Jeff Nichols shares some thoughts about The Bikeriders, his own passion for bikes and the cinematic legacy of the biker movie.
Born in Arkansas, Jeff Nichols is the acclaimed, award-winning filmmaker behind Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, Mud, Midnight Special and Loving. His latest film, The Bikeriders, is an adaptation of the iconic book, published in 1967, that saw photographer Danny Lyon chronicle time spent with the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club. Written and directed by Nichols, the film traces the rise and fall of a fictional
Midwestern biker club The Vandals, led by the charismatic Johnny (Tom Hardy). Events are seen through the eyes of Kathy (Jodie Comer), a woman who gets pulled into The Vandals’ orbit after she begins dating Johnny’s wild protégé Benny (Austin Butler). With a sublime cast that also includes Nichols regular Michael Shannon, Norman Reedus, Beau Knap, Damon Herriman and Boyd Holbrook, The Bikeriders
evocatively recreates a bygone era – a time of great change, when the counterculture movement was stirring, and anti-authoritarian sentiment was rife.
Read more about The Bikeriders
Jeff Nichols Q&A
When did you come across the book by Danny Lyon? And did you swiftly think you wanted to make it into a film?
In 2003. I immediately thought it had the ingredients for a great film. I mean, when you combine these photographs with the interviews in the book, it felt like the ingredients to this delicious meal. I guess I’ll use another metaphor…it was like walking into a room. And there’s no Christmas tree, but all the ornaments are laid out on the floor in front of you. And so it’s your job to build the tree – though you can see all these beautiful things that are going to be a part of it. But it took a while to figure out how to build that structure to hang all those ornaments.
How much is fictionalised in your script?
It’s such a grey area, because I owe so much to the book and to the photographs and the interviews. But this idea of a love triangle in the centre of that, that’s completely fictionalised. The overarching trajectory of the club going from a social group to a more formalised gang by the early ’70s…that’s roughly there in
real life. But it’s not a documentary. The book follows the Chicago Outlaws that did grow to become the second largest motorcycle gang in the world. But I didn’t want to make their story. I really wanted this to be an allegory for a feeling that I got from picking up the book. So fictionalisation was really required to distance yourself from those things. I had to fictionalise the club. I had to fictionalise the characters who
were all based on real people. And their real words actually appear from the beginning to the end. But the context of how their characters are behaving and how they’re relating to each other, that’s all made up. And certainly this love triangle between Johnny, Kathy and Benny is complete fiction.
Kathy is a crucial character in the film. She is our eyes and ears, so to speak, into this world. What gave you that idea to use her interviews as this framing device?
Well, her interviews were the most compelling. And so from her description of walking into that bar for the first time to Benny sitting outside of her house all night, that’s in the book. And it’s extremely compelling, and a great way to enter the world, right? So if I’m looking for an introduction to the world that seemed the most complete, so that was there. And it was like, ‘Well, okay, if that’s where we’re going to start, then that makes sense to use her as this framing device, this lens, to observe this world.’ But I don’t want to just to be an observer, I want her to be a participant…she’s in it. And ultimately, what she ends up representing is really the tension of the whole thing, which is this tension in masculinity; it’s a tension, really, in the subculture. There are all of these negative things that are actually pretty obvious: the violence, the lack of stability and everything else. But then there are all these beautiful romantic things. And Kathy’s the centre of that tension. So it made sense to have her be the one trying to interpret this world for us. And then really, just pragmatically, it allowed me time. I knew I would break that interview into three pieces: a 1965 interview, a 1969 interview and a 1973 interview. In the film, we only give time signatures for ’65 and ’73, because when we included the ’69 time signature people just got confused. And I didn’t want them being bothered by it. But for me as a storyteller, these were home bases that I could go tag, and I could actually mix them up and put them in different orders while still having a linear
feeling. So it was valuable to me as home base.
Did you meet with Danny Lyon, the author of The Bikeriders?
Oh, yeah. He was the first person I really reached out to, I think in about 2014. I sent him an email. And at that point, I had made enough films. I had a bit of a reputation. And then I flew out to New Mexico, where he lives part of the year, and I sat down and I went into this long, long speech about cycles and subcultures and society and how The Bikeriders represented this cycle and what it could mean in terms of a conversation about masculinity and about outsiders. And he shook his head, and he said, ‘Okay, so you don’t want to make a movie just about a photographer?!’
Danny is a huge cultural figure of the era, right?
Danny, I think he’s an icon in American photography. And in New Journalism. Before he shot The Bikeriders in his early 20s, he was 19, son of a dentist in New York. And he travelled down to the American South and became part of the Civil Rights movement. And he was staff photographer for the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and took probably some of the most iconic Civil Rights photographs you’ve ever seen. He was 19. So this guy’s lived.
He was happy with you taking whatever direction you wanted to?
He was, and thankfully, I’ve shown him the film, and he’s really proud of it. And he really likes it. Early on, though, I told him ‘Your book is your thing. The movie’s gonna be its own thing. And there will be similarities.’ And he just wrote me the most beautiful e-mail. He said, ‘To think, me sitting in a room with this reel-toreel recorder and recording these voices and having it travel all the way through your movie, which is getting so much attention now…I just never would have thought that those words would have travelled so far.’ And it was a really beautiful sentiment. And he said something that I really don’t agree with. But he said, ‘You’ve given me something I’ve never had, which is a successful book.’ Now, I think there’s a big argument to be made that his book was really defining in the photography movement of the ’60s. But that was flattering nonetheless to hear.
