ON FILM

Director’s anxiety used in developing character

— Jeff Nichols says Take Shelter was in part born out of a practical problem; after his first movie, Shotgun Stories, was released to terrific reviews in 2007, “the American independent film movement had kind of collapsed.” Lots of studios were cutting back, shuttering their boutique labels.

“All these companies that were supposed to give me $2 million to go make my next film just weren’t there,” Nichols says. “So I had to try to figure out a way to get someone with money to pay attention and invest in my weird, slow, art film that I didn’t even have a concept for yet. And I started to think, ‘What if I blended genres? What if I took something like a psychological thriller and blended it with a drama?’”

Being an independent filmmaker requires a certain pragmatism. Even artists have to participate in pitch sessions.

“It’s funny when you go out to L.A. ... and you’re trying to convince someone to make a movie with you,” Nichols says. “When you mention the word ‘drama’ they get real uncomfortable in their chair - and so I had to hide the heart of a drama inside something else, something they could cut a scary movie trailer for it.”

But this sort of commercial gamesmanship was underpinned by a serious idea - if Nichols thought he had to make a movie with some scares in it, at least there were plenty of frightening things out there.

“I was in my first year of marriage,” he says. “We were talking about having kids and I was coming out of my 20s into my 30s and I was really starting to put my life together, my career was starting to develop and I had these things that I cared for very very much that I didn’t want to lose. There’s a lot of stress that comes out of that. And when I coupled that with this general free-floating anxiety that seems to run rampant in my family ... I’m worried that the U.S. government is going to collapse, that the dollar is going to collapse, that environment disaster is going to end us all - all these things that we have no direct control over but that keep us up at night ... it felt that was something worth talking about in a film.”

And that inchoate fear, an uneasiness about the things we cannot change, became the key note for Take Shelter.

“When I write I try to find some sort of universal thought or idea or feeling or emotion to attach my story to - that way my plot can go any direction it wants to, but it always is anchored by this one emotion,” Nichols says. In Shotgun Stories, a film about an internecine feud between sets of half-brothers set in small-town Arkansas, the theme was “revenge and the thought of one of my brothers being hurt.”

“Whenever I was lost or confused or tired,” Nichols says, “I could easily access that emotion.And with this project, I could easily access all the anxiety that was out in the world. It was just palpable.”

The lead actor in Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter is Michael Shannon (who also has a smaller part in Nichols’ third film, Mud, which is currently being shot in the Arkansas Delta). Since Shotgun Stories, which was his first starring role, Shannon has built up a considerable body of work, generally playing disturbed, off-kilter characters in projects like HBO’s Prohibition set series Boardwalk Empire and the period drama Revolutionary Road (for which he earned a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination).

But though they look a lot alike, and both are products of small-town America, Shannon’s Take Shelter character, Curtis LaForche, is a different guy than Son Hayes of Shotgun Stories.

“One of the few conversations Michael and I had early on was how to separate this character from Son Hayes,” Nichols says. The main difference, Shannon held, was that his Shotgun Stories character wasn’t “anxious.” Son Hayes had a certain faith in his ability to eventually figure things out.

“Son is lower class, and this guy is working middle class, for whatever that looks like in modern American society. ... He’s buttoned up. Mike said, ‘I think he’s kind of tucked in, I think he’s a little bit lighter on his feet than Son Hayes; Son Hayes kind of lumbers and this guy is lighter on his feet. He’s just a little bit more with it.’”

And, significantly, like most of us, he’s got more to lose.

E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

MovieStyle, Pages 33 on 10/28/2011

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