The initial spark for writer and director Jeff Nichols’ latest film, The Bikeriders, came to him nearly 20 years ago, when he was introduced to Danny Lyon’s seminal photographic and oral history of a Midwestern outlaw motorcycle gang by his older brother Ben. “It’s about our search for identity. It is very much about American, masculine identity, capturing a rebellious time in America when the culture and people were changing. ” says Nichols.
“Ben has a band called Lucero and he wanted to use one of Danny’s photographs for an album cover,” Nichols recalls. “He had the book sitting on his coffee table, which was the first time I had seen it.”
The album cover never materialized, but Nichols connected with the photos and text immediately. First published in 1968 and later reissued, The Bikeriders is a chronicle of the four years Lyon spent with the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, interviewing and photographing longtime members. The book inspired Nichols to create a fictional narrative that incorporates characters based in part on some of the original bikers.
“I was introduced to what I think was the 2003 edition, which is important,” says Nichols. “That book has a preface that Danny wrote himself. In it, he goes back and recounts what he heard had happened to some of the members. There is just one line about the leader of the club, this guy named Johnny, who had been challenged for leadership. Many people say that incident was the end of the golden age of motorcycles. Just that sentence started giving me the shape of the film and the narrative.”
Lyon’s preface was steeped in nostalgia, according to Nichols, a nostalgia he believes to be specific to this outsider group. “It was a particular moment in time and once it was gone, it could never come back,” he explains. “It is unique to that moment. There was something beautiful and kind of sad in it that came to inform the whole film.”
Nichols admits motorcycle culture was not a natural fit for him. “I didn’t grow up riding. I didn’t have family members that rode. I was intimidated by it. And these people in the time period were a lot to be intimidated by. As time went on, I would sometimes pitch a story about a motorcycle club and people would say, oh, that’s really neat, you should do that, but it wasn’t really moving forward.”
Jeff Nichols Q&A
Over the years he would visit Lyon’s website, Bleak Beauty, revisiting the photojournalist’s gritty, often candid shots of the Outlaws in their heyday, looking for inspiration. “One day I discovered he had posted some QuickTime files of the original audio he used in the text for the book,” Nichols recalls. “It was Kathy, Zipco, all of the real people speaking. The voices were incredible.”
Hearing them speak for the first time gave Nichols the final push he needed to write a screenplay. “It was such a crucial tool for me as a screenwriter,” he says. “Suddenly I was able to visualize the movie, what it could sound like and look like.”
The audio tapes also gave Nichols the confidence to reach out to Lyon in 2014. “I introduced myself and told him how much I respected his work. He had seen Mud and liked it. So I went to New Mexico to meet with him.”
The Bikeriders takes place on two levels, according to the writer and director. “There is the A-line story, which is about a love triangle, but not a love triangle between two men who are chasing the same woman. It’s a man, Johnny, and a woman, Kathy, who are both chasing Benny. He’s everything that they both want but for different reasons. Everybody is trying to fill Benny up with their hopes and dreams and aspirations, but he isn’t built to contain those. He can’t hold them, and he doesn’t want to. And it’s a tragedy because they both put so much into a thing that was not built to hold anything. That’s not a story that takes place in the book. I took some character inspiration, but my job was to build it into a narrative.”
The film also tells a deeper story about the psychology of outsider groups, adds Nichols. “The best example I can think of is a monologue that Zipco, played by Michael Shannon, has about going down to the draft board all hung over. He aces all the tests, but he is rejected. When I wrote it, I thought it was pretty funny. When we shot that scene, everybody was laughing just like I expected. But by the end, there was a tinge of sadness, because Zipco actually wanted to go to Vietnam. The army didn’t want him. He was an undesirable. You see these tough guys around the campfire start to nod because they understand. It’s actually affirming everything that they’re feeling about not belonging.”
After a chance encounter at a local bar, strong-willed Kathy (Jodie Comer) is inextricably drawn to Benny (Austin Butler), the newest member of Midwestern motorcycle club, the Vandals led by the enigmatic Johnny (Tom Hardy). Much like the country around it, the club begins to evolve, transforming from a gathering place for local outsiders into a dangerous underworld of violence, forcing Benny to choose between Kathy and his loyalty to the club.
