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The Natural State of Film A Q&A with Little Rock filmmaker Jeff Nichols, whose debut feature film, Shotgun Stories, is premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival, one of the world's most prominent. By Lindsey Millar
I was aimless and chronically unemployed in the later half of 2005. I'd met Jeff Nichols months earlier in Austin. A friend of a friend, his girlfriend had kindly allowed some buddies and me to camp out at her and Jeff's house during the Austin City Limits Festival. We made the connection that Jeff was from Arkansas pretty quickly and small-talked on that, and in short order, he told us he was planning on making a movie back home. I was bleary-eyed and withdrawn most of the weekend, but I remember, late one night, Jeff sharing his filmmaking vision with one of our crew. It was blustery talk, delivered impassionedly and at great length and peppered with references to things like "this two million dollar movie I'm going to do" that I chalked up then as the sort of hubris typical of underemployed twentysomethings of a certain stripe (one with which I'll readily admit I'm intimately familiar). But when Jeff moved back to Little Rock and kept talking, with progressively more and more specificity, about tone and plot and shooting dates and actors I'd actually seen in films, I signed on to be on the crew. I was in charge of props, which meant that I begged, borrowed, and stole things like shovels and trucks and kept up with them and sometimes placed them just right on the set. Mostly, though, I read magazines and sat in lawn chairs and watched. A film set can be thrilling. There's a surfeit of drama when dozens of people try to work in concert with each other and against the elements to get that perfect take--until the fifth one rolls around. But I never got tired of watching Jeff. Usually gregarious and funny as hell, on location he'd slip into this intensely pensive mode, where you could practically see the film he wanted to make running through his mind. When he did speak, people moved. Still, before I saw the final cut at a small cast and crew screening last summer, I had low expectations. After all it was a first film, done one shoe-string budget, with a good deal of non- or inexperienced actors, that had taken almost two years to complete. But I was completely engrossed, and not in hey I was there, look there's my girlfriend's truck kinda way. No, in spite of that distraction, I got lost in Shotgun Stories. It's a quietly precise film, driven by the languid rhythms of the South, those in-between moments that might make up half a life—a pause in conversation, the buzz of the cicadas—that're rarely so carefully captured onscreen. Beneath that moodiness, an intensely dramatic family feud roils and finally bursts through. It's a film that trades in blood and kin and justice and revenge and other eternal themes. And it's blowing up. One of only two U.S. films chosen for the presitigious Film Forum at the Berlin International Film Festival, it was billed by the festival as "certainly one of the most impressive independent American productions of the year." Variety, typically first in line to review important films, gushed over it (in it's own bizarre prose style), calling it, "A point-blank buckshot blast of inarticulate American rage, played with the disarmingly placid inevitability of Greek tragedy, "Shotgun Stories" is a precisely modulated yet cumulatively forceful story of a rural family feud turned deadly." Below, Localist welcomes the emergence of Jeff Nichols, a new major talent from Arkansas, who's sure to shape Southern filmmaking for years to come, with an in-depth Q&A. So you're about to premier Shotgun Stories at the Berlin Film Festival and then you're showing it at Tribeca after that? Well, we haven't figured where the domestic premier is going to happen, but Tribeca has invited us, which we're flattered by; we think it's a fantastic festival. But the goal right now is to get through Berlin. In terms of our domestic premier, I'm kind of postponing it until I get back from Berlin. Tell me about Berlin. The way I've always thought about it, there are a handful of top tier festivals. The Academy Awards and the Cannes Film Festival--they're in a totally different league. So that leaves you with Sundance, Berlin, and Toronto. Those are the big ones. Sundance is at the top of that list for American films simply because that's where movies sell. And there's so much hype around that festival, there's just no doubting that it's important. Unfortunately, we didn't get in. It was a letdown, but a couple weeks later, we found out about Berlin. The cool thing about Berlin is that it's a festival for people who love film. It's always been one of the best attended. Shotgun Stories is going to screen in a 745-seat theater that was built after the war and renovated later, whereas the biggest theater at Sundance is set up in a high school gymnasium. Not to say Sundance doesn't like films, but Berlin is a filmmaker's dream, especially for a film like ours. If you shot on HD, screening in a gym would be fine. But our film is classically shot, and classically told. I pushed hard to shoot in 35 mm and especially in widescreen anamorphic. The whole movie, from beginning to end, is a