Jeff Nichols says Mid­night Spe­cial is an homage to Steven Spielberg

For any­one who has pad­dled in the murky psy­cho­log­i­cal waters of a Jeff Nichols film, you’ll be excit­ed to learn that he has not one but two films com­ing out in 2016. The first, Mid­night Spe­cial, which may or may not be named after the Clear­wa­ter Cree­dence Revival song, is a high-con­cept sci-fi tack­ling themes of father­hood and the supernatural.

The basis for the film con­cerns the rela­tion­ship between a father (Nichols’ reg­u­lar Michael Shan­non) and his son (new­com­er Jae­den Lieber­her) as they’re hound­ed across Amer­i­ca by gov­ern­ment forces and reli­gious extrem­ists. In order to dis­sect this mys­te­ri­ous project a lit­tle more, we caught up with its rapid­ly ris­ing 37-year-old writer/​director:

“When I write a film I always kin­da attack it from two dif­fer­ent paths,” Nichols told LWLies recent­ly. ​“The first is always more about plot and sto­ry and aes­thet­ics, and for this one I real­ly was look­ing at sci-fi films from the ​’80s – specif­i­cal­ly gov­ern­ment sci-fi chase films like Star­man, Close Encoun­ters and E.T. – look­ing struc­tural­ly at how the nar­ra­tives unfold­ed in those films but also the aes­thet­ic of those films; the colours, lens flares and the gen­er­al feel­ing and tone.”

Judg­ing by the trail­er for the film, there’s a pal­pa­ble Spiel­ber­gian qual­i­ty to the mate­r­i­al. Acknowl­edg­ing this influ­ence, Nichols says, ​“At the time of writ­ing, my son had just turned one and I was real­ly think­ing about what it felt like to be a father and the emo­tion­al changes that I felt since becom­ing a father, and all the respon­si­bil­i­ties and inse­cu­ri­ties that come with that.”

While Nichols also con­firms that visu­al effects played a more sig­nif­i­cant part in Mid­night Spe­cial than in his pre­vi­ous work, he hopes this won’t be to the film’s detri­ment. ​“You’ll see some CGI,” he reveals, ​“but I don’t think that you’ll walk away think­ing the film is just bathed or drenched in it. I hope the audi­ence just fol­low the mys­tery of the nar­ra­tive, because that’s how it’s designed – it’s designed to unfold like my oth­er films.”

Mid­night Spe­cial is released 15 April.