‘The two things Americans don’t want to deal with are race and sex,” says Jeff Nichols. His new film deals with both, and enters a landscape where both remain unresolved. Loving is based on the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and a black woman (at least in the eyes of the law – she was part African American, part Native American) who overturned anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Incredibly, this did not happen in the US until 1967. When the Lovings married, in 1958, such laws were still in place in 24 US states. Alabama didn’t fully register the change in its state constitution until 2000.

“They’re relics of slavery,” Nichols says of the laws. “This is the idea of white slave owners not wanting black men to sleep with white women – that’s where it started. That fear was the basis of all the Jim Crow laws, but the anti-miscegenation laws were really specific because they got to the matter of sex, and that gets to the matter of identity, which is a far more complex thing.”

Police broke into their bedroom in the middle of the night, demanding to know who Richard was sleeping with

In a bizarre, inciting incident, which Nichols re-creates in his movie, the police broke into the Lovings’ bedroom in the middle of the night, demanding to know who Richard was sleeping with. He pointed to their marriage certificate hanging on the wall. The Lovings had married out of state, in Washington DC, five weeks earlier, and clearly expected trouble. They were handed a one-year prison sentence, suspended on condition they leave their native Virginia for 25 years. Homesick Mildred later wrote to attorney general Robert Kennedy, and the American Civil Liberties Union took their case to the supreme court. The rest is legal history, and as Nichols points out, the landmark case of Loving v Virginia has been cited in legal debates over same-sex marriage and privacy issues.

The fact that the Lovings’ story is so little-known almost proves Nichols’ point about Americans not wanting to deal with this stuff. He’d never heard of it himself, and he grew up in Arkansas and attended Little Rock Central High School, itself a civil rights landmark: in 1957, the national guard had to escort the first nine African American students into the school following desegregation.

“I felt like I had a fairly good grasp of civil rights knowledge, but this is one that’s been left in the background. We’re talking about the bedroom, and also there weren’t any bombings or marches, no one dies, and those don’t always catch the headlines.”

This big screen account began with another film-maker, Nancy Buirski, who read Mildred Loving’s obituary in 2008 and spent the next four years making a thorough documentary, The Loving Story. It was seen by actor Colin Firth and his production partner, who approached Nichols to dramatise the story. Loving has all the ingredients of a grandstanding issue movie. You can imagine the moving monologues, stirring orchestral score, the climactic courtroom scene, but Nichols is not that sort of film-maker. In his four previous movies (Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, Mud and last year’s sci-fi Midnight Special), the 38-year-old film-maker has fashioned a lean, direct, understated storytelling approach that strips away superfluous details, especially dialogue. He describes his approach as “pragmatic”.

Loving cleaves to its subjects’ point of view. By all accounts, Richard and Mildred –delicately portrayed by Joel Edgerton and the Ruth Negga (Oscar-nominated for her performance) – were shy, quiet people. It is a film of simple, everyday moments, of intimate gestures and atmospheric landscapes. Much of what the Lovings do say was transcribed verbatim from archive material. There is no courtroom showdown. “They didn’t go, so we don’t go,” says Nichols. Instead, we see the lawyer asking Richard Loving if there’s anything he wants to tell the supreme court justices. He replies: “Tell the judge I love my wife.”

‘There’s a pervasive psychological threat to the black community’ … Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga in Loving. Photograph: Allstar/Focus Features

In person, Nichols couldn’t be more different to his films – he’s open and engaged, and gives long, eloquent answers that sound almost scripted. At the end of our interview, he apologises for talking too much. “Every film I make really is just an orchestration of scenes to deliver you to one emotional moment,” he says. “And when you write from that perspective, unnecessary things just fall away. It’s such a great feeling when you find things you don’t need.”

Dealing with real history, dramatists are often tempted to amp it up for the sake of entertainment, but Nichols respectfully sticks to the facts – to the extent that some have criticised Loving for not being dramatic enough. He can understand that: “As an audience member, I want to be challenged and I want to experience stories in a different way. Some people are up for that, some aren’t. That’s why some people just don’t like my movies very much. But there are different ways to put the calculus together to make it a deeper experience.”

Impending doom … Michael Shannon and Tova Stewart in Nichols’ 2011 sci-fi film Take Shelter. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex Features

What Nichols excels at is building dread and suspense. He did it most effectively in 2011’s Take Shelter, in which Michael Shannon (a regular Nichols player) was beset by premonitions, or possibly delusions, of disaster. It’s there in Loving, too. They don’t get a brick through their window; instead Richard finds a brick on his car seat. “Rather than thinking of specific acts of violence, I thought of Jim Crow as an institution, and the insidious nature of it,” says Nichols. “They can come get you any time they want, for really whatever reason they want. There’s a pervasive psychological threat that sits on this community, and I could argue sits on a lot of the black community today, that I, as part of the white community, don’t have to deal with. But here we have a white man who gets drawn into that psychological threat, and has to feel it for the first time. I found that really fascinating.”

Up to now, Nichols’ films have focused exclusively on white America, drawing on a southern cultural tradition that could include Flannery O’Connor, Mark Twain and Terrence Malick. Before Loving, there’s barely been a non-white speaking part in any of Nichols’ films. Could it be that he didn’t want to deal with race either?

Being a white middle-class guy born in 1978, how do I talk about this? Where's my point of view?

“You can’t grow up in the American south and not be confronted by issues of race,” he replies. “It was always a subject I thought about, and knew I would address at some point, but being a middle-class white guy born in 1978, how do I talk about it? Where’s my point of view in all of this?”

It’s a sentiment other film-makers doubtless share. American cinema suffers from its own form of segregation, whereby race is only dealt with by film-makers of colour. White film-makers are often too inhibited or too disinterested to go there, unless it’s a self-congratulatory story about a white saviour, or a big, important issue movie. It should be everyone’s responsibility, Nichols believes. “It would be impossible to be a film-maker or a storyteller and not deal with this topic. Not in every story, but it seems like an incomplete statement to not address it at some point, because it’s who we are.”

America is talking a lot more about race and sex these days, but not in a good way. Far right and white supremacist rhetoric has edged closer to the mainstream, legitimised by Donald Trump’s ascent, and resurrecting language that often conjures the pre-civil rights era. The fashionable slur “cuckservative”, for example, whose origins go straight back to antiquated fears of black sexuality. Even the term miscegenation is back in circulation. Comments had to be closed when Loving’s trailer went up went up on YouTube owing to racist posts. Even the trailer for Buirski’s documentary received comments such as: “This is Jewish-made race-mixing white genocide propaganda, white people. Wake up.”

The irony is, the Lovings were the very opposite of social justice warriors. Richard Loving was almost stereotypically all-American. He wore plaid shirts, he had a buzz cut, he fixed cars and laid bricks and drank beer. If he were alive today, you could almost imagine him voting for Donald Trump. “If he voted at all,” Nichols says. The Lovings were mostly apolitical. They were not activists. They didn’t want to be martyrs. They just wanted to be allowed to live together, and yet they effected a massive change in American society. “And that’s a great thing to be reminded of,” says Nichols, “especially in a climate where we feel the movements in society are being made by big political machinery. People made a difference here. Individuals.”