Jeff Nichols

This is possibly my favorite Paul Newman film. Robert Rossen’s direction is straightforward, flawless and timeless. The thing I respond to most in this film is the story structure. It really feels like literature. The middle of this film has a cadence that isn’t rushed and pays great emotional dividends by the time Eddie and Sarah meet the story’s end. Again, much like Hud, plot is dictated by character. I also love that the villain, for lack of a better term, becomes the main character’s mentor. George C. Scott as the manipulative moneyman Bert Gordon is an incredible example of weakness posing as strength. He speaks Eddie’s fears to him, and as a result gains control over him until his own shortcomings take hold. These are the types of relationships and character traits I thirst for in cinema. They add a richness to the stories that reflects their time periods while also connecting the characters to greater, universal behaviors.

When I was in the fourth grade, the UA Cinema 150, a rare domed single-screen theater in Little Rock that sadly no longer exists, screened a rerelease of Lawrence of Arabia. Even at the age of nine, I understood that I was watching something special. Between this film and the flat Arkansas Delta, my love for wide horizon lines was cemented. What Lean’s film taught me is that scale is more about approach than cost. These characters are defined by the location around them, and Lean directs these landscapes every bit as skillfully as he directs the actors. You can’t separate the place from the story. In a time when productions are forced to shoot anywhere a tax credit springs up, it is important for me to watch films that are indelibly linked to their locations. Even with a tiny indie budget, I’ve always wanted my films to aspire to the scale of Lawrence of Arabia. An unreasonable goal perhaps, but the regard Lean has for the frame and how he choreographs his characters in it is something I will always strive to achieve.

“Looks like quite a brawl in here last night.”

“I had Hud in here last night....”

I can’t think of a better way to introduce a character. The truth is, Hud is an absolute son of a bitch. Apparently, Paul Newman thought so too. He was shocked to see college kids with Hud posters on their walls. He played Hud as a villain. It’s what makes the fact that the character is attractive so interesting. It goes beyond that he’s played by Paul Newman, although this can’t be ignored. With the writing of Larry McMurtry, you have a real character archetype unfolding here, a person that actively seeks to upset the happiness in people around him. It’s the type of character that is often ignored as a lead in mainstream films, but these people exist in the world. I love this film because it never attempts to soften or excuse its title character. It simply observes him, like watching a dangerous storm play out, or maybe like watching a venomous snake slither through a nursery. The drama is created by the character, not the plot. This focus on character to drive plot is something I always try to think about when creating a new story.

A lot has been written about this film, especially given its recent anniversary, and I’ll let others discuss its effortless camera movement, the workmanlike crafting of its screenplay, and its ingenious use of holding back the view of the monster to increase the fear. I’ll just talk about one scene, which is when Roy Scheider’s Brody makes faces with his son at the dinner table. Whether it’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or Jaws, Steven Spielberg has an uncanny knack for showing middle-class American life as I experienced it. The dinner table scene exemplifies this lifestyle, and it elevates a monster movie into a masterpiece for me. It feels like a scene with 12 shots, but it has only four angles with a lens change for the medium and close-ups. Watch how the opening fluid master evolves into the majority of the coverage for the scene. The fact that this delicate moment is in the middle of a summer blockbuster makes the difference between a good movie and a great film. “Give us a kiss.” “Why?” “’Cause I need it.”

I owned two DVDs in college, Goodfellas and Fletch. I’ve seen both films innumerable times. I’ve been outspoken about the impact Goodfellas had on my film The Bikeriders, which is not hard to see, but I’ve said less about Fletch. I’ve yet to make a film about a private detective, but when I do I will definitely cite this film as inspiration. The character Fletch, played by Chevy Chase, is not actually a private detective. He’s an investigative reporter, but the genre still applies. Simply put, I think this is one of the funniest films ever made. Chase’s comedic timing is brilliant, and I quote the film daily. You will see two films by the director Michael Ritchie included on my list. He obviously had his finger on something I connect with. Last but not least, I must also call out Joe Don Baker’s performance here. I had the pleasure of working with Joe Don on my film Mud. Between his work in Fletch, Charley Varrick and Scorsese’s Cape Fear, among many, I hold Joe Don up as a true original.

