, whiskey-swilling country-music legend Bad Blake that moviegoers may suspect the film is a documentary-like record of the veteran actor’s secret life. But then you recall all the sneakily great work Bridges has done over the years in movies such as The Last Picture Show, Starman, Jagged Edge, The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Big Lebowski, and Iron Man and you realize his shamblingly natural and pitch-perfect work in Crazy Heart is all of a piece with just about everything else in his glorious and underappreciated career. Still, a lot of credit must go to first-time director Cooper, who worked hard to get Bridges to say yes to the part before he could begin to create the conditions that would allow his leading man to do his thing before the camera. Anyone who loves movies is happy these two were able to get together. Photographed in New York City on December 17, 2009.
One Film Together: Avatar (2009). With old-fashioned 3-D technology, a director had to film the action with two highly unwieldy cameras. Moviegoers tended to watch the often dubious results with one eye closed and a slightly queasy feeling in their stomachs. Cameron has changed all that. In the decade-long preparation for his billion-dollar-grossing sci-fi epic, Avatar, he and a team led by his director of photography, Vince Pace, developed what Cameron has called the “holy grail” camera: a digital system with adjustable lenses that functions much like two eyes connected to a single brain.
(An earlier generation of the camera allowed him to film his 2003 underwater documentary, Ghosts of the Abyss.) After that, the once unfilmable-seeming Avatar became a go project, and the rest is movie history. Like most blockbusters, Avatar is a grand spectacle with great special effects, but it became a global sensation because of its director’s command of the traditional virtues of storytelling and filmmaking. Photographed in Los Angeles on January 6, 2010. The Battle-Scarred. One film together: The Hurt Locker (2009). The Hurt Locker is a clear-eyed depiction of the everyday tensions faced by U.S.
Soldiers during the uneasy American occupation of Iraq. Bigelow establishes an elegiac tone while filling the frame with one intense sequence after another.
Playing Staff Sergeant William James, the leader of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit who may or may not have a death wish, Renner leaps out of a journeyman’s career to establish himself as a genuine star. At first, his character is unflappable to an almost comic degree—a jaunty rebel in the mold of countless cocky heroes of previous American war films. But his protective strategies fail to hold up under the strain of his work.The Hurt Locker’.s sympathies lie entirely with the soldiers who must take the physical, emotional, and moral risks necessary to accomplish a difficult and dirty job. But the experience of Bigelow’s charming-at-first protagonist seems to mirror the larger experience of the country as a whole: We got more than we bargained for. Photographed in Los Angeles on December 14, 2009.The Romantics. One film together: Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009). Daniels may be the best thing that has happened to actors since Robert Altman.
His unforgettable Precious, a harrowing but ultimately hopeful domestic drama, gets its power, in large part, from the brave performances turned in by newcomer Sidibe and the multi-talented writer-comedian-actress Mo’Nique. Sidibe plays the title character—so beaten down at the start of the film—in a blunt, forthright, almost uninflected manner that works nicely against the story’s moments of high drama.
As the girl’s abusive mother, Mo’Nique pulls off something equally astounding: she brings a monster to life and then, without winking at the audience, she stirs our compassion as she shows how that monster came to be. Together Daniels, Sidibe, and Mo’Nique have given voice and form to characters who might otherwise be invisible. Photographed in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 30, 2009. One film together: The Lovely Bones (2009). A 15-year-old student in County Carlow, Ireland, Ronan lives far from the TMZ glare. She played a wised-up child of L.A.
In Amy Heckerling’s underrated romantic comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman before taking on a crucial role in Atonement, for which she was nominated for a best-supporting-actress Academy Award at the age of 13. Now she is being justly celebrated for her successful handling of the difficult lead role in The Lovely Bones. Jackson was lucky to have her, just as he was fortunate when he was able to rely on Kate Winslet as the foundation for his 1994 breakthrough hit, Heavenly Creatures. This time around, he needed an actress who could give life to a character who is at once a pitiful victim of a serial killer and a detective, of sorts, working from beyond the grave.
This is dark stuff, but Ronan, with her game screen presence, brings a light touch and even some humor to the film. Photographed in New York City on December 2, 2009.The Trouble Girls. One film together: Inglourious Basterds (2009).
