The Austin filmmaker on finding the right POV for his new film
There are few more iconic and emblematically American images than the biker gang. The leathers, the patches, the choppers, the camaraderie. But there's also the violence, the depravity, the criminal conspiracies., Jeff Nichols travels to the Midwest of the mid-Sixties to explore how the blue-collar bikers who responded to the outsider cool ofrevs up the story of a fictional biker club, the Vandals MC.
But there were two important things in it, and had I not come in on that particular edition I don’t know if we’d be sitting here. It had color photographs, which weren’t in the original, and it had a second forward that Danny had written in the late Nineties where he kind of caught up with the club a little bit. It’s where he talks about the end of Johnny and really the end of the old Outlaws, as he says they were being referred to at that point.
Honestly, it was a bit of a party trick, my being able to pitch this for about 10 years. Executives would come through town and take me out to lunch or dinner, and they’d be like,"Whaddaya got?" And I’d say,"I dunno, I want to make a Sixties biker film" just because it sounded cool to say. But I really didn’t have it figured out. It wasn’t until I sat down in the late teens and my back was against the wall because I’d had another big project fall through.
I’d read the book so many times that I had all those interviews memorized, and then I reached out to Danny, and I kind of got his blessing; then I started to get, I guess you could say, help in the sense that he would give me outtake photographs and all of the audio that we transferred to digital, so I was listening to hours and hours of stuff. He would do weird things, like just put his recorder down in the middle of a meeting.
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