“Take Shelter is a modern American masterpiece,” writes Michael Tully in this week’s Hammer to Nail review at Filmmaker. I couldn’t agree more. The film was one of my two favorites at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and as the months have gone by, no American independent picture has surpassed it for me in terms of storytelling and emotional impact.

The film is writer-director Jeff Nichols’ second. (His first was the Southern family-feud drama, Shotgun Stories.) You can clearly feel Nichols reaching for something bigger here. Indeed, the movie plays like an M. Night Shamalayan mindbender for much of its length. But, teaching a lesson that many Hollywood films could learn from, Nichols doesn’t let special effects overwhelm the movie. In fact, his third-act becomes more intimate, more focused on human relationships. His mediation on the end of the world becomes more a story about a family, but not in the sappy, easy way so many studio movies use the family to uncritically tie things up. There’s a line spoken by Jessica Chastain to Michael Shannon in the final minutes that will rip your heart out its toughness and its compassion.

I interviewed Nichols about Take Shelter, and you can read the piece in our Fall issue, which should be out in about three weeks. But here are a couple of things that struck me. First, in person, Nichols feels like the real deal. He’s what you’d call “good in the room.” Some people think that means being smooth and a charmer, but it actually means being open and engaging and the kind of person you want to follow and work with. Second, as we talked about the movie, I realized how much this tale of a construction worker haunted by apocalyptic dreams is a scaled-up version of the anxiety all independent filmmakers face. We talked about how Nichols’ well-received first film, Shotgun Stories, didn’t make him any money, and how at the end he was in a position that filmmakers always find themselves in after completing a film. There are people cheering you along, who believe you’ve already made, but you’re still figuring out how to pay your bills and wondering if you can afford to take off work and make that festival premiere. Nichols used these anxieties to build his film. “The economy is a little more interesting to me, and I spend more time fearing that,” he said. “But yeah, it all adds up to a general sense of dread. You gotta find a way to deal with it and be productive in spite of it.... [Being a film director] is a stressful state to constantly be living and working in. It’s exhilarating and exciting too, but it adds to that stress. And especially now that I'm in the WGA, my family's health insurance is tied to my success. That's horrifying, but I guess it’s like that for everybody. You have to perform. That's being a grown-up -- that's life. And being a grown-up is stressful.”

I don’t want to make Take Shelter seem too heavy because it’s gripping and entertaining in a real movie-movie way. (It reminded me, in fact, of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.) I’m just saying that we can be inspired by Nichols by taking whatever negative stuff is swirling around in our heads and using it to fuel our creativity rather than distract from it.

Go see Take Shelter this weekend and see you next week.

See you next week.

Best,
Scott Macaulay
Editor

ADDITIONAL CAREER TRIBUTES ANNOUNCED FOR 21ST ANNUAL GOTHAM INDEPENDENT FILM AWARDS IFP's Independent Film Week wraps up today. By the end of the day, filmmakers from the 145 selected projects of the Actors Charlize Theron and Gary Oldman and director David Cronenberg will be presented with career tributes at the 21st Annual Gotham Awards on Monday, November 28th, joining the previously announced tribute to Tom Rothman, Chairman and CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment. Since debuting in 2 Days in the Valley in 1996, Charlize Theron has appeared in 38 films, including North Country, In the Valley of Elah, The Cider House Rules, The Italian Job, The Road, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, and Monster, for which she won the Academy Award®, Screen Actors Guild Award, Golden Globe and Independent Spirit Award for Best Actress. Theron gives another buzzed about performance in Jason Reitman’s Young Adult, opening in December. In more than 60 film appearances Gary Oldman has created a stunning array of iconic performances in such films as Sid and Nancy, Prick Up Your Ears, JFK, Dracula, True Romance, as well as the continuing characters of Jim Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and Sirius Black in the Harry Potter films. Oldman’s next performance on view will be as George Smiley in Tomas Alfredson’s film of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. David Cronenberg’s reputation as an authentic auteur has been firmly established by his uniquely personal body of work which includes Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Crash, eXistenz, The Dead Zone, M. Butterfly, Spider, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, and the upcoming A Dangerous Method. He is currently in post¬production on his current project, Cosmopolis. These Gotham Awards tribute recipients join a prestigious group of previous honorees including: James Schamus; Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Sheila Nevins, David Linde, Jonathan Sehring, Michael Barker, Tom Bernard, & Marcy Bloom; Bob & Harvey Weinstein, and film critic Roger Ebert; actors Robert Duval, Stanley Tucci, Natalie Portman, Javier Bardem, Pénelope Cruz, Hilary Swank, and Kate Winslet; filmmakers Darren Aronofsky, Mira Nair, Gus Van Sant, Spike Lee, and Martin Scorsese. Nominees for the 21st Anniversary Gotham Independent Film Awards will be announced on October 20th. Table and ticket sales are now available. Full details here.

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