With Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders in cinemas now, we take a look at one of the more turbulent release schedules in recent years…
In Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders, when Jodie Comer’s Kathy first sets her eyes on her future husband she says what, we imagine, people have been saying about Austin Butler for years: “He don’t look like the rest of these animals.”
But Kathy’s observation was almost true for a very different reason. Having committed to playing the follicly challenged Feyd-Rautha for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, Butler’s smoky-eyed sex symbol was very nearly completely bald.
“We had a conversation,” Nichols told The Hollywood Reporter. “I was like, ‘Look, man, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. It’s Dune: Part Two. Dune was one of my favourite movies of 2021. But our character really doesn’t work with a shaved head.’”
Thanks to the frankly miraculous properties of bald caps, though, Butler pulled some strings and saved his quiff. With the amount it’s featured on posters for The Bikeriders, he might just have saved the movie too. At the very least, it’ll be harder to confuse with Mad Max.
But its star’s hair was hardly the first roadblock The Bikeriders faced on its way onto the big screen, and nor was it the last. Nichols first envisioned making a sixties-set biker movie when he came across Danny Lyon’s 1968 photobook of the same name more than 20 years ago. Collecting stunning black-and-white photography alongside interviews with Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club members, it proved the perfect jumping off point for the kind of film, to use the old cliché, that Hollywood doesn’t make anymore.
It’s not hard to see the appeal, or, perhaps, why crafting a narrative feature from a photobook took so long to come together. “These are not people we want to idolize, but that doesn’t mean they’re not attractive,” Nichols told Deadline in 2023. Still, the question of how to tell the story of rebels without a cause without glamourising them proved a hefty challenge.
“I’m obsessed with narrative structure,” the director told Film Stories this week. “I spend so much time in a room by myself trying to figure out how to turn a photobook into a screenplay that works, into a movie that’s going to keep an audience engaged.”
Duly, Nichols spent much of the last 20 years with motorcycle-shaped ideas driving around the back of his head. “At some point it almost became like a dinner party trick,” he told Little White Lies. “I would be like, ‘Hey, you want to hear my movie about a ’60s motorcycle club?’”
Finally, though, after his Alien Nation reboot with Fox fell through after four years in development, Nichols found himself with a film-shaped hole in his diary. After trying (and failing) to fill it with an adaptation of a David Grann article and a Quiet Place prequel (A Quiet Place: Day One arrives in cinemas next week), he found a whole pandemic had happened, almost while he wasn’t looking. Maybe it was finally time for this biker movie after all…
He told A Frame: “I approached New Regency with the script for Bikeriders without any cast members attached, and they still said yes. By the fall of that year, we were making it.”
In the end, that cast would prove crucial to getting the film over the line and into cinemas.
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First up was longtime Nichols collaborator, Michael Shannon. “I had these two great monologues for Zipco, and I just couldn’t wait to see Mike deliver those,” he said.
Austin Butler soon followed. “I needed a character that the audience would not question that this woman Kathy and this man Johnny would put so much into,” Nichols told Variety. “I was at this restaurant, and he walked up and shook my hand… I was immediately struck by the fact that this was the most attractive person I’ve ever met in my life.”
Tom Hardy signed on in his own signature style. “I went and met him at his house, and he talked for four hours straight,” Nichols remembers. “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.’”
Casting director Francine Maisler, meanwhile, put Jodie Comer on Nichols’ radar, and he cast her before catching her standout solo performance in Prima Facie on the West End. Leaving the play, he had only one thought in his mind: “I’m the luckiest director in the world.”
Like a certain other Butler star vehicle, the film’s original awards season release with Disney was pushed back following last year’s SAG-AFTRA strikes. If Dune: Part Two didn’t want to risk a cinema release without its cast to back it up, the IP-less historical drama (with far fewer giant worms) certainly didn’t.
As it turned out, Disney didn’t want to risk a cinema release at all. Silently pulling the film from the schedule without any fanfare, New Regency (whose distribution arm transferred to the House of Mouse during the Fox merger) began shopping the film to rival studios. Soon after, it was picked up by Focus Features, and its cinematic release was secured (Universal are distributing internationally).
Read more: The Bikeriders review | Jeff Nichols hits the road
You’d think this release date malarky would prove stressful, but with the help of some of his nearest and dearest, Nichols seems pretty relaxed about one of the more turbulent release dramas of recent years.
“I don’t live in LA, and when I talked to my wife about it, she was like, ‘Nobody gives a shit about this,’” he told THR. “Everybody in the industry is all concerned about dating and everything else, but she was like, ‘The rest of the country doesn’t care about that. They’ll go see it when they go see it.’”
The Bikeriders is in UK cinemas now.
