Jeff Nichols Reveals He Is Writing Arkansas-Set Original Script Alongside Cormac McCarthy Adaptations – Marrakech

Melanie Goodfellow
·3-min read

Jeff Nichols has revealed he is writing his first original work since 2016 sci-fi Midnight Special that will take him back to his native territory of Arkansas, backdrop to early features Shotgun Stories and Mud.

The project is in addition to his adaptation for New Regency of Cormac McCarthy’s novels ‘The Passenger’ and its companion ‘Stella Maris’ about siblings living with the knowledge that their father helped develop the atom bomb.

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“I am adapting the last two Cormac McCarthy novels but then I am also writing my first original script since Midnight Special, my fourth film,” said Nichols.

Fifth film Loving, about interracial couple Mildred and Richard Loving’s 1960s battle to have their marriage recognized in Virginia, was inspired by Nancy Buirski’s 2011 documentary The Loving Story, while Chicago-based crime drama The Bikeriders was based on Danny Lyon’s book of the same name.

“I’ve been making period pieces and films inspired by other people’s work and this next film for better or worse is going to be cut from Jeff Nichols cloth,” added the director who is keeping all other details under wraps for now, beyond the fact that it will be based in his native Arkansas.

Nichols was talking to Deadline at the Marrakech Film Festival in Morocco which is he attending as 2024 patron-lead mentor of the event’s Atlas Workshops, a talent and project incubator aimed at emerging filmmakers from the Middle East, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Quizzed on how his experience in the U.S. might be relevant to directors in the region, Nichols said the challenges for first time filmmakers were the same worldwide.

“It’s always a challenge to understand your own voice, to understand that you have value to contribute to a larger conversation. Who would have thought that a kid who grew up in rural Arkansas would be standing on the floor of the Palais, screening a film that was very personal to them,” he said, referring to Mud, which played in Competition at Cannes.

“That seems almost as far-fetched as… pick any corner of the world. The quickest route to universality in story telling is regional specificity. You have to be really honest about who you are, about where you’re from and how you see the world,” he continued.

“If these filmmakers are doing that and not trying to achieve some genre goal of something they watched on some streaming service, but they’re actually trying to look at their life, think about how they feel about life and express that through film, then they have as good a shot an anyone of competing on the world stage,” he continued.

The Atlas Workshops are hosting 17 projects in development and 10 films in production or post-production, with the latter including U.S.-Palestinian director Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You; Egyptian director Marwan Hamed’s El Sett (Egypt) about legendary diva Umm Kulthum; and Palestinian fraternal duo Tarzan and Arab Nasser’s Once Upon a Time in Gaza.

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