Interview (Written): Jeff Nichols (“Loving”)

A Creative Screenwriting magazine interview with Jeff Nichols (Mud, Take Shelter).

Your previous films were all original screenplays while Loving is a true-life story. Because of that, was your writing process for this screenplay any different?

Yes, it was. Usually I write for years, and what I mean by “writing” is that I carry things around in my head for a very long time and collect different things. It’s an interesting way of doing things — the bad stuff falls off and the good stuff stays because I don’t write anything down for a very long time. Eventually, I start my outlining process, which is pretty severe. The typing is actually the finishing work because usually I’ve had the entire script outlined and figured out at that point.

For Loving, that long period of gestational creative thinking was replaced by research.

In 2012 I hit the ground running. I went to Virginia and met Peggy Loving, who is the only surviving child of the Lovings, and I went to all the locations relevant to the story that I could. Nancy delivered a hard drive to me with all the footage that she sourced for her documentary, including extended interviews, archival footage, and photographs that she didn’t use in the documentary. It was like having a research assistant drop two or three years of research on your lap all at once.

I squirreled away in my office and pored over that, the documentary, and a book titled Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for Lovers by Phyl Newbeck. All through that process it was a different version of that gestational thinking, because I would read a line in Newbeck’s book about the Lovings’ son being hit by a car, or about Richard drawing blueprints for the home he’s going to build her before they get arrested, and for all these things I thought, “Well, that could be a scene,” and I started lying out the structure for it.

That research part was different and something I never tackled before.

Because you do so much research and outlining, do you tend to do much rewriting?

Because I do such heavy outlining, for most of my scripts I’m pretty certain of where I am going by the time I sit down to type. It’s not like I pick up one of my scripts after typing it out and think, “Wow, that’s a direction I didn’t expect the character to go in.” All of that part of the process — which does happen — happens in the outlining process for me. For better or worse, it’s the methodology I fell into back in college when I was writing short films.

I’ve heard about writers who will write hundreds of pages to get twenty good ones. I’m not like that. I don’t do that much typing.

A trailer for the movie Loving:

For the rest of the interview, go here.