EXCLUSIVE: Jeff Nichols spent two decades considering how to approach what would become his new film The Bikeriders because he did not want to glamorize motorcycle culture.
That’s a hard road to travel when the finished movie stars Austin Butler (Elvis), Jodie Comer (Killing Eve), and Tom Hardy (Mad Max: Fury Road), who aren’t exactly lacking in screen charisma.
Nichols has based his movie on the seminal work of photojournalist Danny Lyon, who rode with and snapped the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club for two years beginning in 1963. His book chronicling his devilish association with the Outlaws was first published in 1968.
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Front and center are Butler as devastatingly handsome biker Benny; Comer as down-to-earth Kathy, unvarnished and clear-eyed, she sees through the biker bullshit; and Hardy as Johnny, the leader who kinda wants to be Benny.
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“Well, you don’t want to say they’re cliché, which is women are drawn to the bad boys and that stuff, because we all are, because I’m as attracted to Benny as she is, not in a sexual way, but in that way…and that was honestly kind of the purpose,” Nichols said.
“The thing I created more than anything was the love triangle and how interesting for it not to be these two guys fighting over a girl, but to be this woman and this leader of this club fighting over this young man.”
Nichols stressed that Hardy’s Johnny character is not attracted to Butler’s Benny in a sexual way, rather that Johnny sees Benny as being authentic, and that’s attractive to him. Whereas Johnny’s already playing a part, he’s quoting back Marlon Brando in The Wild One.
Benny’s an empty vessel, Nichols explained.
“It’s like a glass with no bottle. And Johnny’s pouring all of his stuff into Benny and Kathy’s pouring all of her stuff into Benny,” so that it’s almost Shakespearean.
“It’s what makes it star-crossed. The other star-crossed part is that as soon as you start to put rules around the beautiful thing you built, you’re starting to destroy it. So it’s undoing it as soon as you start to fashion it, you’re undoing what made it special in the first place. And it stands for the club they’re members of but it also stands for the relationships between these three people,” Nichols told me during a lengthy conversation at the tail end of the five-day 50th Telluride Film Festival.
The Bikeriders will also play a headline gala at the BFI London Film Festival on October 5, with subsequent showings October 6 and 9. The 20th Century Studios title opens in U.S. theaters on December 1.
“I’ve been thinking about this for 20 years,” Nichols told me, ever since he read a copy of Lyon’s book that his eldest brother, a rock musician, had purchased back in 2003 when it was republished to include more interview text from bikers and their gals.
“These are not people we want to idolize, but that doesn’t mean they’re not attractive,” he argued.
He noted that Lyon dealt with that dilemma in his celebrated book “because he saw them for what they were because he was around them, and he often talked about how beautiful they were . But also, he would call them idiots sometimes and I think there’s a tension between the allure of this subculture and the reality of it.”
Nichols said that you could simply dismiss bikers they are “grotesque” with their coifs, black leather jackets with polished buttons, and their big, status symbol two-wheeled machines. “It’s very attractive. And I think to deny it is to not be honest.”
And it would be easy, and a tad lazy, to label The Bikeriders as a picture-book movie (Adam Stone’s cinematography is undeniably sublime) about pretty boys on their fast, gleaming choppers.
But both the book and the film go deeper than that because the works are supported by the interviews Lyon conducted which were transcribed and those words contain harsh truths about America.
“The portraits may be kind of beautiful and captivating but those words on the page, that’s where the conflict comes,” he explained.
Nichols used those words to offer a glimpse of America’s dark underbelly.
“There’s a harshness, there’s a roughness. There’s also beauty in that. I’ve always been drawn to working-class stories and people and seeing how they look at the world and approach things and the honesty and the clarity, sometimes, that they have, but there’s also just a sharper edge to all of that,” said Nichols who was raised with two older brothers in the suburbs of Little Rock, Arkansas.
His parents grew up an hour outside of Little Rock in Altheimer. It’s delta land. ”My dad grew up very poor in cotton land. My mother’s father drove a propane truck, so probably had more in the middle-class territory, just simply because he had a job that wasn’t dependant on the rain and the sun and the crops.”
