“[Jeff Nichols] was way beyond most students with narrative. Of all the students I’ve seen in 10 years, he’s probably the best with just taking a story from beginning to middle and end. He was raised right, as we say in the South.”
Filmmaker and Instructor Gary Hawkins (now at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies)
Storytelling Son of the South by Melena Ryzik/NY Times
Writer/Director Jeff Nichols (Mud) doesn’t just have roots in Arkansas, Austin and North Carolina—he has roots in literature as well. I think that’s one of the things that makes his work stand out.
“I was introduced to some of my favorite literature in high school, but it was in college that I started to read somewhat voraciously. At that time I was introduced to a lot of contemporary Southern writers: Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Cormac McCarthy. It was Larry Brown’s short stories that kinda floored me. Harry Crews wrote a biography called A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, a collection of essays, and that combined with Larry Brown’s short fiction and Big Bad Love and Facing the Music really kinda [made me think], especially given where I was from, ‘OK, this feels like an appropriate description of these places.’ I definitely hadn’t seen it in movies and the fact that I found it in books was pretty overwhelming. So then you get back into Flannery O’Connor and, for me, a lot of Mark Twain and then, of course, Raymond Carver. I stumbled across Raymond Carver in my junior year, which is late. I’m kind of a late bloomer.”
Jeff Nichols
Filmamker Magazine
And then there is his film roots:
“I love films and see a lot of them, but you could drop me into a film class and I might be lost. There are five films I like. Four of them star Paul Newman. There’s The Hustler (1961), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Hud (1963), Badlands (1973), and the fifth gets interchanged between Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Shining, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Jaws (1975), and Stagecoach (1939). All of these films are directed by a very specific hand. Almost all of them are in Scope and treat the Scope frame with extreme brilliance. I was watching Butch Cassidy on a plane, without sound, and noticed that scenes were shot in fluid master shots; they’re not in a rush to cut images together to get you some place, but they don’t feel slow. The camera moves at the perfect moment. It feels like a scene that was edited together, but you realize that there were only one or two cuts.”
Jeff Nichols
When you watch one of Nichols’ first three films (Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, Mud) you know there is some depth there. But especially if you’re a young filmmaker it’s easy to envy Jeff Nichols’ success as he lines up to do a sci-fi film with Warner Bros, but it’s also easy to overlook that Nichols has been on this journey for more than 15 years—and he’s just starting to find a wider audience.
Go back and read the posts The Secret to Being a Successful Screenwriter (Seriously) and How to Become a Successful Screenwriter (Tip#41) and you’ll see that though screenwriters John Logan (Hugo) and Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine) took different paths to their success than Nichols—there is a common thread.
Related Posts:
Screenwriter’s Work Ethic (Tip #2)
Stephen King’s Doublewide Trailer
Stephen J. Cannell’s Work Ethic
Beatles, Cody, King & 10,000 Hours
Screenwriting from Iowa 