I grew up in Arkansas. A big part of my becoming a filmmaker was about breaking down the barriers, mostly in my mind, between being a kid from Little Rock and the unattainable filmmaking industry. Memphis was our closest big city. My grandmother lived there for a time, and visits to the city were always special. It wasn’t until I saw Mystery Train that I felt like someone had photographed Memphis as I had seen it. There was no gloss, no overlit Beale Street or iconic Peabody Hotel. It was the streets of downtown Memphis as I had seen them. Odd that this realistic portrait of an iconic American city would in part be through the eyes of two Japanese tourists, but it inspired me to make films that looked like the places I’d grown up seeing. This ultimately speaks to the power of Jim Jarmusch. It’s not that the film is not stylized—it is one of the coolest-looking movies with the coolest characters I’ve ever seen—but that style never sacrifices a grounded, realistic approach. Jarmusch lets his characters play in and out of the frames. The camera moves purposefully, if rarely, and never lacks choreography. It’s a temperance in directing that I very much aspire to.

When I was in high school, the Bravo network showed up on our cable-channel box. Before the time of Housewives and reality TV, Bravo showed foreign films. It was a late night on my parent’s couch when I first encountered Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams. At this point in my life, I had no idea who Kurosawa was or that the film I was watching was the product of one of the greatest directors to ever live. I just took in the stories. Chapters, short stories really, that had the unquestionable feel of the title. Apparently the film was the product of Kurosawa writing down his dreams and nightmares over a long period. The stories do feel like dreams: Beautiful and unsettling, but most important, they stay arm’s length from real life without being unbelievable. I can’t tell you exactly how this film has impacted my own filmography, but any fantastical elements in my work surely owe a debt to this film.

This is one of two films made by Gary Hawkins, a former film-school professor of mine and real mentor to me as a filmmaker, included on my list. To speak about this film is really to speak about the influence Gary had on me as a storyteller and particularly as a Southern storyteller. Gary introduced me to the contemporary Southern writing of Harry Crews and Larry Brown, which opened up a window on to my own roots that has impacted every story I’ve told. This documentary was made on a shoestring for a regional PBS station. While it set out to be a documentary about Harry Crews, it became something more for me. Leaning heavily into Crews’s memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, the film captures a feeling of the South that was completely accurate to me while also being something I had never seen captured on film. It feels like the American South to me. This film and Crews’s memoir should be required viewing and reading for any serious Southern storyteller.

I saw this film in junior high with my father at the local multiplex in Little Rock. On our way home after watching it, we just kept saying, “That was really something.” I was too young to understand how Clint Eastwood had crafted one of my favorite films, but now I know it’s because he built a character whose moral compass doesn’t square with the world around him. He knows right from wrong, but he isn’t always able to control himself enough to operate on those principles. I thought a lot about this when writing my first film, Shotgun Stories. Even when watching characters do questionable things, if those actions come out of a well-defined code, the audience can still empathize with them. Combine this with Eastwood’s understated, pragmatic yet heartfelt direction, and it becomes a real guide for the type of cinema I want to be a part of.

I first encountered this film in college when my film professor Gary Hawkins screened it. We were studying dialogue, and Gary wanted to drive home the point that real people speak in truly unique, sometimes unintelligible ways. In this film, Holly Hunter plays a mother who attempts to hire her former brother-in-law to murder a cheerleader competing against her daughter. In real life, the brother-in-law recorded all of his conversations with this woman. The film used these recordings as word-for-word dialogue that Holly Hunter brought to life with morbidly hilarious effect. When I encountered all of the audio recordings Danny Lyon had from his mid-’60s interviews for his book The Bikeriders, I realized this was my opportunity to use the words of real people to build the majority of dialogue for a script. I owe that inspiration to this film.

