Jeff Nichols’ Directing Rules to Find Where to Place the Camera

With four feature film in a young decade under his belt, indie filmmaker Jeff Nichols has been leading an inspiring creative career. Although he shares a slightly different sensitivity than Rian Johnson or David Lowery, Nichols has a similar taste for DIY and growing organically.

The three filmmakers found a way to write and direct smart feature film with a voice, jumping each time a little bit higher on the budget scale.

At 18 million dollars, his fourth feature film, Midnight Special is a mid-range budget closing to the low scale, a rarity in today’s producing landscape. And Nichols not only managed to get the green light for a spec script, he also got Final Cut (like in all of his previous films).

In that regard, Nichols presents himself as the new heir of an golden era.

During a Q&A at the DGA, Jeff Nichols talked about his process making Midnight Special. One moment particularly got my attention when he mentioned the rules he follows when working on his shot list or on set.

JEFF NICHOLS RULES

Rule 1 – all camera moves say something

Rule 2 – the camera moves need to feel like an organic representation of how the human eye sees the world

Rule 3 – The camera goes where the scene’s point-of-view is.

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Now if you’d like to know a bit more about it, here is what Nichols says:

“Typically what I do, on days that involve action sequences or something, I just do a very simple shot list. I’ll seat and read the scene and I just kind of watch it in my mind.

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You know something like Shot 1A, dolly. I just write a short description of what the movement is, and at that point, I’ve seen all the locations hopefully, and usually we stick to that pretty close.

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I’ve never been a big fan of (handheld shots). But that’s all about camera movements and philosophy I’ve been developing about directing since Shotgun Stories which is, I think all camera movements says something. I think they all speak about point of view and unmotivated camera movement… you better have a pretty damn good reason to do it is my thinking.

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And the reason why we shoot on film is because it’s an organic format that I think really represents kind of the way we see the world. It’s the same with camera movement. Like handheld camera just doesn’t represent the human eye very well. I think steadicam is better but it can give stuff away too if it’s not tide to something.

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I always tell my steadicam operator “There’s a rope tide between you and the actor. He moves, you move, you don’t move without him.”

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Now of course, you break all those rules plenty of times. There’s an unmotivated dolly move in the gas station scene to reveal the stuff in the sky, but that seems motivated by giant balls of fire falling.

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But yeah I have rules, I have rules when I write, and I have rules when I direct. I try to always ask myself… Well in Mud for instance, Mud was entirely, except for like three scenes, from the point-of-view of the boy, so that was just easy for a director you just ask “Where is the boy?” and that’s where the camera goes.

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It starts to affect height and everything else. It was actually a really good film to be my first film with a steadicam because I had never used it before. It just helped me anchor it to something, and anchor it to a point-of-view. (…)

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So really for me, it all comes down to point-of-view. You just look at the beats in a scene and you say ‘Whose point-of-view is this?’ and that starts to tell you where the camera goes.

Thanks to Portia Barnett-Herrin