How ‘Midnight Special’ Proves You Can Make Science Fiction for Adults
It started with a single mental image: Two men in a car, driving down dark Southern backroads in the middle of the night, with no lights on. “I couldn’t get it out of my head,” writer-director Jeff Nichols says, squinting as the sunlight pours through the picture window in his Berlin hotel room. “It was this out-of-nowhere vision of guys going very, very fast, just booking it in a muscle car in the dead of night. It felt cool, you know, but for some reason, I thought: Well, this is a very sci-fi image. I’m not sure why, but that’s what I’m seeing.” Soon, among these two unidentified men, the 37-year-old Arkansas native would add a young boy, sitting quietly in the back seat. The kid would be wearing steampunk-ish goggles. When he’d remove them, an intense blue light would shoot out of his eyes.
Those images are among the first you see in Midnight Special, the independent filmmaker’s first studio movie and his first attempt to make an all-out summer blockbuster-style movie … sort of. Like Nichols’ 2011 breakthrough movie Take Shelter, this story of a father (Michael Shannon) keeping his son (newcomer Jaeden Lieberher) — “blessed” with strange super powers — safe from a religious cult and the Feds feels like a down-to-earth drama with otherwordly elements woven into its fabric. And like his previous movie, 2012’s modest McConnaissance hit Mud, it takes a familiar scenario — an on-the-run chase story — and adds a moody, lived-in feel to it. Set pieces with special effects and adrenaline-soaked action sequences share screen time with quiet, contemplative moments. You can’t really classify it as simply one thing or another.
“There’s actually more of Jaws in here than Close Encounters. Actually, that was a lot more obvious before I took out the part where a giant shark eats Joel [Edgerton].”-director Jeff Nichols
“I actually got pretty far in the writing before I stopped and thought, I don’t know what the hell this movie is about,” Nichols says with a laugh. “I mean, I knew the characters; I knew where it was going, I knew exactly what the plot details were. But I couldn’t say what this movie was about, in a bigger sense.” Meanwhile, he had become a father for the first time, and right before his son turned two, the boy suffered a febrile seizure. “He was fine, but it scared me. And then, right after that, [the shooting in] Sandy Hook happened. And suddenly, I was wracked with fear over my attachment to this little person. I’d be absolutely devastated if anything happened to him.
“When you’re afraid of something, you want to take control of it,” Nichols continues. “But you can’t take control of your kids’ lives — you just have to understand who they are, and where they need to go. That was when I realized, oh, I get it know: I’ve been writing about parenthood this whole time. I just hadn’t quite realized it. And then I knew how to finish the movie.”
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