Nostalgic and Romantic: A Conversation with ‘The Bikeriders’ Writer-Director Jeff Nichols

The Bikeriders captures a rebellious time in America when the culture and people were changing. After a chance encounter at a local bar, strong-willed Kathy (Jodie Comer) is inextricably drawn to Benny (Austin Butler), the newest member of Midwestern motorcycle club, the Vandals led by the enigmatic Johnny (Tom Hardy). Much like the country around it, the club begins to evolve, transforming from a gathering place for local outsiders into a dangerous underworld of violence, forcing Benny to choose between Kathy and his loyalty to the club. 

The Bikeriders is visually stunning. The characters that live and breathe in this pragmatic reality of the 60s motorcycle culture club of the Midwest is quite engaging. The ability to bring still images to life, fully inspired and resourced from the source itself – Danny Lyon and his book of the same name, The Bikeriders, originally published in 1967 – is a challenge – yet a feat achieved by acclaimed filmmaker Jeff Nichols.

During this conversation with writer-director Jeff Nichols, it’s quite easy to relish in the joy that Jeff exudes retelling how he was able to lay the narrative foundation for the film, how he wanted to frame the film like a documentary that he had written, to using other storytelling techniques like voice over and prelap, to giving these motorcycle club characters their own unique and distinct physicality and voice in this specific time period.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: Knowing that this was heavily inspired by the photography book, when was that “aha” moment that you saw a movie there?

Jeff Nichols: Well, the first version of the book I got was a 2003 edition. It's a red and white cover back here. [picks up copy of book] So this is the version that I got first. And it's important, because it's not the original, and it has a second forward in it by Danny [Lyon] and at an older age, kind of looking back at what happened to the club. And he talks about the shape of it. He talks about the club that he joined kind of dying and it becoming this other thing. And referring to the time that he wrote it, it was the golden age of motorcycles, which was nostalgic and romantic, but also it spoke to the death of a thing, or at least to the shift of the thing.

And that gave me shape that that was like, ‘OK, well, that's a story arc.’ I didn't know at that point if it could really be shown through character, but it gave me enough to kind of hold on to. And it seemed like a pattern in society that I'd kind of seen before...I'd seen it in the punk rock scene in the 90s, in Little Rock - these things start in real, organic kind of ways. People just feel like they don't really fit in the mainstream. So, they go over here, and they start a thing that's real attractive and real romantic and real pure, you might argue, in the sense that it's not defined. It's not trying to be a thing. It just is what it is.

But then, because we're human beings, [laughs] we then have to start to put rules to it. And there were rules put to the punk rock scene in the 90s, and there were rules put to these biker clubs to formalize them, to say, ‘OK, well, this is what we're really doing.’ And as soon as you start to do that, it starts to fray, and it starts to get away from its original intention. You just shouldn't try to define a thing, but we have to, because that's what we do as humans. And then before you know it, it's metastasized into this other thing. But that pattern was very interesting to me, and then it was kind of like, ‘OK, well, cool, great idea. But what's the movie?’ Because movies take place in shots and scenes and sequences, and you're following timelines.

And that's where the structure kind of came from, and it makes it so much different than any other film I've made. It was really hard to do - that doesn't necessarily make it more successful [laughs] as a narrative construct, but it was really challenging to say, ‘OK, how can I keep the momentum of the shift of this club over a decade?’ But I need to bounce through time. I need to come back and forth. And that's really where Kathy came in. I've got this one really great interview in the book from Kathy, but what if I split it into three different time periods, so you actually have three different Kathy's, so she's kind of always talking backward in time to give us that point of view. ‘OK, then she can kind of be our guide. And she's got this relationship with Benny, but that's not enough.’ 

Johnny wasn't really a big character in the book because Danny was scared of the real guy, I shouldn't say scared, intimidated. And I thought, ‘Well, this is interesting. What if there was another character that loved this young man as much?’ And then this love triangle started to show up, and it was that feels a little bit more like plot, but it's still in the wheelhouse, because it's character-driven, and then you get the bike riders.

Sadie: There's a great line Kathy says basically about love or being stupid.

Jeff: ‘It couldn’t be love, it must have just been stupidity.” [laughs]

Sadie: Yes! There’s that naïve recklessness in all of that – especially that love triangle with around her, Benny and Johnny.

Jeff: It’s such a cool line. And I didn't write it. She said it in real life, so I can't take any credit for it. But it's such a cool line because we do these things…Look at motorcycles. It's the same thing. It can't be love, it just has to be stupidity that you would get on a motorcycle. They're really dumb machines, you know, but God, they're good-looking. From the second she says it, and the second I read that, it was like, ‘Oh, you're trying to enunciate the tension between loving a thing that is dangerous’ and we all do it, and it's foolish, and we know it's foolish, and we do it anyway. I just was captivated that she was even trying to explain that. [laughs]

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Sadie: Having direct access to the photographer, Danny Lyon, and his tapes, were there any other resources he hadn’t unearthed publicly that helped you further lay out the foundation of the film visually, but also, and painting the picture of all these other characters?