homage to a process and type of film that isn't getting made anymore. You'll be able to see when you see the film print. It's really contrast-y. The blacks are blacks, and the highlights are there for a reason. In weird kind of way, especially on a subconscious level, that makes it really dramatic. In the very first shot, for example, our lead character's face is completely black in the shadows, but you can see, in the light, shotgun pellets strewn across his back. In a single shot, so much is communicated. With film, the negative lives where negative wants to live. To bring the point around, Berlin is the perfect place for a film like that. So is there a chance the film might get sold? There's a huge film market there. I haven't signed deal yet, but I just received our first offer from a foreign sales company. It'll be their job to take the film worldwide to Cannes and other places I don't know about. I'm not expecting any domestic sales--well, I don't really know. I'm just hoping to generate interest from European film market. Tell me about the film itself. What's it about? It follows a feud between two sets off half brothers after the death of the father. Man I've written and said that so many times in the last few months! When did you start working on it? I started writing the screenplay in January 2004, and I wrote it pretty quickly, for me at least; I was done by June, or really by May. I started pre-producing in June. I'd been working in Texas on a Townes Van Zandt documentary, and I just knew I had to go make a movie. And I had the idea in my head. It was one of those things where I just said, "I'm going to shoot in September 2004." It was cool to not have people calling me for drafts, but when I started telling people to ink September into their calendar, I started painting myself in corner. Making that date really forced me to sit down and finish pre-producing and getting money in order. I knew that to use the talented people from my school [North Carolina School of Arts], I had a window of opportunity before they got outside of my price range, which was basically nothing. That added a sense of urgency. How many were on the crew? We had around 12 to 15 people there the whole time. It was probably the size of a typical indie movie crew, maybe even a little bigger. Films have done it with far less. Is this a story you'd been thinking about for awhile? I'm in the process of writing my next script, and I've been thinking about it for about five or six years. This one I thought about probably for a solid six months. I knew starting out that there were certain elements I wanted to include. I knew it would be set in southeast Arkansas, a place I consider to be, of all I've seen of Arkansas, the most striking. I knew it would sound a certain way and move a certain way. I knew Lucero and my brother would contribute to score. While I was thinking about the film, I was always driving around listening to That Much Farther West. And then people like Gary Hawkins, David Gordon Green and Southern blue-collar writers like Larry Brown and Harry Crews who've influenced me--if you put them all in a blender, certain flavors were definitely going to come out. The first thing I came up with was the shotgun wound. Then I decided I wanted to make a movie about brothers. I've got two of my own, and it's just such a unique relationship. You care about your brothers in a way that you're not going to care about your girlfriend, your mom, your sisters, or anyone else, and I wanted to get into that. I also listened to the Drive-By Trucker's Decoration Day a lot when I was thinking about the script and there's a song on that album about a feud, and I kept thinking about this image of a guy spitting on a grave, someone showing up to a funeral unwanted and spitting at something. From there I started working backwards, thinking, well, what if he was just a friend who showed up, or maybe a family member, but why would he be upset? And from that line of thinking, I came up with this story of three brothers abandoned by their father, who grow up not just without him, but in spite of him, who feud with their half-brothers. I read this really great article in The New Yorker around that time about the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and there was one part where the reporter is interviewing a Palestinian mother, while through the window, her son rides his bicycle in this crazed bombed-out place, and the reporter asks the mother why she doesn't leave. The mother answers, "If he dies, he dies a martyr. And I'm ok with that." And I was just really struck by how a mother could be so willing to make such a decision about her son's life because she believed in something so strongly. The same theme kept coming up, too, when I was working on the Townes movie; he was definitely someone who put his art way ahead of his family. So that's how I started painting this character for Natalie Canerday. She's plays a mother who believes in something so much that she twists her sons and actually ends up hating her sons. But as a result, it drives the three main characters even closer. I think that comes across in the film. The three brothers are definitely a unit. But, yeah, once I decided to think about a movie idea, everything that I read or saw started to glom onto it and affect it.
