2016 was an interesting year for Jeff Nichols. The filmmaker released two very different movies in cinemas. The first was the (in my opinion) highly underrated “Midnight Special,” which played like a hybrid of his own indie movie sensibilities with big screen spectacle (indeed, it was his first major studio movie). The second was “Loving,” an intimate and quiet awards season drama, that bucked all the conventions that tag suggests. The latter was a success, the former faced a rocky, half-hearted release by Warner Bros. and if you said it wasn’t Nichols’ best effort, he’d likely agree .
In a must-read roundtable conversation in GQ featuring Ava DuVernay, Cary Fukunaga, James Gunn, Jordan Peele, Dee Rees, Taylor Sheridan, Edgar Wright, Bong Joon-Ho and Patty Jenkins, Nichols talks about how paying too much attention to the industry cycle can hurt a director. And he feels that’s what tripped him up with “Midnight Special.”
“You have to kind of protect the health of who you are in order to do this work. All the press and money and all these things are kind of like a drug: You need more and more and more,” Nichols admitted. “It can open you up to a lesser side of yourself really quickly. ‘Mud’ was a failure at Cannes. Nobody wanted to buy it. So the summer I wrote ‘Midnight Special’ I was writing with a chip on my shoulder. And that turned out to be my least successful film and also probably my least well-executed. It’s because I allowed myself to be affected by the response. We’d be morons if we weren’t affected by it. But you somehow have to protect this thing that you are, or it can really hurt you. It can hurt the work.”
READ MORE: Video Essay Examines The Understated Spectacle Of Jeff Nichols’ ‘Midnight Special’
What’s interesting to note is that when we spoke to Nichols last year, he revealed that he tested the movie, even though he had final cut. The result was that audiences were unsatisfied with his original ending, and he decided to shoot something to help it land a little better.
“…there is one scene that didn’t exist in the original film… I thought [I had a] really elegant ending, where you just didn’t know [the fate of a certain character]. But people were really bothered by it. They couldn’t get over it. So I was sending it around to friends and saying, ‘No, I’m not going to address it, I’m not going to address it’ and then I had this idea [that was] pragmatic, but it also felt thematic. So they allowed me to go back and shoot an additional scene for that and put it in. Does it make the film drastically better? I don’t know,” Nichols said.
“I like it and I think it makes the film at the back end lay down a little bit more. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise,” he added.
It’s all fascinatingly candid stuff from a filmmaker whose work we admire. Thoughts on “Midnight Special”? Share them in the comments section below.