Jeff Nichols: ​‘It’s a very intox­i­cat­ing thing, rid­ing on a bike’

For a long time, The Bik­erid­ers was just a project Jeff Nichols talked about. His close friend Michael Shan­non would rib him about it, point­ing out that he’d been men­tion­ing it for years and was still no clos­er to real­is­ing it. But final­ly, after some false starts, a few shift­ed release dates and a change of stu­dio, his dra­ma based on Dan­ny Lyon’s icon­ic pho­to­book about a 1960s Chica­go motor­cy­cle gang cruis­es into cin­e­mas, star­ring Austin But­ler as a rebel with­out a cause, Jodie Com­er as his exas­per­at­ed wife, and Tom Hardy as the good-natured gang leader try­ing to keep pace with a chang­ing world.

LWLies: I want­ed to ask you about an inter­view that I read in Slash­Film around 2018. You said you were in a bar with Michael Shan­non, and you were talk­ing about The Bik­erid­ers. You said you real­ly want­ed to make the movie, and he said, ​‘Oh, you’re nev­er going to make that movie.’ Is he hap­py you final­ly got to?

Nichols: I don’t know, but he’s great. I know he’s thrilled and excit­ed, but you know, the first film I worked on with Mike, we start­ed film­ing in 2004. It was Shot­gun Sto­ries, and he was the lead of that film. And I found this book in 2003.

Oh, wow.

So I’ve prob­a­bly brought it up to him for 20 years, and it real­ly was like, ​‘Nichols. Stop.’

In the inter­view you said you hadn’t got a script yet.

At some point it almost became like a din­ner par­ty trick. I would be like, ​‘Hey, you want to hear my movie about a ​’60s motor­cy­cle club movie?’, and I would reveal these lit­tle bits and pieces, and peo­ple were like, ​‘Oh, that sounds amaz­ing.’ But then I would go home and, you know, just crawl into the foetal posi­tion, because I didn’t actu­al­ly know how to make the whole thing.

Some­times it’s great to just have an idea and just know that idea is so good.

Yes, and think ​’I’m not going to ruin it by actu­al­ly doing it.’ Yeah, right. I think this has been very much
true for this idea, because it real­ly was. It lived in this beau­ti­ful place in my mind for so long, like to bring it down to earth felt like I might break it or ruin it.

But you’ve been in touch with Dan­ny Lyon [author of ​‘The Bik­erid­ers’] for a long time.

Yeah, I think I first reached out around 2014, around the time of Mid­night Spe­cial. I’d been stalk­ing his web­site, Bleak Beau­ty, and he had just ran­dom­ly one day post­ed some Quick­Time videos of orig­i­nal audio. And that was real­ly the first time that I thought I real­ly had to do some­thing with this. I was real­ly
intim­i­dat­ed by it, because, and this might sound strange, espe­cial­ly being in the UK, but I felt like I couldn’t write in that accent.

It’s very distinctive.

It’s very dis­tinc­tive, and it’s not just the accent, it’s the time peri­od, which affects the word choic­es and every­thing else. Like, it just felt very for­eign to me, espe­cial­ly being a South­ern­er. And once I heard these audio record­ings, it was like, ​‘Oh! And they’re so spe­cif­ic, and they’re so intense.’ Once I had heard them I thought, ​‘Now I think I’m run­ning out of excus­es not to do this thing.’ So then it was real­ly about going to meet Dan­ny, because it’s not like you could sit down and write this film with­out his bless­ing, you know?

Of course.

And we did actu­al­ly option his book of pho­tographs, and there was some debate whether or not that
was actu­al­ly nec­es­sary, because they were pho­tographs, but it felt like the right thing to do. And I want­ed not so much the details of the club, because that wasn’t real­ly what I was after. That’s not what I was going to fic­tion­alise. But it felt nec­es­sary to sit with them and kind of talk about the feel­ing of that time, which real­ly comes across in the book, in the inter­views. To get his bless­ing, I think, was a real­ly big deal. There’s so much of him in the book – just down to the fact he was with these guys for such a long time. For sure. On and off and drift­ing back to them. And he’s so cool. I mean, he’s pro­lif­ic. By the time he did this book, he’d already done incred­i­ble things. At the age of 19, he trav­elled down to the Amer­i­can South to pho­to­graph the Civ­il Rights Move­ment. He became John Lewis’s room­mate and the staff pho­tog­ra­ph­er for the South­ern Non­vi­o­lent Coor­di­nat­ing Com­mit­tee. This was at the age of 19.