Director’s Statement
I’ve always tried to find a universal theme in my films. The idea being that if you have a universal thought at the core of your story, it is possible to make a very personal, regionally specific film that feels totally unique to a specific time and place that still resonates with a broad and diverse audience.
The Bikeriders is about our search for identity. It is very much about American, masculine identity, but only thinking of it in those terms misses a bigger idea. We are all desperate to find and build an identity for ourselves. I think this is one of the greatest animating forces at work in our society right now. People no longer simply define themselves by their work or where they went to college. We are turning to our sex, race, culture and history to help us find a deeper, more meaningful identity for ourselves. What I find interesting, and what The Bikeriders directly addresses, is that in our search for a unique identity, we very often turn to groups to help us define ourselves. It is human nature to want to belong, but that feeling is compounded when the group we choose to belong to is more unique. The more specific the group, the clearer the identity. In some instances, this can be a wonderful, powerful thing in our lives. In others, it can be terribly destructive. The Bikeriders represents both.
When you combine this universal idea, or truth if you want to go that far, with a subculture as complicated, colorful, dangerous, and alluring as American motorcycle culture, I think you have the recipe for a film that will speak to a lot of people. I found Danny Lyon’s book 20 years ago, and it has been an obsession in my life ever since. While illuminating for me all of the thoughts mentioned above, it was also, quite simply, the coolest book I’d ever come across. My hope was to make a film that captured this feeling, and more importantly, transferred it to a larger filmgoing audience. That is my wish for The Bikeriders.
As he considers the film and the book that inspired it, Nichols sees a pattern that recurs in all societies. “Mainstream culture doesn’t suit everyone,” he says. “Some outsiders are drawn to subcultures and that’s where interesting things happen. Subcultures are where new art comes from. Subcultures are where people can find interesting ways to express themselves. And inevitably those subcultures become interesting to the main culture. They are absorbed by the mainstream and become shadows of themselves.”
When he first discovered Lyon’s The Bikeriders and its unforgettable photos and text, he was reminded of a subculture he himself had explored as a younger man. “That’s what happened to the punk rock community I experienced in the mid-’90s in Little Rock. There was a great music scene and a great punk rock community. They couldn’t necessarily articulate why they didn’t fit in; they just knew they didn’t. They created their own world out of a desire to be outside of mainstream culture. But it morphed and it became this other thing. As it became more mainstream, punk rock seemed to become a facsimile of itself. It felt cyclical and very similar.” This cycle, he says, feels real and true and universal. “And anytime you land on something that feels universal, it’s worth exploring for a film.”
From Page To Screen
Perhaps best known as fashion-plate femme fatale Villanelle on the acclaimed television series “Killing Eve,” Jodie Comer has also emerged as one the most versatile actresses working today, playing leading roles on television, stage and screen. In The Bikeriders, the British actress transforms herself once again, playing Kathy, a conventional Midwestern girl who falls for an enigmatic young motorcyclist, and serves as the narrator of the film. The actress also listened to about a half hour of audio interviews that made it clear to her that Kathy is an exuberant woman who says exactly what she thinks.
Much of the film’s extensive narration was adapted from the real Kathy’s taped interviews, according to Nichols. “Kathy has a unique cadence in the way she speaks,” he says. “She’s funny and self-deprecating and has a very strong working-class Chicago accent. Jodie captured that exactly, as well as the way Kathy pauses and the way her voice pitches up when she is being sarcastic. I’ve played the interviews for audiences at festival screenings and they are dumbfounded by how accurate her dialect is. It’s uncanny.”
To Austin Butler, who shot to worldwide attention as the star of Baz Luhrmann’s biopic Elvis and was recently seen in Dune: Part Two, Benny is a mysterious figure and a man of few words. He comes from a more affluent family than most of the bikers, which sets him apart, says the actor. “He’s fallen out with his family and become a lone wolf. But there’s something in every human being that needs community. When he found the Vandals, he found a father figure in Johnny and camaraderie with all the guys. He and Kathy get married very quickly, but he’s always got one foot out the door. He doesn’t want anybody to need anything from him, but Kathy needs him to stop riding and get out of that life, and Johnny needs Benny to take over the gang.”