Mike Shannon gives a remarkably strong, understated performance. How'd you get him in the film? When I was in school, my friend and mentor and teacher Gary Hawkins showed me a tape of him. Hawkins had been invited to the Sundance labs, the directing workshops where you go and hangout and shoot scenes from your screenplay with top-notch actors and then break them down with directors like P.T. Anderson. Actually, Anderson went through the program with Hard Eight early on. So did Tarantino. You can see clips of his workshop tape with Tim Roth doing scenes from what would become Reservoir Dogs. But the idea is, in the same way that you do exercises in art class then rip up your work, you're supposed to destroy the tapes. But Hawkins didn't delete his. He brought his back. And he was like, "Nichols, you gotta watch this guy, Mike Shannon." He showed me the scene, and I thought to myself, "That's it. I want that guy in every movie that I make." So I started to follow his career. I saw him in Pearl Harbor and Eight Mile and everything else. When I was writing Shotgun Stories, I wrote the lead part for him, having never spoken to him. Once we started casting, I was looking for the guy around town that looked the most like him. I realized pretty quickly that was ridiculous, so I called Hawkins and got his phone number, and I called him up and I said, "Hey, um, Gary Hawkins gave me your number. I think you're a great actor. I wrote a screenplay for you." And he laughed. I don't think anyone was writing screenplays for him then. But he told me to send it, and I did, and a few weeks later, he called back and said, "I think I could do this, but do you have anything to show me?" I had a student film that'd been well received and everything, but it was a student film, so I told him I didn't have anything. So he called Hawkins to ask him about me and Hawkins told him, "Well, you might go down there and waste three weeks and go on with your life. Or maybe he'll make The Last Picture Show." So on the script and that one piece of advice, he signed on to do the film. We didn't talk about paying him or anything. I just showed him the final cut of the film. I think he was impressed. He told me that he was proud of it. That was a big hurdle for me. When someone gives so much of themselves and their time, you at least want them to be proud. Because I think, not to speak for him, but even though he's been in a lot of huge movies, I don't know if he's proud about Kangaroo Jack. So that meant a lot. He totally makes the movie. I want to try to get him an Independent Spirit Award. Yeah, you know, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Yeah, okay Capote , big pay cut, yeah, yeah. But I'm talking about someone who got on plane, traveled to a state he'd never been to, to work with a guy he'd never met. Someone not getting paid anything, not expecting anything, who I put up in the guesthouse of a friend. If the name of the award means anything, he deserves two.
