The day after the world premiere of his film The Bikeriders, Jeff Nichols seems pensive.
The writer-director has just debuted his new film at the Telluride Film Festival, and he’s still working through his feelings about it. “I’m sure it’s wrapped up in all of my insecurities and other things, but I left that screening kind of just wondering if people would get the thing that I was doing,” he tells me as we sit down at a small restaurant in town.
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At first, I assume this is because at Telluride there aren’t usually big parties where he could hear feedback right away, like he probably had when he debuted films at Cannes like Mud and Loving. But Nichols, who is attending Telluride for the first time, says it’s deeper than that.
“If I’m being really honest, which is dangerous, there’s something about my emotional connection to it,” he says. “This was the first film where I didn’t just build it out of an emotion. I built it out of a feeling, which is different.”
Sometimes Nichols finds that emotion between a couple, like in Loving, or between a father and son, like in Midnight Special. Often his characters are fighting to be with each other, to keep each other safe. But Bikeriders was different for him. “This is a vibe and a tone,” he says of the film, which stars Tom Hardy, Austin Butler, Michael Shannon and Jodie Comer as members of a Midwestern motorcycle club. “When I watch Goodfellas, when I watch certain films, I just drop into these films. I just want to sit and absorb that feeling. That’s kind of what I was doing with this.”
That connection to Martin Scorsese‘s 1990 mob classic was picked up by many of the first viewers for Bikeriders, but “I don’t know if they’re noticing it for the right reasons,” Nichols says. It’s not just about style choices like voiceover or freeze-frames. For Nichols, the connective tissue runs much deeper. “What fascinates me about Goodfellas is if you look at the narrative structure the first hour, it’s wild because there’s no plot,” he says. “That movie is about what it felt like to be a gangster and this period in this very specific place. That’s what I look to Goodfellas for. The filmmaking mechanics don’t interest me as much as the narrative mechanics.”
Nichols was initially inspired by a photography book that his brother owned, Danny Lyon’s 1968 book The Bikeriders. Lyon had followed around the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, taking black and white photographs and transcribing interviews he’d had with members of the club. Nichols found the photos and the stories mesmerizing, and had wanted to make a film ever since. At the time, he was already working with Michael Shannon on his first film Shotgun Stories, and he brought it up to Shannon. Ever since then, Shannon has told him, “You’re never making that fucking movie. Stop fucking talking about it,” jokes Nichols.
So what took him so long? “When I was staring down the barrel of The Bikeriders, I knew there was this kind of idea up here,” he says waving his hands above his head. “It was a complex narrative structure that would weave in and out of time, that would weave in and out of these anecdotes and would give you a sense of a subculture. But I couldn’t quite grab it. And so, it became just a thing I kept pushing away.”
First, he wanted to make Take Shelter (which would also star Shannon) and then he hoped that success would allow him to make Mud. After two films released the same year, 2016’s Loving and Midnight Special, he knew he needed a break. “I was at the point where I was like, ‘My well’s empty,’ even though I had all these ideas,” he says.
He spent three years working on Alien Nation, a big-budget sci-fi remake for Fox, but it fell apart following the Disney acquisition. “It was pretty heartbreaking,” he says now. “And honestly, I was kind of angry about it, and I said, ‘Fuck it, now I’m going to write The Bikeriders.’ I kind of felt backed in the corner a little bit because it was the idea that was sitting there and it was time to do it.”
By that time, he had spoken to Lyon himself and had acquired the actual audio recordings of the interviews. It was a rich well of source material, and he became interested in a story about a motorcycle club, a band of misfits that eventually gets so big that it loses its magic. “There was this sense of nostalgic loss. There was a moment in time that was very real and beautiful because I can see it in these photos, and it’s gone forever,” he says.
The audio tapes of a woman named Kathy were of particular interest, and Nichols decided to center his story around her. She married one of the bikers, and had an inside look at how the club changed as the years went by. “She’s a great observer,” he says of Kathy. “There’s tension between glorifying them and also understanding them and showing them for what they are and what they aren’t. Kathy carries that tension better than anyone because she sees all the cracks and all the silliness, but she’s also wrapped up in it.”
Nichols cast Comer in the role before he’d seen her Emmy-winning work on Killing Eve, and long before her one-woman Broadway show Prima Facie won her a Tony. Her Bikeriders performance as the outspoken Kathy has been the talk of Telluride. “Jodie’s a worker,” says Nichols who recalls that one day on set, she left her notes behind and he took a peek. “I realized that she had taken every word in the scene that she spoke and phonetically broken it down, and it just went on for pages, for pages, for pages. A lot of people can do hard work, but then she makes it invisible.”
Comer had the rest of the cast in awe too. Nichols recalls how in one of her first scenes with Hardy, she has to his character Johnny, who is president of the club, that she wants her husband Benny (played by Austin Butler) to belong to her. Nichols asked who wanted to shoot their part of the scene first, and Comer said she would. “She came in and it was like a double barrel shotgun to the chest,” says Nichols. “I think Tom at one point missed a line because we were all just kind of watching her do this thing.”
Nichols also cast Butler before the release of his breakout film Elvis, though Nichols had gotten an early look at the trailer. Benny is a brooding man of few words, but a dedicated member of the motorcycle club. “At this point in my career, I’ve been around a lot of famous people, and they all have an energy to them, they all have a charisma, and he definitely has it,” says Nichols. “It goes beyond just being a movie star. You just wanted to be with him.”
Benny is in a lot of ways desired by both Kathy and Danny, who want so much for him and put their desires on him. “He’s a bit of an empty vessel,” says Nichols, who says he can’t wait to work with Butler again. “I know there’s more gears there.”
The biggest challenge for Nichols was stepping into a world that was so far from his own. He wasn’t even alive when these photos were taken, and he was not familiar with motorcycle culture. He and his actors studied the photos, audio files and did other research to get to know this subculture. And the actors went to motorcycle camp so they could ride with the confidence of a member of the club. “These bikes are 50, 60 years old. They’re not precision instruments at this point. They are very difficult bikes to ride,” he says.
The Bikeriders, which 20th Century Studios will release in theaters on Dec. 1, feels like a step back into time, and into a society created by and for outsiders. For Nichols, who hasn’t released a film since 2016, Bikeriders feels a bit like new territory for him too. “I’m really proud of this film and I think it does what I’ve set out to do, which is just dip you in this world and this feeling, the same feeling I got from these photos,” he says. Now he’s just got to learn to sit with the feeling of it being out in the real world, too.
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