Filmmaker Jeff Nichols had “The Bikeriders” in mind for years before finally making it into the film that opened in 2024. The subject matter was part of what gave him pause. “I’m not from the motorcycle community or the biker community. It’s not something I’m really comfortable with or familiar with,” he explains. “and [Danny Lyon‘s] book documents the Chicago Outlaws, which are a current motorcycle gang. And so that was really intimidating.” Watch our complete video interview with Nichols above.
Based on Lyon’s photo book of the same name, “The Bikeriders” follows the fictional Vandals Motorcycle Club founded by Johnny (Tom Hardy), who starts to lose control as the club grows and expands across the Midwest through the 1960s and 1970s. In telling this story, Nichols had to decide “how to fictionalize this club so that I could kind of tell the story the way I needed to, and not just document the history of that actual club. So I had to figure out a balance between fictionalizing and pulling from Danny’s book and these real words. So that was a big hurdle.”
But another challenge was the way the film stylistically departs from Nichols’ previous work. “My other films have a real austerity or a temperance to them,” he points out. “They’re all linear. There’s no voice-over. We don’t use non-diegetic music. There were a lot of aesthetic things, in terms of the way the narrative was built and the way the story was told, that were also outside of my comfort zone.” So he waited until a point in his career when he was “confident in that other skill set.”
From there, capturing the detail of Lyon’s photos was a painstaking process. “There was one photo in particular. It was a color photo from Danny’s book of two guys sitting on their motorcycles. One was this character named Cal at a gas station, and I gave it to every department head. And I said, if we have any shot in our movie that looks as complex and deep and rich as this photograph, then we will have won.” They paid attention to everything from the age and customization of the bikers’ clothes to the “grease right at the base of their fingernails” and the colors of their motorcycles and the gas pumps.
“We didn’t photograph this film any differently than we did ‘Loving’ or ‘Mud’ or ‘Midnight Special‘ even,” Nichols says. “It was the same cameras, same lenses. It was just all of the artistry that went into all these different departments. Once you put them all together and you put a lens in front of it, you have that density, you have that quality. I think this is a beautiful film as a result of all that work.”