In the film, you reference The Wild One and also Easy Rider, which are iconic biker movies of their time. How important is the biker movie in the mythology of American cinema?
It’s funny, it’s like a canary in the coal mine in terms of where biker culture is in the cultural zeitgeist. And I found it interesting to look at and bookend the popular culture of biker films in this study of biker culture, because you can’t get two more different films in terms of aesthetics. I mean, if you look at The Wild One, it opens with this kind of cheesy [shot of] Marlon Brando on a fake motorcycle with rear projection. It’s very stilted. And then you get Easy Rider, which is this really organic, bizarre art film, trying to express the feeling of the late ’60s and early ’70s. You couldn’t get two more aesthetically different films. And they’re only a decade apart. But I thought they were perfect signposts or something of where the zeitgeist was in
relation to biker culture.
Are there other biker movies?
No, but everybody just talks about [TV show] Sons of Anarchy. In the ’60s and ’70s, you could throw a rock and hit a biker film. It was this sub-sub-genre. And then they would make biker horror films and biker sci-fi films. For a while that was every movie…whenever a bad guy showed up, they were a biker. And it just played itself out. But that’s kind of the point, right? That’s why you put [Norman Reedus’ character] Funny Sonny on a motorcycle, getting paid five bucks to attract people into the theatre to see Easy Rider. The whole thing’s become an affectation of itself. And that’s where you get the idea of…now this subculture has kind of reached primetime. Which arguably it did with Marlon Brando in The Wild One, but it was different then.
Well The Wild One didn’t change cinema in the way Easy Rider did…
Absolutely. And I think, biker culture hadn’t become…two versions of itself, three versions of itself [as it did] later. The guys now coming into the club, they’re coming in for different reasons, because now they’re looking at it out in society, and it’s different now. It’s defined itself more. And so they’re kind of jumping onto this train way later, with much different motivations.
What’s your knowledge of bikes yourself?
I’m not really into biker culture. I learned to ride before writing this film, just so I wouldn’t be a complete fraud! And I love it. I’ve been bitten by the bug. I have a Royal Enfield INT 650. And it’s a beautiful bike. But I got a wife, I got a kid, I got a family I got to take care of…the last thing I need to do is do a header off of a bike.
Well, this is kind of what the film is about, isn’t it? The tension between your domestic and rebellious life?
Yeah, it’s why I wouldn’t be a member of this club. They wouldn’t let me in. And I mean, there’s a lot of talk actually…that scene where Brucie gets killed. And they talked about that. Those are some lines from the interview: ‘Because it’s the one that comes out of nowhere, that’s the one that gets you, the one that
comes out of nowhere.’ And it feels like that. Especially when you have no helmet on…you’re completely vulnerable on this thing. And the world can snatch you out just like that. And I think riding around with that constant knowledge has to be an adrenaline rush for people. It has to be part of the attraction. But I also found it interesting to put some of those lines…Beau Knapp’s character Wahoo, after the funeral scene for Brucie, is like, ‘That’s the way I want to die. The way I want to go out is on a bike.’ Again that’s another quote from the book. But then I juxtapose that with Johnny’s character in this moment being just tired of bullshit: Just shut up. Just shut the fuck up. Now’s not the time for me to hear your macho bullshit.
So how do you see Johnny as a character, as the leader of this gang?
It’s too harsh to say he’s a fraud. But he’s definitely putting on an act, right? The process of seeing Marlon Brando in The Wild One and getting the idea for this, the reason he’s so attracted to Benny is because he’s not Benny. There’s the scene by the campfire, when he says, ‘You’re what all these guys are trying to be’ and he’s really talking about himself. The truth is, he’s a pretty straightforward normal…”bougie guy” is the word that Danny used. He’s got a house, he’s got kids, he’s got a job. And he’s really not built for this world. In that sense, it’s kind of like Frankenstein; he builds the monster and then it rises up and kills him. If he had been a real part of this world, maybe he could have held on to it, but the truth is, he wasn’t. Tom liked to use the phrase, ‘He can’t be half a gangster.’ So even in the way Tom built that character, that character’s voice, his mannerisms and everything else, I think he’s playing a part. I can’t imagine anyone else playing that. Because of the role that Tom was in, it had such a significant impact on the way the film played. That scene by the campfire, where he offers Benny the club for the first time. It’s not written the way that it’s played on screen. It’s played on screen because of Tom Hardy. And that sexuality,
that intensity, that’s all a credit to Tom.
How do you compare this film to your earlier work?
I mean, they’re all attached because they’re all attached to me. I make really personal films, even the ones that are like this, that are inspired by something else. And in that sense, I feel close to all of them. This film feels very much like the film made by a man in his mid ’40s, a guy that for the first time is starting to look back in life as much as he’s looking forward. It feels like it’s written by a person who for the first time can actually understand the term ‘nostalgic’ and what that means and the impact that it has on your life. And so in that sense, it’s a personal film. And they’re all personal films. You could also talk about meditations on masculinity, meditations on the working class. There are lots of things to look at. I’m also obsessed with narrative structure and how a story is told and how it unfolds for an audience. And each film I make I try to adjust that and tweak that as it is appropriate to the story I’m telling. So yeah, this thing’s all me!