Have you ever been… 

A bik­er? No, nev­er. My old­est broth­er is a writer. And he also became obsessed with Danny’s book. And he actu­al­ly wrote a song with his band called ​‘Bik­erid­ers’ inspired by the book. That was on an album called ​‘Nobody’s Dar­lins’. And so he’s had his own kind of fas­ci­na­tion with these pho­tos in this book. And it prompt­ed him to start writ­ing. And he actu­al­ly does a motor­cy­cle tour now called The Bik­erid­ers Tour, where he basi­cal­ly straps a gui­tar to his BMW and rides around and plays. Before I sat down to write this, I was like, I’ve got to go get my license. And I got to fig­ure this out because I can’t be a total fraud. And it’s a very intox­i­cat­ing thing, rid­ing on a bike. Like, there is some­thing to it. It’s kind of hard to explain. I guess I made an entire movie about it. But yeah, it’s not a cul­ture though that – and this is going to sound strange – I’m par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in.

Like mod­ern day bik­er culture? 

Yeah, it’s not real­ly my thing. That is for oth­er peo­ple to explore. I was real­ly inter­est­ed, though, in how a sub­cul­ture got start­ed and how these guys felt in Danny’s book at least. They had pret­ty earnest inspi­ra­tions for feel­ing like out­siders and every­thing else. That I was drawn to.

There’s some­thing very naïve about that scene of John­ny watch­ing The Wild One and think­ing, ​‘That guy’s real­ly cool.’ 

We’ve all done that. That was tak­en actu­al­ly from the book. There’s a pho­to­graph of the real John­ny, his kind of fam­i­ly scrap­book of the club. And one of the pages was a TV Guide with Mar­lon Bran­do on it. So that actu­al­ly hap­pened. I think it was kind of up to me to then turn that into not just an insti­gat­ing moment for the char­ac­ter, but also a defin­ing moment because… And I think Tom cer­tain­ly embraced this
with his voice and every­thing else, but he’s just play­ing the part. He’s just act­ing like Bran­do and it catch­es up with him in very dan­ger­ous ways. He’s not real­ly part of that world. He has a house and a fam­i­ly and daugh­ters and he knows deep down he’s not real­ly the guy on the screen.

You counter-bal­ance the heavy male focus of the film with the inclu­sion of Kathy, who deliv­ers the voiceover and offers a woman’s per­spec­tive. Why did you feel this was vital to your inter­pre­ta­tion of the story?

Well, it helps real­ly define what I’m try­ing to say about mas­culin­i­ty. Because she’s caught up in the same ten­sion that I think a lot of men are caught up in, which is hav­ing an under­stand­ing about the lim­i­ta­tions of the stereo­types of mas­culin­i­ty. There’s a lot of silli­ness that goes along with it. And so Kathy’s not just an observ­er in the film, she’s a par­tic­i­pant in this ten­sion between these two things, you know, being in love with some­thing and being attract­ed to some­thing that, at times, can be quite negative.

Did you man­age to talk to any of the guys that were around at that time? How much did you chase a sense of doc­u­men­tary-like fidelity?

No, I didn’t. Part­ly we couldn’t find a lot of them. A lot of them had died. And I real­ly want­ed to talk to Kathy. And she may still be alive. I don’t know. At some point, I think I realised before I wrote it, and one rea­son why I took so long to write it, was this isn’t Lov­ing. This isn’t a doc­u­men­tary. I’m not try­ing to get their sto­ry right in terms of the spe­cif­ic details. In fact, I don’t want to even know. Because I want to tell my own sto­ry. I want to tell a sto­ry that is some­how able to just cap­ture this nos­tal­gic feel­ing of this very spe­cif­ic thing at a very spe­cif­ic time, in a very spe­cif­ic place, that exist­ed, it formed and then dis­ap­peared. And so I real­ly didn’t want the con­straints of, you know, this is real­ly how the out­laws did it.