June 2004 Little Rock, Arkansas

Nichols wrote the script for his first movie, Shotgun Stories, with an actor in mind: Michael Shannon. They’d never met, but after seeing Shannon in 8 Mile and High Crimes, Nichols decided he wanted him in every movie he would ever make. Through a former professor, Nichols—then just 24—tracked Shannon down and persuaded him to read the script. “Your agent’s always telling you, don’t work with first-time directors, work with somebody who knows what they’re doing,” Shannon told me. “But I got the impression from Jeff the first time I talked to him that he knew what he was doing.”

That’s because Nichols has been thinking about movies for a long time. His dad and uncle own a furniture store in Little Rock. But during off-hours, when most dads might take their sons fishing, Nichols’ dad would take Jeff to the multiplex. Nichols loved John Carpenter, Steven Spielberg, John Sayles, Ridley Scott, and “anything with Paul Newman in it.” He read a lot too—S. E. Hinton, the master of young-adult fiction, made a huge impression, especially with The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. (Motorcycle Boy has “the best name ever,” Nichols said.)

Nichols studied filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, which he describes as more like a trade school in that it stresses skills over theory. Before Nichols wrote his first screenplay, he told his father that it would be about New York mobsters. Gently, his dad suggested that, instead, he write about “a place you know that others don’t.” The result was Shotgun Stories, set amid the cotton fields and back roads of southeastern Arkansas.

Shotgun Stories became the beginning of a self-styled curriculum. Nichols set out to teach himself lessons that would let him make bigger movies down the line.

Shannon signed on and even agreed to work for free. Nichols’ mom cooked for the crew, and his dad ferried people to and from the set. At one point, Nichols realized he was going to run out of celluloid—“it was costing me and my family $365 a minute every time we rolled film”—so he cut back on the number of takes. Still, despite the ragtag nature of the production, Shannon was impressed. “I consider Jeff a member of the Southern culture—not necessarily the culture of Nascar-­watching, beer-­drinking people but people like William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor,” he said.

But if Nichols was to become an important voice in the Southern storytelling canon, he still had a lot to learn. Nichols “had a lot of ideas and a lot of charisma, but I think he also still had a lot of uncertainty,” Shannon said, remembering how Nichols pressed him for advice. So Shotgun Stories became the beginning of a self-styled curriculum. Nichols set out to methodically teach himself lessons that would let him make bigger movies down the line.

Though he thought the movie was makeable for under $50,000 (“I didn’t move the camera and shot all exteriors during the day”), Nichols had to borrow and scrape to get it done. He wrote the script in his father’s furniture store, “surrounded by mattresses,” and edited it in his laundry room. Lack of money and distribution muscle meant the movie, shot in 2004, didn’t get to theaters until 2007.

February 2014 Southern Louisiana

Jeff Nichols sat facing the wind, watching. He and about half his 150-person crew had been on this gravel-strewn logging road in the Big Branch Marsh National Wildlife Refuge, about 45 minutes north of New Orleans, since dawn. It was day 30 of production on Midnight Special, and the winter had been one of the coldest in Louisiana’s history. Even though the sun was out, everyone was hunched in parkas.

Looking at the director—clear-eyed and stubble-faced in gray jeans, brown work boots, a red-and-blue plaid shirt under a navy V-neck sweater—you wouldn’t sense any jitters. He joked easily with his cast and crew while projecting an air of knowing precisely what he wanted. “You never really have a question for him that he can’t answer,” Joel Edgerton, who plays a state trooper in the film, told me between takes. “I presume if you hid a GoPro in the corner of the room where he writes, he probably runs around and acts it all out.”

“I never wanted to make movies just for me,” Nichols says. “I want to make movies that people watch.”

Indeed, Nichols said, while on set he sees the whole movie in his mind’s eye, at least as he imagined it while writing the script. But directing is “a weird job,” he said, because it requires “this constant balance between the original idea and the fluidity on set. I work really hard on these scripts. I don’t take changes lightly. But I know there has to be a balance.”

The day’s scene involved all of Nichols’ main cast members—Edgerton, Shannon, Adam Driver (playing a federal agent), 13-year-old Jaeden Lieberher (who plays Alton, a mysterious glowing-eyed boy), and Kirsten Dunst (as Alton’s mother). The shot demanded that a black Prius drive toward a red Isuzu Rodeo and stop short, nose-to-nose. Nichols wanted to show the cars in profile. There was just one problem: To get the shot, the only place for the camera was in a bog nearly 4 feet deep. “There’s one right place to put the camera. I’m a big believer in that,” he said. “You’d think you could put it anywhere. Nope. It’s like a diet of the mind.”

So Steadicam operator Matt Petrosky and first assistant cameraman David Regan went out on the water in a flat-­bottomed boat—a luxury, all the indie veterans there agreed, possible only because of Warner Bros.’ largesse. They pushed with long poles to float the camera and themselves into position. But the boat kept wobbling, threatening to ruin the shot.

June 2013 Austin, Texas

For years, Nichols’ wife shouldered most of their family’s financial burden. Shotgun Stories had cost him $49,000. On Take Shelter, he’d been paid just $6,000. Between films he’d temp at an Austin ad agency, but ­Missy’s job in publishing paid most of their expenses. Now, with the Warner Bros. deal in hand, they decided that she could quit and spend more time with their 2-year-old son.

At home on the day she gave notice after 19 years at Texas Monthly, Missy was telling her husband about all her tearful good-byes when he glanced down at his iPad. “I just kind of noticed what had popped up. Jeff Robinov, the one that brought me in and set all this up for me, had been fired,” he said. “And I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell her until the next day. I was like, ‘It’s going to be fine.’ She was like, ‘I’ll get my job back.’ I was like, ‘No, no, don’t. It’s going to be great.’ I shit my pants.”

Hearing about it even two years later, I couldn’t help but say, “Wow.”

“Yeah,” Nichols replied, smiling. “Making movies!”