Jeff Nichols
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“Shooting on Film Remains Somewhat of a Black Art”: DP Adam Stone on The Bikeriders
After eight years—much of them spent developing projects that never came to fruition—Mud and Midnight Special filmmaker Jeff Nichols is thankfully back with a new movie. That means cinematographer Adam Stone is back with a new movie too. After meeting Nichols at the University of North Carolina School for the Arts, Stone has been behind the camera on all six of the director’s features. Every one of them has been shot on 35mm, including the pair’s latest collaboration, The Bikeriders. Lensed in and around Cincinnati, the movie takes its inspiration from the photographs and stories in Danny Lyon’s titular 1968 […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jul 11, 2024 -
TIFF 2016: Five Questions for In the Radiant City Director Rachel Lambert
With In the Radiant City, I wrote in my Toronto preview, Louisville, KY native Rachel Lambert has brought to Toronto a debut film that seems like it might be the kind of laconic, unexpectedly emotional regional drama associated with filmmakers like Victor Nunez. Executive produced by Jeff Nichols, In the Radiant City follows a man, Yurley (Michael Abbott, Jr.), estranged from his family, who returns home to finally deal with the aftermath of a violent act in his family’s past. Supporting players include the always excellent Marin Ireland and Paul Sparks. Below, Lambert discusses how she connected with Nichols, why […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 11, 2016 -
One Perfect Place to Put the Camera: DP Adam Stone on Midnight Special
In the summer of 2005, with roughly $50,000 scraped together from friends and family, Jeff Nichols made his directorial debut Shotgun Stories not far from where he grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. Two things haven’t changed since – Michael Shannon has been in front of the camera for every Nichols movie and cinematographer Adam Stone has been behind it. That includes Take Shelter, Mud, and now Midnight Special, which elevates Nichols to the studio realm with a tale of a father (Shannon) and his “special” son (Jaeden Lieberher) on the run from the government and a religious cult with […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jun 30, 2016 -
Berlinale 2016 Dispatch #2: Midnight Special, Creepy, and A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery
The only American narrative in Berlinale’s Competition selection this year was Midnight Special, Jeff Nichols’s cryptic homage to utopian sci-fi and early Spielbergian iconography, and something of a return to the more fantastical genre territory seen in his breakout, Take Shelter. In the film, which reportedly had a budget of $18 million and tends to look like it cost ten times that, Roy (Michael Shannon) and Lucas (Joel Edgerton) are on the lam in Texas following their apparent kidnapping of a young boy named Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), a “special child” coveted by the CIA, cultish rural religious organizations, and other […]
by Blake Williams on Feb 22, 2016 -
Trailer Watch: Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special, Once Again Starring Michael Shannon
Michael Shannon has been in each Jeff Nichols feature so far, and with Midnight Special the director/star duo of Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter and Mud graduate to (seemingly) big-time studio money. (The actual number, per this interesting article, is a relatively modest $18 million.) It’s a sci-fi chase movie — the trailer gives off the general vibe. The film drops March 18.
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 20, 2015 -
Win Copies of To The Wonder and Mud
Finish off Friday with a free movie. Thanks to Magnolia and Lionsgate, we have five Blu-ray or DVD copies to give away of two of the most acclaimed movies of the year: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder and Jeff Nichols’ Mud. To win copies of both before their release on August 6, all you have to do is email nick AT filmmakermagazine DOT com with the answer to the following question: Which two women worked on films directed by both Malick and Nichols in 2011? (Clue: one is an actress, the other a producer.)
by Filmmaker Staff on Aug 2, 2013 -
Jeff Nichols on Mud and the Realities of the Contemporary Indie Director
Jeff Nichols, a product of the vibrant class of the North Carolina School of the Arts film program that also produced David Gordon Green, Craig Zobel, Michael Tully, Jody Hill, Tim Orr, and Danny McBride, announced himself as a highly talented young filmmaker with his 2007 debut Shotgun Stories. The slow-burning rural drama was gorgeously shot in Scope and revealed Nichols’ ambition to create cinema on a big canvas, even when his budgets were small. Four years later, his sophomore feature, Take Shelter, about a father who believes an apocalyptic storm is coming, caught the imagination of both critics and […]
by Nick Dawson on Apr 26, 2013 -
Mud | Director Jeff Nichols
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 19, 8:30pm — The MARC, Park City] When I first read this question I was immediately struck by how different my answers would be for each of the three films I’ve made. Each answer really shows where I was at in my life during these productions. For Mud, the biggest sacrifice I made was being away from my family. At the time, our son was one, and I missed roughly four months of his life. Despite a few occasional visits during production, I mostly had to block out the fact that I wasn’t getting to be […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2013 -
Post Mortem — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Post Mortem world premiered at the 2010 Venice Film Festival. It’s being distributed by Kino Lorber Incorporated and opens at the Film Forum in NYC on Wednesday, April 11, 2012. Visit the film’s page at the Kino Lorber website to learn more.) There is such a thing as pitch black comedy, and then there is the work of Chilean director Pablo Larraín, whose warped sense of humor deserves its own adjective. Tar black, maybe? With his latest two films, Larraín has returned to his country’s unpleasant recent past to try to make sense of what transpired. In Tony Manero, the Pinochet […]
by Michael Tully on Apr 12, 2012 -
THIS IS WHAT THE (OBSCURE) MOVIES DID TO ME IN 2011
They moved me. Often deeply, in ways I failed to articulate to myself until much later. That is, of course, the whole reason I go to the movies, to have some sort of visceral, emotional (or intellectual) response, be it laughter or sadness or pain or empathy or disgust or profound understanding. Why else do it? Nothing, beside having those emotions, meets the criteria of entertainment, at least for me. See, I’m one of those lucky few that gets to travel the world just to see films. Crazy, I know, especially in this era of not so cheap oil, but it’s […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 5, 2012
