In a year in which the threat of apocalypse hangs over movies as disparate as Lars von Trier's "Melancholia" and Jon Shenk's documentary "The Island President," Jeff Nichols' "Take Shelter" presents the indie face of impending doom. A quiet, unsettling drama about a family man who isn't sure if the vivid apocalyptic dreams he's having are premonitions of catastrophe or signs of insanity, the Sony Pictures Classics release is both haunting and haunted, with a monumental and anguished performance by Michael Shannon at its center.
"Take Shelter," which opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles, won both the Grand Jury Prize at January's Sundance Film Festival and the Critics Week Grand Prize at Cannes. Shannon co-stars with Jessica Chastain, and he's nearly as ubiquitous as she is these days.
In addition to a sizeable role in the HBO series "Boardwalk Empire," which just launched its second season, the 37-year-old, stage-trained actor has four more movies heading for release, and is currently playing General Zod in Zack Snyder's Superman reboot, "Man of Steel."
When I talked to Jessica Chastain a couple of months ago, she said you had no time and no money to make "Take Shelter."
Yeah. It was a speeding bullet. We had four weeks to shoot the film. The good thing is that Jeff is incredibly prepared. When he writes the script, he is very strenuous and very diligent in making sure that he's telling the story he wants to tell in the way he wants to tell it. And as he's writing, he's visualizing how he wants to shoot it. So by the time he shows up on set he doesn't need a lot of time to monkey around.
But is there time if you want to talk about doing something differently?
Yeah. I mean, we're pretty simpatico most of the time. It was actually more interesting to see him work with Jessica. She's very intelligent, and every day, every scene we did, she would have a question that would make Jeff pause and consider something from a new angle. I think it was very healthy for Jeff to have Jessica in this movie.
It's very hard to not have panic set in on low-budget film sets. It's usually a panicked scenario – people are running around, and you don’t have time for the scene you're shooting, let alone the scene you're supposed to shoot next. But Jeff is very good at not freaking out. And he'll extricate us from that energy and go sit somewhere quiet for 10 minutes and go sort things out.
Is the movie we see onscreen close to what you read in the script?
Yes. It's very, very, very close. It's not 100 percent, and there's one scene that Jeff and I quibbled about a little bit.