Nichols told me his dad was raised by a single mom. “And so they came out of a very working-class place. That’s where our grandparents lived. That’s where we grew up.”
Later on, his dad owned a piano store and then became a furniture salesman. Nichols found the land of his parents “beautiful and exotic” and he explained that his kin are “great storytellers and they’re great people.
“I didn’t grow up with that chip on my shoulder of, I hate small towns. I kind of love them, and I love the culture and the personalities,” he explained with a sense of pride in his voice.
I believe that’s why he’s fully able to grasp who the characters in The Bikeriders are. He approaches the story through character, not through narrative plot. They’re not chess pieces, he said.
“And I care about them because I see them. I see them moving around, it’s like I trust that they operate in a real way,” he said.
“Perhaps, it has something to do with the fact that I don’t come from here [America]. I am not an American, though I do have family in Nashville, Tennessee, and in Washington D.C. But more than any other American film I have seen in a long time, I felt that The Bikeriders took me to the heart of what’s going on in the United States. It’s a movie that has helped me try to fathom why,” as Nichols put it, “there’s darkness everywhere and there’s evil everywhere.”
Nichols told me that in deciding to make the film he was looking for patterns in society “and in humans, things we do, things we know we do. Sometimes we admit to them. Sometimes we don’t. I saw this pattern of people feeling like they don’t quite belong here in the mainstream, so they move to the outside. And that’s where the really interesting stuff starts to exist and starts to be created.”
The alienated, he observed “produce things. They produce music. They produce art. And in a way, there’s a lot of that in early biker culture, in the building of those bikes, but then also in the way they dress. It reminded me a lot of the punk rock scene in the ‘90s in Little Rock that I grew up around, the care that they take,” he said, sparking an interest in me to explore punk rock in Little Rock, for heaven’s sake.
“Because even if you’re looking at a biker who’s all greasy and crazy looking, it’s like, ‘Yeah, but they sewed those patches on. They’re actually thinking about who they are.’ And they’ve put love into those bikes and it’s all an outward expression of some identity for themselves. But they’re also on the fringe. But because then it starts to become a social thing, a group thing, people start to have to put rules to it and kind of this structure to it. And as soon as you start that, it starts to die.”
It becomes an affection of itself almost. Nichols gives a sense of that in a marvelous scene featuring the actor Norman Reedus (The Walking Dead) as a biker called Funny Sonny sitting on a motorcycle getting paid five bucks to get people in to see Easy Rider.
It’s such a super touch.
“Yeah, it’s kind of like a joke, like I’m a biker. Come and watch this movie,” Nichols laughed.
When I got to read excerpts from Danny Lyon’s book, I was struck by how much of the actual interview transcripts have been used in the film, especially those uttered by Kathy, who, by the way, Nichols has tried to find, but thus far, has been unsuccessful.
Nor does Lyon know where she might be or what happened to her over the intervening years.
But I kinda know Kathy.
I understand her. I know women as the backbone of our culture. I know about strong women, I happen to be married to one, for starters, who hails from pioneering Australian stock.
Jodie Comer hails from Liverpool and there’s something in the Mersey river over there that gives people, women in particular, a certain strength. Comer channels that strength into her acting. Sure, she excelled in Killing Eve but you’d understand more about what I’m talking about if you’d seen her hold the stage in Suzie Miller’s one-woman play Prima Facie that played in London’s West End and on Broadway, winning her the Laurence Olivier Award and the Tony Award for best performance by an actress.
I sat on two awards panels that honored Comer’s performance. I mean, it was a no-brainer.
My point being that Comer was born to play Kathy in The Bikeriders. I heard a couple of people moan that she didn’t accurately capture the right American accent. I couldn’t give a fig about that.
Did she manage to capture the character?! That’s the point.
Nichols told me that he called Adam Driver, who starred with Comer in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, to ask what she was like to work with.
“Total professional, Adam does not suffer fools,” he said, much like Michael Shannon, who’s also in The Bikeriders. ”So I knew that box was checked. There’s no vanity there. Then I found out it’s that times a million. She’s a worker.”