This is a great John Sayles film by any metric, but it holds a specific influence for my career. Around the time this film was released, I had an idea for a story—about a man hiding out on an island in the Mississippi River—that would one day become my film Mud. I knew I wanted this man to feel like a walking legend, a myth in flesh and blood. That is what Matthew McConaughey is in Lone Star. It was a powerful enough impression for me to stalk McConaughey for the role of Mud 15 years later. Beyond that, you have Sayles’s direction of another incredible Chris Cooper performance. Their repeated working relationship would be one I’d strive to mimic with Michael Shannon. Sayles has an incredible book called Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan. The way he talks about directing, particularly the use of constructive coverage, guides my work to this day.

I first met David Gordon Green on the documentary The Rough South of Larry Brown. It was the summer after my sophomore year in college, and David, weeks earlier, had wrapped filming on his first feature film, George Washington. Although I hadn’t met David while he was attending school, rumors of this guy who had graduated and shot an entire feature film in 35mm anamorphic scope were everywhere. David and I were immediate friends. I remember him showing me a VHS copy of an early trailer he had cut for the film and thinking, “He’s done it.” He was the first person I’d ever known to make a feature film, and it looked so, so good. It didn’t feel DIY in the typical indie sense. It was graceful and poetic, both in terms of story and aesthetic. It was its own thing. The fact this film would be the first from our group to break through the noise of the industry was a significant lesson for me. If you make things for yourself, the rest of the world has a better chance of noticing them. I would look to George Washington as an aesthetic guide, but also as a business model for my first film, Shotgun Stories. I sat David down and asked, “How do I do this?” His main and most important answer at the time: “Put all of the money in the camera department.” This single piece of advice guided the execution of my first film and, really, the rest of my career. George Washington stands as a demarcation point in American independent cinema and in my life.

Bill Paxton was a treasure, and I’d like more people to watch and talk about this film, his directorial debut. Southern gothic is a term Flannery O’Connor eschewed and instead preferred her own definition of the term grotesque. She considered the grotesque to be a recognition of human nature, or at least a part of it. Frailty is grotesque in this sense. It’s a mistake to dismiss it as only a psychological horror film. It certainly embraces genre to tell its story, but I think Paxton is getting at something much richer in this film. He’s talking about our ability to recognize good and evil in people despite how the larger society defines them. Watch this film, and if it speaks to you, tell others about it.

As mentioned on the Harry Crews notes, this film is made by Gary Hawkins. Unlike the Crews documentary, I was actually a part of making this film. The summer after my sophomore year of film school, I worked as a production assistant and had the pleasure of visiting Oxford, Mississippi, with the crew. I was able to sit and listen to the interviews with Larry and his wife. I also have a small, only mildly embarrassing cameo as a young fireman in the re-creation of Brown’s short story “Boy and Dog.” In terms of authenticity, Gary always told us that it is the job of narrative films to resemble documentaries and it is the job of documentaries to resemble narrative films. This has been a guiding mantra for me. In this documentary, what could have been a straightforward piece about an interesting writer really becomes an exploration of a marriage and, more specifically, what it means to be married to an artist. It really touches on what it is like to create things—the need to create things and the impact that has on the world around you. I love this film.

I wouldn’t be alone in claiming No Country for Old Men as one of the greatest films ever made. This is the only film that my creative team—which includes my cinematographer, Adam Stone; and my production designer, Chad Keith—and I watch before every film we make. It doesn’t matter if we are making a sci-fi chase film or a historical drama, we always look to this film in prep for guidance. Every frame is worth hanging on your wall. The craft behind this film is more controlled than anything I’ve ever seen. The camera moves perfectly in sync with the characters and the narrative. There isn’t a false note in the plotting or character behavior. The restraint is extraordinary.