Top 60 Jeff Nichols Quotes

Marriage isn’t about a collection of scenes over ten years of two people telling each other that they love each other. It’s about commitment.

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.

If you want someone to show up and execute your script for you, seriously, there are a lot of great people out there. Don’t call me.

There are great advantages of making things on the independent market. There’s freedom and control there, and kind of a cleanness to the process that I like.

I’ve been really lucky when it comes to casting kids, and I don’t particularly like child actors. Too often, they just show up, and they’ve had whatever real innocence that’s in a child just beaten out of them. They start to perform for you, and you can just see it coming. It’s no good.

I first read ‘Tom Sawyer’ when I was in 8th grade, 13 years old. I realised since that Mark Twain just bottled what it felt like to be a child.

I love ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ big sweeping films. I want my films to feel that way, to be on a big canvas.

I loved, in ‘Starman’, the use of anamorphic lenses, the creation of blue light, and Carpenter’s use of the widescreen format.

I haven’t seen ‘Room’ yet. People tell me ‘Room’ is such an amazing film, but ever since I had a kid, I just can’t. I can’t do it. It’s not fun. It’s not a place I want to be.

Sometimes you’ll write while listening to a piece of music and think it’s great, but then you’ll go back and read it without the music and go, ‘This sucks.’

Whenever I write, I try and approach my stories from some kind of universal theme or idea or emotion.

There’s one right place to put the camera. I’m a big believer in that. You’d think you could put it anywhere. Nope.

I had two DVDs my junior year. One was ‘Fletch’ and one was ‘Goodfellas,’ and I watched those movies so much. I just remember eating Ramen noodles and watching ‘Goodfellas.’

Write dialogue that supports the situation and the characters, as you find them.

You have actors you’ve worked with previously, and you have actors you haven’t worked with that you’ve seen in things where you know they can work in these parts. And then there are actors who blow you away, who surprise you.

I think the way you make a movie dictates the movie that you make.

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?

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.

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.

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.

‘Mud’ was a depository for a little more nostalgia and just a different kind of feeling, a different kind of mood. Something that’s not so dark. Something that does actually have a happy ending and is a little more hopeful.

Your whole life is changed with that first child. Your social behaviors are all turned upside down, you’re sleep deprived, but eight months in, my son had this seizure, and it just woke me up to the idea that, oh, no, this can end. And it can end in a way that will destroy you forever.

Financing for ‘Shotgun Stories’ was initiated with money from close friends and family. This is where the money to go into production came from. After production, a company called ‘Upload Films’ came on board and provided post-production funds and services. In both instances, people were taking a gamble on us.

I’ve kind of always had this balance between genre and personal dramas. It almost feels like the two help each other. If I was just to make a genre film, maybe it would be hollow and soulless. If I was just to make a personal drama, maybe it would be melodramatic and nobody would ever go see it.

I’m really calculating when it comes to these scripts – I’m really calculated about character behavior and dialogue.

I thought ‘Mud’ would be such an easy film for people to understand.

Nature is the purest thing we can touch and observe. It can be the most beautiful and also the most devastating.

It took me a year just to edit ‘Shotgun Stories.’ Actually, it took me two years to edit ‘Shotgun Stories.’

I think I could probably make $5 to $10m movies for a very long time and live a perfectly good life doing it. I’d probably get paid as well as a surgeon, which is pretty damn remarkable for a guy who went to film school.

I’ve only seen one snake out in the wilderness, not behind glass, and I froze. I literally couldn’t move. So to say I have a fear of snakes would be true.

I don’t think ‘Shotgon Stories’ or ‘Take Shelter’ have hopeless endings. I think there’s hope in both those films, no matter how hard you have to search for it. It’s there.

My connection to ‘Aquaman’ came out through the Sony hack. It had no relationship to reality. I was not on that film. I was not hired to work on that film. I had been talking to Warner Bros. about it.

I grew up in Arkansas, and I went to Little Rock Central High, which was the site of a desegregation crisis in ’57. I graduated in ’97.

My stated goal as a filmmaker is to feel something. Is to have a palpable emotion in my life, carry it through the gauntlet of the filmmaking process and try and have it land for an audience at some point during the viewing experience. That to me is successful filmmaking.

We have a problem with dealing with race in our country. We have a problem with dealing with marriage equality and equality in general. These are complex, divisive issues in our society, and I think that the only way we further this conversation is to take them down to a very human scale.

When my son was 8 months old, he had a febrile seizure. You know, if you’re in the first year – my wife and I refer to it as the ‘darkness.’ You’re just underwater.

A lot of people have a belief system that is strictly based on religious dogma.

I am not going to approve the home-screening format for my film just carte blanche in lieu of a theatrical screening when I cannot trust that it will ever be seen in the format that it’s intended to be.

You can watch any Hitchcock film and be blown away.

I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

‘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.

I can talk to execs very clearly, very plainly. I don’t get nervous in front of them anymore.

I think only the movies you do remember are the films you had an emotional connection to.

The real cost is always more than just the money you shell out.

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.

Marriage is tough. I can tell my wife all day long that I love her, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t show that.

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.

My first job in the film business was working as a production assistant, and then a production manager on a documentary about Townes Van Zandt.

I think too often in films, people think endings are a summation of plot, and I don’t like that. Because once you know where you’re going as an audience member, then it’s like a video game. You’re just waiting for them to get through the levels and beat the bad guy. And I just think that’s boring.

Your reaction when you lose control in a situation is to try and hang on tighter.

In terms of my personal spirituality and everything else, it’s ever-evolving. I have a desire to want more out of the universe. But the older I get, the further I get from any specifics about that.

‘Shotgun Stories’ and ‘Take Shelter’… I was willing to make those with no money and no time. With ‘Mud,’ I just wanted to protect it until I could have the resources. It’s a real tricky movie.

My characters aren’t chess pieces. I don’t move them around some big board. I actually care about these fictitious people.

I’m a director because I directed a movie. And if I have any advice for people, it’s, ‘Go write something; go direct it. If that’s what you have a desire to do, go do it. If the movie stinks, just put it on the shelf and try to do it again.’

I think Warner Bros. are probably some of the best people in marketing films in the world.