Filmmaker Jeff Nichols' 'Midnight Special'; UK band HAELOS; TV's pilot season

I can honestly say the movie will play better for you the less you know, but I'm also a realist. It's really up to the audience to decide what kind of experience they want to have. I really appreciate the statements you're making and some of the reviews have done that as well up front. It's kind of like, look, this movie is designed to lay out like a mystery. The way the story is told is almost as important and the story that is told. As long as audiences know that up front it's up to them. Do they want to ruin the experience or not? It's on their shoulders. 

I grew up a Creedence fan. That song's been baked into my life for a long time. I was struck with this idea of two guys driving really fast down these southern back roads. That was the initial image I was struck with. This title popped into my head. Tonally, it felt like the movie I wanted to make.

Typically. I made this film "Take Shelter" about a guy renovating a storm shelter in his back yard. That began when I was standing in my back yard and I remember vividly thinking about if there were a storm shelter there, and a man standing over the open doors. This was very similar. If there were two guys in a car at night, I thought, why can they only move at night? Why are they moving fast? Who's chasing them? You build it out from there. 

Sometimes as writers, we try and put narrative development above character development. We try to move our characters around like chess pieces that do our bidding. The problem with that is sometimes the characters do things they shouldn't do. Things that are inorganic. For me, my goal as a filmmaker is to try and find an emotion in my life that's palatable, and transfer that emotion to the audience.



Making movies is an extremely difficult process. To be able to have an emotion that's palpable enough to make it through and land with someone in an audience three years later — that's a difficult thing to do. If I put that at the center of my purpose as a storyteller, it lends itself to character behavior far more than plot.

It can be. It can also be a heavy critique. I made for a very bad screenwriting student. You don't want to be completely dismissive of three act structures. It's a natural way we process stories. But I don't know where [act breaks] come in my movies, because they have absolutely nothing to do with character. 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.

I would like to think that when you're watching the film, it makes sense. That's the first goal, beyond any commentary I'm trying to make. It works for the movie. That said, I'm a big fan of Jason Bourne movies — I love movies. That said, we've gotten to a point in bigger films where the chase scene begins and my brain shuts off. You know they're going to make it to the other side. So now, it's kind of perfunctory. We're going to watch a beautifully crafted sequence that means absolutely nothing.



For me, when I came to this moment in the film, I thought — if you want to get to this place, but you can't get there? And this father is just aching. You know how desperate he must get. That seemed far more torturous. 

Yeah. I think only the movies you do remember are the films you had an emotional connection to. It's so easy to think back on blockbusters from the 80's — I try not to make that distinction between them and more intellectual movies. 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.

It's taken a while for me to get this film finished. Had I written this film today, Alton would be different. Because I have a different relationship to my son. I wrote this when he was 8 months old. There's an interesting development that happens as a father when you can really start to know the personality of your son. But I've dealt with this before. I wrote this film "Take Shelter," That was written when my wife was pregnant, and I was thinking about fatherhood in a theoretical sense. But I think I'm fully realizing now that my opinion of fatherhood in that first year...you're sleep-deprived, your social life has crumbled, and you're so caught up in the insanity of this entire sea change in your life. It's easy to lose sight of what's happening. Which is this really beautiful thing, this neurological system that's growing and developing in front of you.



When my son was eight months old he had a febrile seizure. It's the body's reaction to a spiking fever. It doesn't have any longterm effects, but my wife and I didn't know that at the time. But in that fog of that first year of parenthood, I was yanked out of it by this experience. It really started to make me think about my purpose as a father. Lo and behold, I'm working on this cheesy sci-fi chase movie, and needing to find some emotional core to anchor this thing to the world, and to my world. So of course, that experience and my attempt at understanding fatherhood became the anchor for the whole thing.

Benardout: The band started kind of off the back of both Arthur Delaney and I were working individually with Dom Goldsmith. Those two projects were running in parallel for a period of time. We came to this point where we decided to try and come to together and collaborate on a track. We weren't sure what that collaboration was gonna turn into, but that first song that we wrote together was "Dust." 

Benardout: We definitely had the backbones of an idea of the sound, but "Dust," we put it up with no real expectations of it. We just wanted to have our friends have a listen. 



Goldsmith: We just put it up on Soundcloud and then, literally within 24 hours, it was near the top of Hype Machine and we watched the plays go up by the thousands every minute. We were like, "This is kind of emotional for all of us," because we've been trying to do this for a long time -- each of us. I remember calling my mom. I was like, "I'm actually quite overwhelmed by this." I feel like it feels so lovely to get a connection with people. 

Benardout: The culture today with music, you become the not so relevant band, but we're talking in a matter of weeks. There's so much music coming out that you don't wanna just be that buzz band for two days and then move on. So for us, that was very important for us to really getting an album out that people can get to know us as a whole project rather than one buzz track like, "Dust." 



Goldsmith: It was really important to us to really consider an album and try use the new, but also keep an eye on the art form of the past, and that's kind of back to how we make the music. 



Benardout: And also just make something for us and not try and keep up with the hype and just put out this album now that is this snapshot of the last year of the music that we've created, and not try and hold on to anything for too long and wait for another two years before we drip out another track or EP.  

Goldsmith: Each of us have been doing this for about 12 or maybe even 15 years each. We found a lot of failing and we don't view that as a negative thing. We've all learned along the way and every project that you do, you pick up the things and keep the things that make you stronger.



So when we came into this, we had a very clear vision -- each of us -- on the kind of music that we wanted to make, and that was actually the key thing. We, for the first time, made music that was for us. We weren't really trying to imitate anyone. We realized we all had a shared love of the early Bristol scene in the '90s in the UK, and we wanted to update it with modern electronic music sensibilities and productions.We weren't life long friends. 



Benardout: We came together over the music.