Tell me about some of the other actors. Natalie Canerday, who I mentioned before, is amazing in film. I think she's got a total of six lines. But she's by far one of the most memorable characters. I wrote the part of Boy for Doug Ligon. He was someone, in addition to Mike Shannon, that I wrote the movie for. He acted in the student film that I wouldn't show Mike. Every so often you put the camera in front of someone and they're totally unaffected. He was like that, especially having been through film school and being on set with a bunch of his buddies and knowing that the film probably wouldn't go anywhere. His father passed away two weeks before we were supposed to start shooting. I thought it was over; I thought he wasn't going to make it. I talked to him, and I told him he didn't have to come--if my father passed away, I'd go into a coma--but he said, "Nope, this is important, this is something we have to do." He showed two days before we were supposed to start shooting, and he really does a good job. His natural ability really came out. Talk about underplayed, especially for being such a boisterous personality. Mike Abbot and Travis Smith play the two older half brothers. Mike lives in New York. Watch out for him. He has this clarity with which he approaches material; he reads it and just comes out right way. He and Travis were both actors from my program in North Carolina. Barlow Jacobs, who plays Kid, was a friend of David Gordon Green's, who at this point was just a friend of the program. I called David frantically looking for actor at the last minute because the actor originally cast in the role cancelled. This was maybe a week before Mike Shannon was supposed to come into town, and we didn't have one of the major roles cast. David was initially going to play Kid, but he would have to sandwich it into all kinds of shit. That guy's insane. It was like he could do four days of shooting, then fly away, then maybe come back--it would've forced us to really screw with our shooting schedule. So David mentions he's got this buddy, Barlow Jacobs, who's asleep on his porch. Both of them had decided to stay in New Orleans and hunker down and ride out a hurricane, pre-Katrina. And I recognized the name; he was someone I'd met through Hawkins, and I thought, "That guys got a cool way about him. He'd be perfect." So I told him about the script in about five minutes, and I emailed it to him. And a couple of hours later, he calls back and says, "This is awesome. I want to come do it." A few days later, he shows up in Little Rock in a Winnebago a friend had lent him that we ended up using as the girl's bathroom on the set. He steps out with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, wearing a ripped up shirt, and with hair much longer than I remembered him having. That was the moment, when I was like, "Sweet, let's make a movie." Barlow went on to [write and star in] a movie after Shotgun Stories called Low and Behold. It's about insurance claims adjustors after Katrina. It's in Sundance. He was also in Great Wall of Sound , Craig Zobel's film, which is also in Sundance. Craig Zobel and David Gordon Green were two years above me at [North Carolina School of Arts], and so was Adam Stone, who shoots all of David's second unit stuff, and who shot Shotgun Stories and Great World of Sound. Jody Hill and Danny McBride, who were a couple years ahead of me, too, made The Foot Fist Way, a film about a Tae-Kwondo instructor in a mall in North Carolina that just got bought by Will Ferrell's new production company. It's supposed to be the next Napoleon Dynamite. And Pete Sattler--that guys amazing. It's not that these guys are just making movies; they're making good movies that're really defining the landscape of Southern American cinema. And I don't include myself in that group. Maybe one day. And Gary Hawkins is really influential on all those guys? Yeah, Gary Hawkins is a huge creative force and influence on all of us. He saw things in us early on and kind of shaped things in our filmmaking. I talk to him every week. He came down two weeks before shooting and helped me breakdown scripts, and he saw multiple cuts of the film. David Gordon Green is definitely the patriarch, though. He broke down the gate, he got inside the secret society, and he's been able to reach down and help his friends. His new film, Snow Angels, is at Sundance, too. I haven't seen it yet, but it's supposed to be his best movie. And he's about to direct Pineapple Express, this $30 million action comedy with James Franco. Who better than him to make a big budget studio movie funny and weird? With Shotgun Stories, specifically, he, like I said before, started out as just a friend, who was always encouraging. I sent him dailies and rough cuts, and he was always saying, "This is cool, this is cool." And I talked early on to Lisa Musket, David's producer, and she kept saying, "Can't wait." Then I finally got to a place where I could send him a final cut with my brother's music mixed in, and after he saw it, he said, "Man this is really good. I showed it to Lisa Musket and we watched it twice in the same morning. I don't know if you'd want this, but we'd be willing to come on as producers." Then he sent me CAA and Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, who came back and said that CAA wanted to be involved with the film, and he put us in touch with Upload Films, who are good people, and who made an agreement to put up the money to finish the film. Not getting into Sundance really knocked the wind out of us, though. It's just such and impossible festival to get into, but I'd kind of convinced myself that it was possible. I could physically feel the momentum get sucked out. It was palpable. Then a week before Christmas, David Gordon Green called and said that [The Berlin Film Festival] loves your film and wants it in the festival. He said, "This is the greatest thing that's every happened in your life. This is going to change you life. Not because you're going to get to hang out with famous people and be a douche. But because these are people love movies. They're going appreciate your movie"
How about Alan Disaster? How'd you get him involved? Emily Galusha took me to this party, I think at Thomas Hankins's house, and I heard this guy telling a story, and I was like, "Who the fuck is that? This guy can't be serious." Then I turned and saw Alan. I just stood there and listened to him tell the story and the way he talked and spoke. And I said to myself, "That guy's awesome. That guy needs to be in my movie." So when I was writing, I was thinking about him, and ended up writing, for him, the part of Shampoo, who's this huge character—he's the Greek Chorus, the one clear-cut antagonist in the film, who really propels the action. When I was getting the film together, I saw him at a wedding on the 4 th of July, where they had sparklers. And I went up to him, and I said, "You don't' know me, but I'm Ben's little brother." I don't think that got me anywhere. "And I'm making this movie, and I want you to be in it." He was just kind of like, "Yeah, ok, whatever." I remember the first time we put him in front of the camera, just to get him warmed up. I think he thought this was a video project for UCA or something. There was this huge camera and a fairly big set-up and crew, and he didn't know what to think. But, yeah, he's amazing. There was nothing more brilliant than sitting at this famous hotel in L.A. out by a swimming pool with David Gordon Green and three CAA agents. Jake Gyllenhaal and Penelope Cruz were sitting at the next table. I think Taylor Hackford was a few tables away, and I'm sitting there drinking a beer and this CAA agent leans forward and says, "Tell me about Alan Wilkins and Douglas Ligon." It was crazy. I want nothing more than for both of those guys to become huge stars and raging assholes. I want that to happen so badly. So, the movie wrapped in October 2004. Why did post-production take a two and a half years? When shoot film, you typically get dailies, you send the film off at end of the day and the next day you watch it on DVD with the cinematographer and producers. You figure out, number one, if you've got the shots. We couldn't afford to that. We shot blind. There could've been a registration problem. Every negative could've scratched. Anything you can imagine could've gone wrong. Thousands and thousands of dollars could've been crapped away. On top of that, when we finished, we didn't have the money to process it. So it sat in the back of my dad's furniture store turning to vinegar. Every night, I went to sleep thinking about what could happen. It's a chemical process. Once exposed, the chemical process keeps happening. Finally, I talked to my dad's cousin, Mike Freeze, who together with his partner, Martha Melkovitz, owns the Keo Fish Farm, where we shot some of the film. When I first went to talk to him, I told him that this was a dream of mine. That I was leveraging myself--my family, my friends, my money, and my family's money. That it was a huge gamble. And he respected that. He'd done kind of the same thing with his fish farm. After we got done, he asked me how I was going to finish it and told me to give him a call if I came up against any hard spots. I needed some funding to get the dailies back. Once I got those I could start editing on my computer. So I called him and he said let me talk to my partner, and we'll get back to you, and they came through amazingly. Once I got the dailies, I spent a year, back in Austin, editing. I set up on a G4 laptop an editing suite in the laundry room of the house where I was living with my girlfriend. Usually, films have second unit crews to shoot stuff for B-roll. In action movies, second units shoot real time-consuming things like car crashes. On a movie like this, they'd shoot nature shots. I couldn't afford a second unit. But I really needed one. I decided I'd shoot what I needed to get a rough cut then I'd figure something out. By the time I was editing, a year after we'd wrapped was coming around. And I was flip-flopping. I thought that maybe I didn't need to shoot anything else. Most everyone involved had kind of quieted down and gone their separate ways, but Glenda Pannell, who plays Annie in the film, was always calling me and encouraging me and staying on my case, and she said, "You know, you really, really need to do this." So we did a second unit shoot with me and Adam and Mike Shannon and