Nichols, he says, created a script with extraordinary care. “He really thought out every character and every angle. By the time that we got to set, he had a blueprint in his mind that was a comforting support system for us all. He encouraged the actors to do whatever they wanted, but you always knew he was taking care of you.”
Although the recordings Lyon posted were useful to some of his castmates, there were none of Benny. “I saw it as a blessing because there’s nothing to say that I do or don’t sound like Benny,” says Butler. “I listened to a lot of different recordings of people that Danny made and those were very helpful. But then at the end of the day, it’s more just about Benny’s essence and how that comes through in my voice.”
Butler grew up around motorcycles — his father and grandfather both rode. When his grandparents moved from California to Arizona when he was a young boy, Butler and his dad would ride the whole way to visit them. “When I was 16, my dad decided it was time for me to learn so he just threw me on a bike in a parking lot. After I spoke to Jeff (Nichols) about this role, I started riding all the time. Then when I was in Australia shooting Elvis, I met a man who fixed up old Harleys and we would go riding together. That was my first time getting on an older bike. It helped get me ready for the film.”
Tom Hardy plays Johnny, the Vandals’ founder and longtime alpha male. As a senior member of the group, he sets the example for the up-and-comers, but he is starting to feel his age. Johnny wants to appoint Benny as his successor. “When you look at Johnny, you see a man who gets outpaced by the times,” says Nichols. “He has the classic greased-back biker hair, but the younger members no longer look like that.”
Club member Funny Sonny, played by Norman Reedus, is a recent arrival from California, a hardcore biker who falls in with the Vandals.
“There were two pieces of pop culture I wanted to bookend this story with,” says Nichols. “The first is The Wild One with Marlon Brando, which is the kickoff for Johnny’s character. The other is Easy Rider.
Norman Reedus’ character, Funny Sonny, gets paid to sit outside of a movie theater to get people to come in to see it. They’ve become kind of a movie version of themselves. They’re starting to play the part of a biker.”
When Butler was cast, the only other actor in place was Michael Shannon. “I didn’t even know then which role he was playing,” he recalls. “He’s an incredibly focused actor. He’ll finish a take and then he’ll walk off by himself, come back a few minutes later and just go right back into it.”
Shannon plays Zipco, a character inspired by an original Outlaw immortalized in Lyon’s well-known photograph, “Funny Sonny Packing with Zipco, Milwaukee.”
Set primarily in Chicago, The Bikeriders was shot in and around Cincinnati, Ohio, a midsize Midwestern city that afforded the production both urban and rural settings for the film, as well as neighborhoods that could plausibly stand in for 1960s Chicago. The meticulous recreation of the city, it’s denizens and its surrounding areas depended on a close collaboration between the camera, production design, costume, and hair and makeup departments, according to Nichols. “I’ve been lucky enough to work with director of photography Adam Stone, production designer Chad Keith and costume designer Erin Benach on multiple films.”
The director gave each department head a single specific image: a color photo of Cal, one of the real- life bikers, sitting in a gas station holding a soda bottle. His clothing, his posture, the colors surrounding him would all influence every visual element in the film. “I told them that if we could achieve a frame in this film that looks this dense, this filled with life and specificity, then we’ve won,” he says.
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JEFF NICHOLS (Director, Writer) is an acclaimed writer and director who hails from Little Rock, Arkansas. In addition to two nominations for the prestigious Palme d’Or, Nichols has won three awards at the Cannes Film Festival. His critically-acclaimed feature, Loving, received four Critics’ Choice Award Nominations including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, and garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for Ruth Negga. Nichols was previously an Independent Spirit Award Best Director nominee for Mud, starring Matthew McConaughey, and Take Shelter, starring Michael Shannon. Nichols and Shannon have collaborated on multiple occasions, beginning with Nichols’ directorial debut, Shotgun Stories, which he also wrote. In addition to numerous festival honors, the short film was also nominated for the John Cassavetes Award. Nichols and Shannon also worked together on the science fiction film Midnight Special, co- starring Adam Driver, Joel Edgerton, and Kirsten Dunst. He is the director of the upcoming film, The Bikeriders, a drama following the rise of a fictional 1960s Midwestern motorcycle club through the lives of its members.