During a 2007 interview actor Ray McKinnon motioned to a young man sitting nearby and remarked, “This is who you should be talking to. Someday I hope to be in one of his movies.” It was an intriguing remark considering that the unassuming stranger McKinnon spoke of had made only one film—Shotgun Stories—a low-budget Arkansas indie feature that, at the time, had been in few festivals; it was turned down by Sundance. Redemption for that mistake, however, would come a year later when the film appeared on numerous Top Ten lists including those of critics Roger Ebert and David Edelstein. Jeff Nichols, it appeared, was being noticed by everyone, except for the actor he desired to connect with the most, Matthew McConaughey, who would eventually become the star of Nichols’ third film Mud, opening in theaters this week.
“I started thinking about Mud back in college,” says Nichols who went to the University of North Carolina School of the Arts where he met fellow director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express, George Washington). “I had the idea of a man hiding out on an island in the middle of the Mississippi River. Immediately I was thinking of Matthew for this part.”
But despite favorable reviews of Shotgun Stories and sharing an agent with McConaughey, Nichols couldn’t get the actor to read the script. “I just didn’t have enough heat,” says the director. “I didn’t have enough juice. So I went out and made Take Shelter.”
Take Shelter received a number of accolades—including Independent Spirit Award nominations for best director, best feature and best actor in Michael Shannon—something he hoped would give him the Hollywood credibility to reach someone of McConaughey’s stature. But then Mud’s financiers complained that the actor was out of their reach. When that led to a failed experiment with a different actor, Nichols was finally given the green light to talk with McConaughey.
At the center of Mud is young Ellis (Tye Sheridan) who lives in a houseboat on the Mississippi with his parents on the verge of divorce. He and his friend Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) discover an abandoned boat high in a tree on an island in the Mississippi. Also on the island is the fugitive Mud, and McConaughey has found another unique and distinct role to add to those he has adeptly collected over the past few years, from a male stripper in Magic Mike to a psychotic police detective in Killer Joe. The boys help Mud escape from some Texas bounty hunters, but not before he aims to reunite with his lifelong love Juniper (Reese Witherspoon). Putting rural citizens in extreme circumstances has become a theme in all of Nichols’ films, and he does it with a minimum of dialogue, some on-target casting and an authentic simplicity, something clearly seen in the character of May Pearl (Bonnie Sturdivant), an older girl with whom Ellis has a crush on.
“In the first scene she’s in, one of her friends is calling to her to come on,” says Nichols. “And she’s like ‘Okay!’. I wrote ‘Okay’ in the script but the way she delivered it was like, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly how I want that said’. But I didn’t even know it until it came out of her mouth. My job is to get the behavior right, meaning don’t force them to do anything they wouldn’t do.”
His passion for the craft becomes evident as he further expounds on the art of screenwriting. “Plot doesn’t have anything to do with behavior. And dialogue is the greatest tool and also the greatest weapon to ruin a movie, because you have two things in a script. You’ve got lines of action and lines of dialogue. So people use lines of dialogue to tell you things. I think that’s stupid. I think dialogue should be behavior in every instance.”