Jeff: It was really interesting, because yes is the answer, Danny was very generous with me. And a lot of this was happening kind of during the pandemic. We've been talking for six years at this point, but when I'm really putting pen to paper and typing this was during the pandemic, and we'd have these long Zooms, and he would just bring things up and show me things. It wasn't until that point that I realized just how well I knew the book. I shouldn't say this, but at times it felt like I knew it better than he did, because I'd just been reading it over and over and over again. He was remembering it.

One really good example is that in the book, everybody talks about Benny, and there's several photos of him, but you never see his face. And so, I have built this character in my mind based on this. And as a result, he's kind of this myth, he's kind of this dream. And then he shows me an outtake of Benny's face. And I was like, ‘That's not what Benny looked like.’ [laughs] I had already begun my process of interpreting the book, and so sometimes these things are really helpful, because that's the other thing, sometimes he shows you the angle, and you get to see around the edge of this photograph you've been staring at for 20 years. And there were other things too, like, ‘I thought the detail of the clothes were this, but now you've shown me this color outtake, and I see that they're built differently.’

There was a lot of information. Not to mention his point of view on the whole thing. I sat with him in New Mexico the first time I met him, near where he lives, and I was nervous. I blathered out this whole thing about punk rock and the cyclical nature of these outsider groups and everything else. And he was like, ‘Huh, so you think the bike riders is an example of cultural shifts through time?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I do.’ He was like, ‘So you don't want to just make a movie about a photographer?’ I was like, ‘Oh no.’ [laughs] And he goes, ‘Because these guys, they were kind of morons.’ [laughs]

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Sadie: What was that writing process like from developing the characters, with the aid of the visual reference, and to then choosing key frames that you knew were pivotal to a scene or a transition, or an introduction for a character?

Jeff: I'd ordered an extra copy of the book, and I took an exacto knife and I just cut it to pieces, and I had an exploded view of the book. I'm in my writing office right now. So, whenever I turn to the left, this entire wall over here is just corkboard. Those are all the things I'm writing right now, and usually, as you can see, I'm very meticulous about note cards and structure. And what's crazy about this one is it's the most complicated narrative structure I've tried to lay out, and I didn't use the note cards.

There's something about how meticulous my other films are laid out and they're linear. I wanted this to feel like a documentary. I wanted it to feel like an edited documentary that I wrote, which is really hard to do. And so, as a result, there was something about not using the note cards and not outlining it, that made it feel more alive. I would write one scene, and I knew the shape of it, but I didn't necessarily know what was coming next. And at the end of every scene, I would do a thing that I haven't done in other scripts, like, well, one I didn't really ever have voiceover in other scripts…the first line from the next scene would always overlap, especially in the first hour. It's why that first hour is real, I hope easy to watch, like it almost feels like a narrated documentary.

I’ve just been talking about it for such a long time, I knew that Johnny would burn down this bar, and I knew that that would be this inflection point. And I loved the line, which was mine, was that ‘I think it terrified him’ and that's Kathy's voiceover. It's really part of the next scene, but it lays over the end of that shot. And I knew there'd be this slow push in on Johnny's face, and here he is, kind of realizing his authority and his power over this club, like he can actually order a bar burned down and the cops are terrified of them. They won't come interrupt them. And I remember thinking that's gotta be a head trip. And I bet for a guy like that who's actually not really a biker gang leader, he's a truck driver, I bet it scared the shit out of him. And so, that's an example of an anchor point, and I had a few.

And then I just started slowly breaking it apart and writing it into the scenes, and adding the visuals to it. And it was like training wheels. By the time I got through that opening sequence, which was really all leaning on her, I felt less like a fraud and more like, ‘OK, I kind of understand this.’ We've introduced Kathy and Benny, and by benefit of her walking into that bar, you've met these other people. 

And I can actually kind of engineered this love triangle because Johnny's going to come over. And so, you've really set up everybody. You've actually introduced everybody, we just don't know it yet. We gotta find out who Johnny is, because we kind of are going to learn who Kathy is, just by benefit of the fact that she's talking all the time. You never go back and hear how Kathy grew up, or anything like that. You've seen how she got brought into this world. And for this movie, that's what it's about, everybody's relationship to the to the club.

You're not making a biopic about where people came from, you're making a biopic about how they're related to this club. I was finding these opportunities to put these great other characters in who all had voices in the book, but they wouldn't be voiceover, that was Kathy's domain.

The Bikeriders is now available to watch on VOD.