8 things to know about The Bikeriders, according to director Jeff Nichols

The Bikeriders is a stunning slice of film gone by. Adapted from the 1967 work of photojournalist Danny Lyon, it tells the story of The Vandals, a motorcycle club that’s a rival to the Hell’s Angels.

The movie charts the rise of the club through three central characters: Johnny (Tom Hardy) the founder, Benny (Austin Butler) the rebel, and Kathy (Jodie Comer) the narrator of sorts, who retells her life with the group to Danny (Mike Faist).

Written and directed by Jeff Nichols it’s an oil-stained movie soaked in petrol in whisky that oozes cool and is tinged with melancholy. It's a bruising look at masculinity in the '60s, deconstructing it through misty eyes.

To celebrate its release, we spoke to Jeff Nichols about The Bikeriders. Here, in his own words, he explains exclusively to ShortList what inspired him to make his motorcycle movie...

1. It’s about showcasing a subculture…

“It all came from Danny Lyon’s book. Once you start to really look at those photographs and dig into the text, you realise that Danny was into New Journalism at the time.

"He wanted to create a photo book that didn't just sit on your coffee table, but actually brought you into this world in detail and showed these people for who they were and how their brains worked and why they made the choice to live this way.

"In that sense it's a piece of anthropology. It gives you as a filmmaker all the ingredients necessary to show up to show a subculture in detail. And as a filmmaker, that's what you're looking for.”

2. It’s about the riders, not the rides…

“I started doing research about motorcycle gangs and everything else and I was kind of turned off to be honest. It just held no interest for me.

"So why am I attracted to Danny's book? It’s because he made a book about people, not just about motorcycles. His book doesn't really fetishize motorcycles. It fetishizes his motorcycle riders. And that's of interest to me.”

3. There’s a book about the movie that’s based on a book

“We found this photo book about Paris, Texas and there are no cameras or booms in it. It's just shots of the 1980s and Harry Dean Stanton looking awesome. It felt like, from our perspective now, the work by William Eggleston or Joel Sternfeld - these incredible photographers that were capturing life in the 80s.

"We thought, 'what if we took that approach to our book?' What if took photographs of our people already in these costumes and hair and wardrobe and everything, but, but let's maybe approach it like an art photo book?

"It felt meta but it also felt like a really cool idea. We wanted a photographer that would show up and capture these characters kind of the same way Danny did. And that's really what happened.

"I couldn't be more proud of that. I think it's a killer book. I have it in my office, and I'm very proud that it exists.”

4. Many of the shots are straight out of the book…

“We were very meticulous about recreating the photographs [in Danny Lyon’s book]. What's funny though, is that this stuff was so in my DNA after living with it for so long. There are parts of the movie that weren't intentionally recreations of photographs. It just ended up that way.

"Like there's a whole dirt bike track sequence where Johnny's character is talking about starting the club. And there's shots out of that look specifically out of the book, and that wasn't that wasn't by specific design.”

5. Art imitates life and vice versa…

“When I first met Danny to talk to him about why I wanted to do this, I blathered out a speech about the punk rock scene in Arkansas in the '90s and how I saw this very organic, homegrown, outsider scene kind of build up and it felt like ours by the end. Then, I'm in the mall, and Green Day is playing on the speakers and you're like, ‘what happened here?’

“It's like mainstream culture came for us and absorbed us. And of course they did because that's how it always happens. This is a cycle that you see in society and culture. People feel like they don't fit or they choose not to fit. And they go to the outside and that's where art, music, fashion, all the cool stuff happens. These people are making choices. They're making choices for themselves and that is inherently attractive. And so, yeah, pretty soon mainstream is going to come for you.

“So if you do something as cool as start a biking or bike club, eventually Marlon Brando is going to make a movie about it. And then Dennis Hopper is going to make a movie about it and then Jeff Nichols is going to make a movie and it's just gonna keep happening over and over again. I think as a filmmaker, when you see these kind of universal cycles, they're worth exploring.”

6. There’s a beautiful melancholy to the movie

“Melancholy is a great word for it. Because melancholy plays into a bigger word, which is nostalgia which is hard to define. But, for me, it's kind of this idea that you have experiences in your life that are formative and beautiful and sad and painful and you can't ever have those again. Because it's almost like you've learned those lessons.

“When you’ve been through that part of your life, you have a fondness for it when you look back on it. An appreciation for it. But there's a recognition that it will never come back around. And I feel that way about this part of motorcycle culture.

"Danny writes about it this way that the club that he was a part of no longer exists. The name is still there, the patches are still there but the inciting factors that got people to join that's gone. I think that's a really beautiful, sad kind of melancholic thing.”

7. The cast was crucial to the film…

“The cast came together in such a beautiful way. There were actors that I had that didn't work out for one part or the other, but I now can't see it any other way. That's a credit to the degree of talent that I have in front of that lens. You look at a frame it's like, foreground, mid ground, background... there is just somebody doing something, some talented actor.

“I couldn't see another actor doing what Tom [Hardy] did. It would have been really easy to cast an older actor as Johnny and them show up and be like, ‘I'm your adoptive father. I'm here for you, kid’. But that's not what happens in this movie, it is so much more interesting.

"What Tom does is covets him. This is a guy who wants what this young man has. That's what makes it kind of sensual and dangerous.”

8. There was a bike bootcamp…

"Even the guys that came to us with riding experience had to be trained on these bikes. They're [the bikes] 60, 70, 80 years old. The fact they are running is a miracle, but they're all set up. I think it was the early '70s in the US that they actually mandated how a bike is set up, so that the clutch and the throttle and everything and the brakes are always in the same spot. But before that, it's kind of whatever you want.

"So there were gear shifters down on the gas tanks that were called ‘suicide shifters’. They didn't have disc brakes. They didn't have snapbacks, throttles - they were very, very dangerous things. And when you put famous people with no helmets on them and speed on the highway, it's a little terrifying.

"So, yeah, they went through a bootcamp with Jeff Milburn, our stunt coordinator and motorcycle guru. He did a beautiful job of training them up and getting them comfortable, just enough.

"But I got to give credit to Austin Butler. He didn't have a ton of riding experience when he came to us and when we're filming him riding, you watch him take his left hand off of the handlebar and he puts it on his thigh - I don’t know where that came from, whether he lied to himself but that is acting. Three weeks before, he definitely couldn’t do that."

The Bikeriders is out in cinemas now, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

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