With Comer set, Nichols pursued Hardy.
They met at his home in London. “He was super polite, and nice, and gracious, but also had a million questions, blah, blah. He’s hyper-intelligent. He vibrates with energy,” Nichols recalled.
Nichols left that meeting “kind of punch drunk,” to catch Comer in Prima Facie at the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End.
“I go in and I’m kind of processing the Tom meeting. Then this play starts. I hadn’t really read anything about it. I knew it was a one-woman show. I walk out of that play and I’m like, ‘I’m the luckiest director in the world.’ Like this is it. I have an ace up my sleeve and just wait till we get there [on set] because she’s going to kill this,” said Nichols still in thrall of Comer’s talent.
Then he went after Butler.
“That guy’s a movie star,” he exclaimed.
He’s a f*cking movie star who can act, which isn’t always the case with movie stars, I add.
“He’s got the chops and then some,” Nichols agreed.
Butler had the sense to underplay Benny. “I have to give him credit for that because that’s what that character needed to do. There has to be a kind of emotional barrier for that guy, for the whole thing to work. He’s so charming,” Nichols said of Butler.
“I’d go up to him and I’d be like, ‘See, you’ve got to stop smiling so much.’ He’d be like, ‘Oh, okay, Jeff.’ I’d be like, ‘No, you’re doing it again. Stop being so charming.’ But he has an aura around him. When you have that aura combined with the work ethic and the talent that guy’s going to the moon,” he declared.
I quickly sensed that Nichols had something up his sleeve for Butler in the future but, boy oh boy, it was easier confronting a big brown bear in Telluride than getting an answer out of Nichols.
What is it, Jeff? I demanded, nicely.
“I can’t tell you.”
Come on, I said, “Tell Uncle Baz. You know you want to.”
He shook his head.
“I don’t know if he’ll do it or not, but yeah, I got something up my sleeve. It’s a real-life character. It’d blow people’s socks off. Yeah. We’ll see, we’ll see.”
Francine Maisler should win an Oscar for casting, if there was ever such a thing. The BAFTAs have a category for casting directors.
Mike Faist (West Side Story) portrays Danny Lyon the sort of narrator of the piece; Emory Cohen has a cool role that I won’t give away here and then there’s Toby Wallace, who I first spotted in the Aussie soap Neighbours when he was a kid.
I really started paying attention to Wallace when he appeared in Shannon Murphy’s Babyteeth opposite Eliza Scanlen (Little Women, Sharp Objects). He’s got that hint, that mark of something. I also saw him in Kitty Green (The Assistant)’s new film The Royal Hotel at Telluride, which will be playing TIFF as well.
But he needs to stop playing menacing characters otherwise he’ll be stuck. He’s got much more to give than that. Nichols agreed that Wallace “is going to be something special.”
He also saw him in Babyteeth “where he looks like a stray dog. That’s what we wanted. Even when we gave him this haircut, he took the clippers and just dug pieces, like he had mange or something on his head. I think you’re in young Sean Penn territory there. I think that guy has some serious gears.
“But honestly, in this cast, you can throw a rock and hit talent,” he boasted.
He stands in solidarity with the actors and writers on strike but implored that “everybody, just get back to the table.”
It’s devastating for so many people, he told me.
”I just want them to get back to the table and get down to business. Everybody’s got to get back to the table,” he said trying hard not to thump the table we were seated at.
“They need to do it now. Today, get back to the table,” he cried.
My Toronto Time
I felt somewhat discombobulated arriving in urban Toronto with its towering mirrored skyscrapers, from Telluride, high up in the San Juan mountain range of the Rockies. I like cities but Toronto’s a bit too extreme for me. I’ve been coming here for decades but I’ve never mastered it. Everything’s always “awesome,” which drives me nuts. And there are galas for this film and that film and there’s just too much faffing about.
Telluride, on the other hand, forswears red carpet palaver, which makes me very happy. It’s all about the movies minus the fuss.
That’s not to say that there won’t be great movies at TIFF. There will be. There are a few things in the program that are just ace.
I guess I just miss those glorious, wide-open spaces and forested peaks.
And the wild bears!