Jeff Nichols Quotes
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What Richard and Mildred Loving did was, by their nature, not by any calculus, they separated themselves from the political conversation. They did not have an agenda. They did not want to be martyrs. They did not want to be symbols of a movement.
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My characters are not thinking about the act breaks. They're thinking about what they need to do to move forward. As long as I focus on that, the story starts to progress. As soon as I think, 'We're 20 pages in, something better blow up,' we're in trouble.
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It took me a year just to edit 'Shotgun Stories.' Actually, it took me two years to edit 'Shotgun Stories.'
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I thought 'Mud' would be such an easy film for people to understand.
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I never wanted to make movies just for me. I want to make movies that people watch.
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I was always interested in creative writing growing up. From junior high on, I was writing short stories. I also grew up watching movies. My father would take me to everything. Most weeks, I could open the paper having seen every movie listed.
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I really don't know how to tell you what it feels like to be a parent.
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I think the way you make a movie dictates the movie that you make.
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I think Warner Bros. are probably some of the best people in marketing films in the world.
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'Indiana Jones' was me growing up. I could quote lines from 'Tango and Cash' as much as I could quote lines from 'The Searchers'.
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The more we try to control our kids and create who they are and where they're going, the more that will fall apart. That's a dangerous thing. So you need to actually manage the fear and figure out who your kids are. Who do they want to be and how can you help shape that, but not control it.
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The real cost is always more than just the money you shell out.
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'Take Shelter' is a tough movie because there's no humor in it, so there's really no way to judge how you're doing - whether people are still with you or not.
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It's amazing how far you can get into a plot before you figure out what you're doing.
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I'd love to just continue making original films from scratch, but it doesn't mean I won't try my hand at something else in the meantime.
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Most film productions, when they're based at a place, they get, like, a 30-mile radius or a 30-minute radius to get out of the town. And once you go past that, your day starts to become shorter, and you have to start paying your drivers more, and everybody just gets paid more, and you have less time to shoot, and everything costs more.
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I think only the movies you do remember are the films you had an emotional connection to.
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I think plot is very overrated. Plot is obviously necessary, but what I really care about is emotionally affecting the audience. Having a thought myself and then an emotional experience myself, somehow transferring that to the audience.
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People ask me about past projects I've worked on, and other things; I'm just really bad at lying. I have a bad poker face, so I just try to tell people how I'm feeling in the moment and really what I was trying to do.
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I have gained a lot of confidence in my process of making films. It does't mean I'll make a successful film or even a good film, but I know how to make my film.
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Definitely when you give a script to an actor, it's like dropping a capsule in water and the fizzing starts. That's when the thing starts to live and breathe.
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I think we're so advanced when it comes to watching narrative material. I mean, it's all we do is consume content all day long. So when a character walks onscreen, you immediately start making connections for that character: Is that a good guy? Is that a bad guy?
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When I saw the scene in 'Close Encounters,' and Richard Dreyfuss's son is screaming at him - that's a heartbreaking scene. And I remember being devastated by 'E.T.' Or when E.T. started to get sick. That broke me up a little bit.
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Your reaction when you lose control in a situation is to try and hang on tighter.