Barlow came up, so we could shoot more of them at the fish farm. Jones Productions helped us out with the camera--Gary Jones son, Alex, was the second assistant cameraman on the film--and Mike Shannon gave me some money, and my friend Matt Hoffine gave me some, too. We ended up with about 30 minutes of B-roll footage. My editor Steve Gonzales did the first assembly cut. We couldn't afford to have him work all the way through. He edited George Washington. He's an amazing, genius-level guy--he helped write one of first Final Cut Pro programs. Anyway, he cut in all the B-roll, and it made so much sense. It's now so much more about place and landscape, which I'd always had in my head--I just couldn't afford it. The way the characters sit on their emotions and how slow the scenes move really makes sense now. It was something I think I took for granted because I'm from here, and I recognize that tone, but you can't expect people to react to what they don't know. But once we had the landscape shots and my brother's amazing score, the whole thing made sense. So how did you get by while you were doing all that? I had a really amazing support system with my family and Missy, my girlfriend. And I took freelance work whenever it came along, which is another reason it took so long. I had to work three or four days a week because I was taking every job in Austin that I could. I'd do PA work on a video shoot, doing things like getting water and putting ice in a cooler. And I had slowly accruing credit card debt. The coup came when I started to get work from this cool, boutique ad agency, Butler Bros. I've been working with them a lot. Tell me about your brother's score. I told Ben stuff I liked from Lucero, and he was writing songs all along. He actually did a whole slew of stuff that didn't make it in the movie. He may be pissed it didn't make it, I don't know. I wanted a theme, though. He gave me several things, all good, but not thematic. Finally, he gave me all these different variations of "Hold Me Close," a song from Nobody's Darlings. I'd asked him to re-record it with an upright bass played with a bow, which just has the most gorgeous sound. The CD he gave me had 8 tracks of different versions of same song. It was perfect. It just broke my heart when I heard it. Ben did every piece except for two. Pyramid, who score a lot of David Gordon Green's stuff and who're friends with Adam Stone, were willing to help out. Their stuff is extremely dissonant, but it still fits. It doesn't feel like a traditional film score. No one who watches it would say that it's bad or incorrect; it's just different. The music operates differently. Traditionally, scores emphasis emotion, but here we drop out of music a lot and you hear the cicadas and low end wind sounds or trucks passing by. That lack of music really accentuates the score when it does come in. When are the good people of central Arkansas going to get a chance to see the film? We had a cast and crew screening in Little Rock last year, but we've had to hold off on anything open to the public because it's key for festivals that they host domestic or world premiers. The SAG rules say that you have to have a theatrical release before you have home video release. It's very possible that it'll have a really nice DVD release, and then screen only once outside of other festivals. Which sucks. But I'm a realist, I know that the cost of putting it on 15 screens versus what it'll make is probably risky. But Berlin has a way of changing things, historically. But if we end up having to rent out a theater to do one showing to get the public to pay [to satisfy the SAG rule], I'd love to do it in Little Rock. Do you have any future projects you're working on? I'm writing a movie that takes place on the Mississippi. The sad reality, though, for an Arkansas filmmaker, who loves Arkansas, who made a movie in Arkansas, it's not going to be at all in the realm of possibility to shoot any more films in Arkansas. I'll probably have to shoot it in Louisiana because of the way tax credits work there. They just don't exist in Arkansas. Which sucks. There's no real concept to influence L.A. money and producers. I'm talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, three times the budget of Shotgun Stories just in taxes. That is, if someone gives me a couple million dollars to do a movie. Maybe if Shotgun Stories is successful enough I can convince people to shoot wherever, but I'm thinking practically. If I go to a producer about shooting a film in Arkansas on the Mississippi, I imagine they'll say, "I'm no scientist, but I think the Mississippi River runs through Louisiana as well." It's a shame that tax incentives that don't cost anything to be in the books don't exist. There's not so much filmmaking that comes through Arkansas that they're giving up money. But I don't know if it'll be my next film. It might cost too much. I'm also writing a movie called Land of Opportunity. Mud, the movie on the river, is one I've been thinking about for years. Anything I missed? I don't think so. I want to send a huge thank you to the communities of Sott, Keo, and Little Rock. I can't wait to bring it home and show it.
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