From the raw material of an Italian-made late-70s Dirty Dozen knockoff called Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato (released as The Inglorious Bastards in the U.S.), Tarantino has whipped up his latest barmy bijou mashup: part World War II epic, part goofy Mike Myers comedy (literally—he’s in the movie), part grind-house gore-fest, part Eastwoodian revenge fantasy. The linchpin of this whole exercise—and the counterpoint to the film’s putative star, Brad Pitt—is the Vienna-born Waltz. As Colonel Hans Landa, he runs the gamut of cinematic Nazi-ness, from the cold menace of Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List to the high camp of Dick Shawn in The Producers. With his tight smile and pit-bull jawline, he bullies his way through his every scene, terrifying and electrifying. It’s the kind of performance that a prankster like Tarantino might call S-S-sen-sational.
Photographed in Los Angeles on December 14, 2009. The Beautiful People. One film together: Crazy Heart (2009). Anyone who falls under the spell of Crazy Heart, a boozy, all-American story set beneath bright southwestern skies, is likely to hold the opinion that it contains the best Jeff Bridges performance. He so easily embodies down-on-his-luck, whiskey-swilling country-music legend Bad Blake that moviegoers may suspect the film is a documentary-like record of the veteran actor’s secret life. But then you recall all the sneakily great work Bridges has done over the years in movies such as The Last Picture Show, Starman, Jagged Edge, The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Big Lebowski, and Iron Man and you realize his shamblingly natural and pitch-perfect work in Crazy Heart is all of a piece with just about everything else in his glorious and underappreciated career. Still, a lot of credit must go to first-time director Cooper, who worked hard to get Bridges to say yes to the part before he could begin to create the conditions that would allow his leading man to do his thing before the camera.
Anyone who loves movies is happy these two were able to get together. Photographed in New York City on December 17, 2009.The Pot Stirrers.
The move was announced today along with a slate of 11 new and 20 returning series. While most remain in the unscripted sweet spot, newer offerings include, a scripted anthology series starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana. New unscripted titles include a home design-meets-fashion series featuring Queer Eye alum Carson Kressley and Thom Filicia as well as Flipping Exes, about a former couple who remain partners in an Indiana real estate business.
“Our brand offers a unique environment for our viewers to escape with drama that is fun and funny, yet far from their normal reality,” said Jerry Leo, Executive Vice President, Program Strategy, Lifestyle Networks and Production at the NBCUniversal network. “By doubling down on noisy formats and big characters, expanding our lifestyle programming in the design and home space, and offering seven nights a week of originals, we’ll be able to serve our fans more of what they crave while also attracting new viewers with our wide scope of programming.”. Bravo remains a bright spot for NBCU as the company looks to combat the effects of ratings erosion facing all TV programmers. The network’s 16% lead as the No. 1 network among female viewers in F18-49 and F25-54 is its widest margin ever. Bravo also said it finished the first quarter of 2018 as the No.
5 ad-supported cable network among all viewers 18-49, the highest quarterly ranking it has ever achieved in primetime. As it looks to continue growing beyond live, linear viewing, Bravo also said it is the No. 1 cable network for video on demand among all cable networks with 20.6 million streams via set-top-boxes. On digital platforms, Bravo has generated 18.4 million live streams and 27 million on-demand views, up +156% and +108%, respectively, compared with the previous year. The roster of returning shows includes Vanderpump Rules, Million Dollar Listing New York and The Real Housewives iterations in Atlanta, Beverly Hills, Orange County, New Jersey and Dallas. They join the original scripted series Imposters, which just premiered, as well as late-night talk show Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen and the Emmy-winning Top Chef. Here are the network’s descriptions of the 10 new series: Thom and Carson Project (Working Title) Produced by Critical Content and Free Range Media with David Metzler, Tom Forman, Jon Beyer, Thom Filicia, Carson Kressley, Jason Hollis and Grace Lee-Toumanidis serving as executive producers.
Carson Kressley and Thom Filicia are here to help fight the uniformity and ubiquity of American home design. In this new series, Thom takes Carson under his wing to teach him interior design by channeling Carson’s impeccable sense for fashion. The formidable duo will create breathtaking and affordable home re-designs for their lucky clients using expert skills mixed with their signature endearing charm fans fell in love with during Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.