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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Jeff Nichols Quotes

I know how to write a movie. I know how to direct a movie.

– Jeff Nichols

A lot of people have a belief system that is strictly based on religious dogma.

– Jeff Nichols

The more we try to control our kids and create who they are and where they’re going, the more that will fall apart. That’s a dangerous thing. So you need to actually manage the fear and figure out who your kids are. Who do they want to be and how can you help shape that, but not control it.

– Jeff Nichols

What Richard and Mildred Loving did was, by their nature, not by any calculus, they separated themselves from the political conversation. They did not have an agenda. They did not want to be martyrs. They did not want to be symbols of a movement.

– Jeff Nichols

There’s one right place to put the camera. I’m a big believer in that. You’d think you could put it anywhere. Nope.

– Jeff Nichols

Making movies is really hard. It’s a very complex process, with many, many variables.

– Jeff Nichols

Whenever I write, I try and approach my stories from some kind of universal theme or idea or emotion.

– Jeff Nichols

With ‘Midnight Special,’ the sound was used as a narrative construct. The audience is looking in one direction when a sound suddenly erupts from the other direction.

– Jeff Nichols

The real cost is always more than just the money you shell out.

– Jeff Nichols

We’ve gotten to a point where it costs so much money to make a movie that directors and filmmakers feel they have to make sure that everybody gets it. And that’s an unfortunate development, I think, in a lot of narratives floating around in the film industry.

– Jeff Nichols

I am not going to approve the home-screening format for my film just carte blanche in lieu of a theatrical screening when I cannot trust that it will ever be seen in the format that it’s intended to be.

– Jeff Nichols

I think plot is very overrated. Plot is obviously necessary, but what I really care about is emotionally affecting the audience. Having a thought myself and then an emotional experience myself, somehow transferring that to the audience.

– Jeff Nichols

There are great advantages of making things on the independent market. There’s freedom and control there, and kind of a cleanness to the process that I like.

– Jeff Nichols

I really don’t know how to tell you what it feels like to be a parent.

– Jeff Nichols

I’m not as worried about the process of writing, simply because I think I’ve got that one down, you know? I think I know what brings specificity to these ideas, what brings specificity to the genre elements, or anything else, and it’s personal emotions.

– Jeff Nichols

I was always interested in creative writing growing up. From junior high on, I was writing short stories. I also grew up watching movies. My father would take me to everything. Most weeks, I could open the paper having seen every movie listed.

– Jeff Nichols

I found filmmaking to be a very practical art form. It’s about figuring out how to create within the very practical limitations/constraints of time, money, and large groups of collaborators.

– Jeff Nichols

I outline and outline and outline, and then I’m very specific about the stuff I write. That’s my process.

– Jeff Nichols

We have a problem with dealing with race in our country. We have a problem with dealing with marriage equality and equality in general. These are complex, divisive issues in our society, and I think that the only way we further this conversation is to take them down to a very human scale.

– Jeff Nichols

As a director, you see something in someone; you know it’s there, you just got to go get it. You do that with any actor. That’s your job.

– Jeff Nichols

I grew up in Arkansas, and I went to Little Rock Central High, which was the site of a desegregation crisis in ’57. I graduated in ’97.

– Jeff Nichols

I have a very linear mind.

– Jeff Nichols

I’ll say this: I think from a directing standpoint, ‘Loving’ is my most accomplished film. Strictly from a technical, directing point of view.

– Jeff Nichols

I’ve been really lucky when it comes to casting kids, and I don’t particularly like child actors. Too often, they just show up, and they’ve had whatever real innocence that’s in a child just beaten out of them. They start to perform for you, and you can just see it coming. It’s no good.

– Jeff Nichols

I think it’s important to say typing in the computer is like the last, last phase of my writing process. That’s kind of the fun part. Well, it’s all somewhat fun, I suppose. But usually what happens is I think about a movie for at least a year – maybe a couple more – and I don’t put anything down.

– Jeff Nichols

I first read ‘Tom Sawyer’ when I was in 8th grade, 13 years old. I realised since that Mark Twain just bottled what it felt like to be a child.

– Jeff Nichols

I never wanted to make movies just for me. I want to make movies that people watch.

– Jeff Nichols

My first job in the film business was working as a production assistant, and then a production manager on a documentary about Townes Van Zandt.

– Jeff Nichols

We have so many films that we can fit into the slate a year, and we spend $100 million on those films in order to make $400 million dollars. We don’t spend $20 million in hopes of eking out $40 million.

– Jeff Nichols

It’s amazing how far you can get into a plot before you figure out what you’re doing.

– Jeff Nichols

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