Jeff Nichols Brings The Bikeriders to Arkansas Filmland, Where He Talks Casting Austi

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One fan drove all the way from Louisiana to Little Rock to see the new Austin Butler movie, “The Bikeriders,” hoping the “Elvis” star might show up. Unfortunately, the ongoing actors strike prevented Butler from attending Filmland, a local industry fundraiser that hosted the Arkansas premiere of the film earlier this week — a rowdy portrait of a 1960s motorcycle gang freely inspired by a book of photos New Journalism pioneer Danny Lyon took while embedded with the Outlaws. But Butler would have been there had the labor dispute been settled in time, director Jeff Nichols told the crowd.

Nichols, who now lives in Austin, Texas, grew up in Little Rock, and co-founded the Arkansas Cinema Society after discovering that his hometown had no organization to bring together filmmakers and movie lovers. For the past seven years, he’s been bringing movies and stars — like Adam Driver and Jessica Chastain — to ACS’s annual Filmland fundraiser. Until “The Bikeriders,” that’s how long it had been since the “Loving” helmer directed a feature (he dedicated four of those years to making an alien movie, in which Michael Shannon was supposed to play a bird-like extra-terrestrial).

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Now even the film’s release date has been impacted. Originally slated to open Dec. 1, “The Bikeriders” is just one of several films whose fate depends on when the strike resolves, since movies like this — based not on comic books or pre-existing franchises, but an unconventional spark of inspiration — rely on the cast making appearances and doing publicity.

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And what a cast! Butler plays Benny, a free-spirited biker, caught in an unconventional love triangle between his wife Kathy (Jodie Comer) and best friend Johnny (Tom Hardy). Johnny wants Benny to take over as leader of the pack; Kathy hopes he’ll park his chopper for good and settle down.

On stage after the Filmland premiere, Nichols and I spoke for nearly an hour about the film. The director explained how he managed to attract such an ensemble, which also includes Shannon (Nichols’ muse since his 2007 debut “Shotgun Stories”), Boyd Holbrook, Emory Cohen and newcomer Toby Wallace (“Babyteeth”).

“The trick is writing a motorcycle script [set] in the ’60s,” quipped Nichols, who was drawn to the milieu depicted in Lyon’s book. “With ‘Loving,’ which was another period piece based on real things, I didn’t want to invent anything. I wanted to be so true to Richard and Mildred Loving’s story, I wouldn’t put anything in that script that I couldn’t prove. This is completely different,” said Nichols, who wanted to imagine his own story. “Hopefully I’m not offending any Outlaws. They still exist. They’re the second largest motorcycle gang in the world. And I don’t really want to cross paths with them.”

On stage, wearing a button-down shirt and newish pair of jeans, neatly rolled at the cuffs, Nichols looked nothing like the film’s grease-smeared, leather-clad characters. “I’ve never seen an episode of ‘Sons of Anarchy.’ I don’t even know what it’s about,” admitted the filmmaker, who considered Lyon’s book his introduction to the motorcycle scene. Ever since discovering “The Bikeriders” on the floor of his musician brother Ben’s place, he’d been obsessed with trying to re-create the feeling those black-and-white photos had ignited in him.

That meant tracking down Lyon, now 81, and convincing him to sign off. Nichols gave him “a big, smart speech” about the themes he imagined — about the rise and fall of subcultures in this country — “and at the end, he looked up, and he was like, ‘So you don’t want to make a movie about a photographer?” Nichols said.

Lyon does appear as a character in the film, played by “West Side Story” actor Mike Faist. He’s seen snapping photos and interviewing the members of the club, rechristened the Vandals. (“It is really hard to come up with the name of a motorcycle gang that doesn’t already exist,” Nichols said. “I would think of one and then it would be like, ‘No, there’s a chapter here’ … or else it’s a punk rock band.”) But it was something more anthropological that drew the director to this microcosm.

“I think it is a very real thing in our society that there are people that feel like they don’t belong, so they go to the edges of society, and that’s where all the really cool stuff gets created: cool music, art, style, fashion, everything. And because it’s so compelling, it attracts everyone else to it.”

These days, bike movies — once a staple in Hollywood — are so few and far between that actors were lining up to be involved. “In fact,” Nichols said, “I was turning people down to be in this movie.”

Butler was the first to sign on. “Austin Butler was an incoming call, and my producer called me and was like, ‘You gotta meet this young guy, Austin,’” he explained. Nichols knew the actor had been cast as Elvis, though Baz Luhrmann’s biopic hadn’t come out yet. “I was at this restaurant, and he walked up and shook my hand. He’s like 6-foot-3, and his hair is blonde and didn’t look like Elvis’ hair. I was immediately struck by the fact that this was the most attractive person I’ve ever met in my life.”

The real Elvis Presley wanted to be the next James Dean. He made 31 features, but never developed the acting chops. Butler’s a different story. He played Presley, and now, with “The Bikeriders,” the rising star channels Dean’s tortured-rebel appeal.

“I needed a character that the audience would not question that this woman Kathy and this man Johnny would put so much into,” Nichols said. “He’s like an empty glass of water. They pour all of this stuff into him, and he just can’t hold it. He doesn’t want to hold it, and that’s where his acting chops come in.”

If Butler is doing James Dean, then Hardy is more Marlon Brando. In a flashback inspired by one of Lyon’s photos, Nichols shows Johnny watching “The Wild One” on TV.

To cast Hardy, Nichols flew to London. “I went and met him at his house, and he talked for four hours straight. He had, like, a blank piece of paper, and he was making notes,” said Nichols, who remembers being jet lagged and overwhelmed by all the actor’s ideas about his character. “I left feeling like I had just taken an AP college exam or something, and [Hardy’s agent] calls like a few hours later. He’s like, ‘Tom just loved you. He said you’re a great listener.’”

Still, there was the question of Hardy’s accent. Any time he plays an American, the actor comes up with an unconventional way to speak. Nichols had gotten his hands on audio recordings of Lyon’s interviews with his subjects for the book — a snippet of which he played for the Filmland crowd. That way, Comer was able to base her character’s strong Midwestern accent on the real-life Kathy.

“She phonetically broke down every word in the script according to this audio, and according to the accent that she built for the character, and it was just a tremendous amount of work,” Nichols said.

With Hardy, however, it was anybody’s guess.

“It was terrifying for all of us. The financiers, the studio, they would call and they would be like, ‘Have you talked to Tom about what voice he’s going to use?’” Nichols said. “It wasn’t until the first day of filming that I heard it. He came up to me and said, ‘What do you think?’”

Hardy’s accent is more nasal and higher pitched than you’d expect from his tough-guy appearance, as if Johnny (who has a wife and a job, but spends his weekends with the gang) is an impostor among the blue-collar bikers.

Hardy asked him, “It’s not too Bugs Bunny?” Nichols embraced the star’s unconventional sound, admitting, “You have to get used to it though. It’s a choice. And I think this is why people respond to Tom Hardy — because he’s not just phoning it in. This guy’s doing weird, cool stuff.”

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